BRAZIL
National Catholic Reporter
by John L. Allen Jr. | Jul. 26, 2013 NCR Today
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
If proof were ever required of how profoundly Francis has turned around public impressions of the Catholic church, consider this: He’s been in the global spotlight now for five consecutive days in Brazil, and no one brought up the church’s sexual abuse mess until, admittedly indirectly, he did so himself tonight.
Francis’s language was oblique, and it takes a bit of exegesis to connect the dots between what he actually said and the abuse crisis.
Tonight brought World Youth Day’s traditional Via Crucis procession, marking the Stations of the Cross. Francis offered a reflection at the end, which was largely a meditation on the meaning of the Cross.
At one stage the pope spoke about Jesus on the Cross being unified with everyone who suffers.
“Jesus, with his Cross, walks with us and takes upon himself our fears, our problems, and our sufferings, even those which are deepest and most painful,” the pope said.
That includes, Francis said, those who “have lost their faith in the church, or even in God, because of the lack of consistency of Christians and ministers of the Gospel.”
“How much Jesus suffers for this lack of consistency,” the pope said.
The category of “lack of consistency” obviously covers a lot of ground, and probably includes all the temptations Francis has repeatedly denounced since becoming pope – careerism, vanity, self-interest, and so on. Yet in the context of the last two decades of the church’s life, it will be difficult for most people not to hear an echo of the sex abuse scandals too.
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