October 16: The road map to the road map

If Evangelii Gaudium is the key to understanding the papacy of Pope Francis, the road map as many have already said, then the so-called Aparecida document is the road map to the road map.

In May 2007, the bishops of Latin America and the  Caribbean met in Aparecida, Brazil for only their fifth General Conference. The chair of the drafting committee was Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires; in effect, the pope-to-be was the chief editor of what is now considered a major ecclesial text, the Concluding Document of Aparecida.

The impact of this document on the new Pope’s thinking can be measured by the number of times he referred to it in his Apostolic Exhortation (15), and especially by the significance of those references.

In exhorting the faithful to a greater missionary commitment, for example, Pope Francis uses two key passages from Aparecida to answer the basic question: Why mission?

“The Gospel offers us the chance to live life on a higher plane, but with no less intensity: ‘Life grows by being given away, and it weakens in isolation and comfort. Indeed, those who enjoy life most are those who leave security on the shore and become excited by the mission of communicating life to others.’ When the Church summons Christians to take up the task of evangelization, she is simply pointing to the source of authentic personal fulfilment. For ‘here we discover a profound law of reality: that life is attained and matures in the measure that it is offered up in order to give life to others. This is certainly what mission means.’”