ROME
Commonweal
Letter from Rome
By Robert Mickens
April 3, 2017
Pope Francis has spent his four years as Bishop of Rome steadily and tenaciously waging a campaign to change the mentality of individual Catholics and the ethos of the entire church, which he dreams of being an outward-looking, accident-prone and getting-its-hands-dirty community that is “on the move”.
In fact, the pope’s “attitude adjustment program” is gradually reshaping the very identity of global Catholicism, even though it’s not to everyone’s liking.
Just as he hinted he would do when he addressed fellow cardinals just four days before they elected him, Francis has been trying to liberate Jesus Christ from a church that, increasingly in the past three or so decades, had become a sick, self-referential, and theologically narcissistic institution living only for itself.
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