This posting from the issue of Liturgy dealing with “Pastoral Liturgy and Pope Francis,”
guest-edited by Katharine Harmon, looks at Pope Francis’ approach to his
ministry as a preacher.
Governing Pope Francis’ entire ministry, not least his
preaching, is the call to accompany the poor as he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium (“The
Joy of the Gospel”): “Each Christian and every community must discern the path
that the Lord points out, but all of us are asked to obey his call to go forth
from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of
the light of the Gospel.” [¶20]
The call to the peripheries is a
call to see others not as the world may see them but as God intends them to be
seen. The following poem [Brian Bilston (an alias),“Refugee,” https://brianbilston.com/2016/03/23/refugees/] exemplifies this reversal in
perception by inviting the reader to read not only from the top down, but from
bottom up.
They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong
to you or me
Should life have dealt a different
hand
We need to see them for who they
really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to
those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another
way
(now read from bottom to top)
Christians, like Saint Francis and
Pope Francis, have been and now are invited by virtue of discipleship to have
friends in low places, and the poetry of their lived Gospel in our top-down
world reads from the bottom up. . .
For example, two weeks into his
papacy, Francis celebrated the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday at
the Prison for Minors Casal del Marmo in Rome. Each year at this first of the
Easter Triduum liturgies, the Gospel reading is first proclaimed and then
enacted in a foot-washing ceremony.
In 2013, Francis performed this
liturgical action from the bottom up—moving it from Saint Peter’s Basilica to a
youth prison and washing the feet of teenagers (some in shorts and with
tattoos), notably washing the feet of girls as well as boys and, most notably,
washing the feet of a Muslim teenage girl.
. . . Francis has performed this
liturgical action at drug rehabilitation centers, prisons, and refugee camps.
Can we wager that, as Francis ministers individually at the feet of Muslims,
Christians, and Hindus, and to teenagers, migrants, and the imprisoned, that
the face of Christ is mirrored in a mutually transformative encounter of the
pope and of those whose feet are being washed? . . .
After the washing of feet at Casal
del Marmo, the pope began his characteristically short homily [see www.vatican.va, the Pope’s sermon in Rome on
Holy Thursday] by saying:
This is moving. Jesus, washing the
feet of his disciples. Peter didn’t understand it at all, he refused. But Jesus
explained it for him. Jesus—God—did this! He himself explains to his disciples:
“Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are
right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your
feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. . . (John 13:12–15).
The Gospel of God in Christ is
proclaimed in word and sacramental action at the very center of the lives of
the poor.
Heille’s full essay is available in Liturgy 33, no. 2 available by personal subscription and through
many libraries. For more, see Gregory Heille, O.P., The Preaching of Pope Francis: Missionary Discipleship and the Ministry
of the Word (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015).
Gregory Heille, O.P., “Pope Francis: Preacher,” Liturgy 33, no. 2 (2018): 3-10.
