October 11: Spiders in our office

In the section on “Person to person,” we read: “Being a disciple means being constantly ready to bring the love of Jesus to others, and this can happen unexpectedly and in any place: on the street, in a city square, during work, on a journey.”

Or, indeed, even in the parish office, if there are no spiders in the way. In his wide-ranging interview with Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, published for the first time in 2010, when he was still Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis sounds a favorite theme:

“The temptation that we clergy can fall into is being administrators and not pastors. This means that when people come to the parish to request a sacrament or anything else, they are not always met by the priest but by the parish secretary who, from time to time, can turn out to be a bit of a shrew. There used to be a secretary in the diocese whom the congregation called “the tarantula.“ The problem is that these kinds of people not only scare people away from the priest and the parish, but also from the Church and from Jesus.”

Driving the spiders out of our places of work can be hard going; maybe this is why the Pope puts a premium on example. He makes his own phone calls, he sets his own appointments, because that is what constant readiness to encounter the other means.