UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Michael Sean Winters | Aug. 19, 2015
We are more than two years into the papacy of Pope Francis. The entire nation is focused on his upcoming visit to the United States, which will begin exactly one month from Saturday. In DC, I can assure you, the begging and the shoving and the cajoling to get tickets to one of the papal events is unlike anything I have ever seen. So, it is a good time to discern what are the most important themes in this pontificate, what are the areas of continuity and discontinuity from previous pontificates, and where is Pope Francis leading the Church at this moment in time. Or put differently, who is this man who is coming to America next month?
Today, I kick off a series of columns that will set the table for the pope’s visit. Today, I explore what I think is the over-arching theme of this pontificate, and tomorrow, I will examine how that one large theme plays out in six, smaller sub-themes. Friday, we will dig down on what we can expect specifically from his talks – and more than the talks, from the gestures – in the U.S. Next week I will examine how the pope challenges both the Catholic Left and the Catholic Right.
I discern one overarching theme to this pontificate, with several subheadings, and a second major theme that has not been much remarked upon. The overarching theme is this: The Church has become too self-referential and worldly, and this has crippled its ability to evangelize, to spread the Good News, to be the graced sacrament where people encounter the Risen Lord, leaving the Church sick or irrelevant or both, and the antidote is a Church of encounter, especially at the margins, after the model of Jesus. That, in one sentence, is the essence of this pontificate and he returns to this theme again and again. Just last month, in one of his morning sermons, the Holy Father recalled Jesus throwing the money changers out of the temple and he said:
The people who went on a pilgrimage there to implore the blessing of our Lord, to make a sacrifice: Those people there were exploited! The priests were not teaching them to pray or giving them a catechesis… it was a den of thieves…. I don’t know… maybe we’d do well to reflect on whether we encounter similar things going on in some places. It’s using God’s things for our own profit.
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