October 23: Losing the center

The breadth of Pope Francis’ pastoral experience can be glimpsed yet again in his list of examples of spiritual worldliness. He seems to touch all bases.

“In some people we see an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time.” That’s one. “In others, this spiritual worldliness lurks behind a fascination with social and political gain, or pride in their ability to manage practical affairs, or an obsession with programmes of self-help and self-realization.” That’s two, three, and four.

“It can also translate into a concern to be seen, into a social life full of appearances, meetings, dinners and receptions.” That’s five. “It can also lead to a business mentality, caught up with management, statistics, plans and evaluations whose principal beneficiary is not God’s people but the Church as an institution.” That’s six.

He does not repeat the controversial phrase from his first-ever homily as pope, when he said that if the Church did not have Christ at its center, then “we will be a pitiful NGO.” But that idea drives the point home, especially that of his sixth example. A Church that is corrupted by spiritual worldliness, one that “makes herself a ‘centre,’ as he said in his address to Latin American and Caribbean bishops assembled in Rio de Janeiro last year, “becomes merely functional, and slowly but surely turns into a kind of NGO. The Church then claims to have a light of her own, and she stops being that ‘mysterium lunae’ of which the Church Fathers spoke. She becomes increasingly self-referential and loses her need to be missionary. From an ‘institution’ she becomes an ‘enterprise.’

The church of faith becomes The Firm.