Oh hey, has anyone noticed our new Pope took the name FRANCIS, Vita Pura's patron? And he's all about simple living and care for the poor? Well, the Wisconsin State Journal picked up on it...
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/profile-of-pope-francis-humble-intellectual-jesuit/article_896bda86-8c16-11e2-b817-001a4bcf887a.html
Some highlights from the article:
Bergoglio often rode the bus to work, cooked his own meals and regularly visited the slums that ring Argentina's capital. He considers social outreach, rather than doctrinal battles, to be the essential business of the church.
He accused fellow church leaders of hypocrisy and forgetting that Jesus Christ bathed lepers and ate with prostitutes.
“Jesus teaches us another way: Go out. Go out and share your testimony, go out and interact with your brothers, go out and share, go out and ask. Become the Word in body as well as spirit,” Bergoglio told Argentina's priests last year.
Bergoglio compared this concept of Catholicism, “this Church of ‘come inside so we make decisions and announcements between ourselves and those who don't come in, don't belong,” to the Pharisees of Christ's time — people who congratulate themselves while condemning all others.But Bergoglio himself felt most comfortable taking a very low profile, and his personal style was the antithesis of Vatican splendor. “It's a very curious thing: When bishops meet, he always wants to sit in the back rows. This sense of humility is very well seen in Rome,” Rubin said before the 2013 conclave to choose Benedict's successor.
Let us thank the Lord for the gift of good leadership, and humbly submit ourselves under Pope Francis' guidance!
Dude...talk about such an essential fount of HOPE in this season of Lent with this gift of such an essential character in out new Papa.
ReplyDeleteDid anyone get to hear Fr.EricN's homily this weekend? Baller. Totally on the mark for what our community needs, and totally expresses the essence of our VP community, too. Ahhh! Praise be to God for such an obvious presence of the Holy Spirit in this whole schebang.
The Catechism speaks of hope, and I was really moved by this:
"The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men's activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity." (CCC 1818)
So too let us learn how to be sustained. How to have simplicity. How to have radical charity. ...tis the season for it; especially now, and especially always.
Irina! I'm lovin the CCC quote.
ReplyDeleteFr. Neilson's homily on Sunday was soooo relevant to Vita Pura!! (he might have even stolen some stuff from us...just kidding) It was so wonderful, he talked about the simplicity of Papa Fransico a lot: this dude is seriously living a vita pura! It is awesome that our new Pope clearly gets so much joy out of his life as a simple servant of God! Fr. Neilson talked a lot about the joy that comes with simplicity and I think that that's a great thing for us to think about. Maybe our resolutions aren't easy, but I think that if we are doing it out of a genuine love for Christ we will receive great joy. Like those of us on winter retreat learned, the burden of Christ is easy and his yoke is light! Rejoice and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery! Let us not be enslaved by the promises of this world...I could paraphrase relevant scripture all day because Jesus is all about this stuff!
I am getting too excited about this. I am obsessed with Pope Francis and Vita Pura, it is seriously distracting me from my studies.
I'm still geeking out about this. Like guys, really. Humility is such a huge thing that todays society struggles with. I know I do. And if you dont struggle with that, please teach me your ways. I love how he states that Jesus hung out with the sinners and the prostitutes, and Pope Francis is calling us to be like that. To realize that we are all sinners and that we need to learn to forgive. It is easy to judge others on their sins, but in reality, we are just as bed. Not only is Pope Francis all gung ho (that is NOT how it is spelled) about living physically simple, but also mentally simple. AHHHH GUYS THIS IS GREAT!!!!!
ReplyDeleteP.S. I heard we killed a rabbit??? hahahah
ReplyDeleteLove what everyone has been saying so far about poverty and simple living.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that stuck out to me as unclear about Fr's homily (I could be misunderstanding) is the difference between spiritual and material poverty. I've been reading a lot lately about liberation theology, a Catholic movement in Latin America that is very intent on uniting belief and action to bring about a more just world through evangelization and social justice.
There's a really good quote by one of its founders, Gustavo Gutierrez, where he talks about the ideal Christian utopia: the early Church in Acts 2. He says about the Christian virtue of poverty: it is an "expression of love, is solidarity with the poor and is a protest against poverty...It is not a poverty lived out for its own sake, but rather as an authentic imitation of Christ" (Theology of Liberation 301).
He later goes on to state why he believes the early Church gathered all their possessions in common: "this was not a question of erecting poverty as an ideal, but rather of seeing to it that there were no poor...to eliminate poverty because of love of the poor person" (ibid.). Whether he's taking the poverty imagery too literally, I'm not sure. But I agree with him that it's easy for us to valorize poverty as something heroic or noble because we have the OPTION to be poor if we'd like. To those that don't have that option, poverty is an injustice that is disgusting and undignified. Perhaps we could say that, because they have less material possessions, they are able to abandon themselves more fully to God. But if we can choose to abandon ourselves to God in our situation, what's stopping us from helping them to secure their basic necessities? Abandonment can happen in any situation.
That's a bit of rambling, but I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts. Something that's been on my heart in the last few weeks and hopefully will be encountered and resolved when I go to Peru in the fall.
Normally people don't respond to their own comments with rebuttals, but I thought of one :)
ReplyDeleteBishop Morlino's latest column in Catholic Herald: "Our care for the poor is not simply in providing food, clothing, shelter, etc. — though it is all of that — but it is to provide Jesus to them. We are called not just to social activism, but to authentic charity, authentic love."
I think both his and Gutierrez's vision can operate simultaneously, and each is trying to stress what he thinks is most urgent. For Gutierrez (a Peruvian man in the midst of the slums of Lima) this is "food, clothing, shelter" because they are immediately necessary to live. This charity can show the love of Christ to those people without the benefactors ever saying so. Morlino (bishop in US) thinks beyond the immediate necessities because he is concerned primarily with their spiritual health. I think it's two sides to the same coin, instead of the false dichotomy that's sometimes portrayed between charity and evangelization.
Steve, this is some really great stuff on poverty which is great because we haven't really ever talked about poverty in Vita Pura. We do talk a lot about reducing and living simply, but I think that poverty and simplicity are certainly not always the same thing. I like your quote from Bishop Morlino because a lot of time I think that we focus on simple living because it helps us grow closer to God and stretch farther away from the material world, but it makes me think of simple living as a way to be authentic in charity. As Christians we are called to be charitable, but how authentic is that charity if we live lavish, excessive lives? If we are just briefly visiting the world of the poor, as if it is some alien planet, are we really connected to them? I'm obviously not saying that we should ever be intentionally poor, rather intentionally simple because of love for Christ and empathy for the poor.
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