UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Michael Sean Winters | Nov. 4, 2014 Distinctly Catholic
Yesterday, I looked at the internal, managerial, staff-related issues that face the USCCB in advance of their plenary next week. Today, I would like to look at the attitudinal, dare one say ideological, challenges facing the conference. And, to be clear, while I think the bishops must take the lead in resolving the managerial issues, the bishops need to take some long looks in the mirror if they wish to address the attitudinal issues I will discuss today.
I write “issues” and, indeed, there are discrete issues in play, but I think the basic challenge facing the USCCB at this moment is singular. For years, they have been acting on a model of the Church as a bastion or redoubt, confronted by a secular culture that only seems to grow more secular, and more hostile, by the day, bringing the faithful elect within the walls of the redoubt, drawing clear boundaries between the Church and the ambient culture, the washed and the unwashed, with clear sets of propositions to which all are expected to sign on without any troubling questioning, hurling anathemas, nurturing a sense of grievance, perplexed as much as anything by the speed and the comprehensiveness of the cultural changes all around them. It is the culture warrior vision at the heart of the essay by George Weigel that I called attention to yesterday.
Now, Pope Francis has proposed a different model for the Church. He sees the Church as a field hospital. Those who fault Pope Francis for his sunny personality and cheerful, joyful approach to evangelization sometimes mistake that joy for naivete, although the metaphor of a field hospital assumes a battle has been fought or is being fought, but it casts the Church not as a combatant, but as the mender, the healer. More to the point – and this may be the key point – for this pope, the Church as field hospital is not only a metaphor, there is more substance and reality to his vision than that. He actually wants the Church tending to the wounded, the scarred, the embittered, the lost, and tending with all the care of a good nurse. For Francis, as for Benedict, the Church is not a proposition, still less a checklist of propositions, but a way of life that embodies the beliefs we hold and, unlike Benedict, Francis has a knack for using gestures and simple language to communicate his vision to the unlettered, indeed to all. He leads with pastoral care, not with theology or philosophy and bids the Church to do the same, rooting our theology in our experience, not the other way round and giving preferential attention in all our experiences to the poor, not because they need our help but because we need theirs, for it is the poor who are closest to the Lord.
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