ABOVE ALL, THE GOSPEL!
Friday, 28th February 2025
POPE FRANCIS: TWELVE YEARS OF HIS PONTIFICATE
On March 13, 2025, Pope Francis reaches the twelfth anniversary of his Petrine ministry at 88 years of age and in diminished and fragile health. This is a propitious time to reflect, analyze, and consider what this pontificate, the 266th in the history of Catholicism, has meant for the Catholic Church and the world.
An Institution with a two-thousand-year history, comprised of us, the baptized, has been contaminated by ambition and struggles for the world’s power throughout the history of humanity. This power does not serve the weakest; rather, it tramples and crushes (Mt 20:25-29). The Church has also been contaminated by greed for material goods, which often transforms the guides, leaders, and hierarchs of the Church into merchants of faith (“Do not turn my Father’s house into a den of thieves” (Mt 21:12-16); “You cannot serve God and money” (Mt 6:24). This is a greed that prevents the Church from being “poor and of the poor.” These are two thousand years of history in which the world’s hedonism has also seeped into the lives of ecclesiastical leaders.
This history of the Church, moreover, over-emphasizes the Old Testament; we pray more with the Old Testament than we do with the New Testament, and we preach the ten Old Testament commandments more than the new and only commandment of Jesus of Nazareth: the fraternal command of love. Likewise, the Church’s preaching was contaminated with greater use of philosophical categories than with the criteria of the gospel and with more insistence on rubrics, precepts, commandments, and ecclesiastical law than with the belief in “life in love.” (They set aside and forget traditions.)
All this has separated or impeded and hindered the approach of the faithful to the Gospel that is Christ himself, the first source of faith, and we have forgotten that the disciples “are in the world, but not of the world” (Jn 15:18), because we must live in the world, but according to the logic of the Gospel, in order to be, in the world, light and salt. “But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned?” (Mt 5:13-16)
Amidst these historical contaminants in the Church, in authentic attachment and following of Christ and the Truth and logic of the Gospel, the figure of Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerged as the first Jesuit and Latin American pope and, from what was previously said, his universal shepherding has been focused, stubbornly, on bringing us closer again, with gestures, deeds, and words, with proclamations and denunciations, to Jesus of Nazareth and the criteria and principles of his good news, of his gospel, which, although they are insanity and foolishness for the world, are the power, strength and wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:18-24).
This urgency, this vehemence, this way that Francis guides us to the Gospel throughout his frenetic, abundant, and magnificent ministry and expressed, especially in his encyclical letters (Lumen Fidei, Laudato Si, Fratelli Tutti and Dilexit Nos) and in his apostolic journeys, has been insistently manifested - in:
- His ongoing defense of the earth’s “discarded,” as Francis calls them, i.e., society’s smallest, impoverished, and most vulnerable. Hence his concern, for example, for migrants and their calls for fraternal coexistence, mercy, social justice, the “best politics” of fraternity and solidarity, and peace.
- His urgency for the Church and its leaders to uninstall themselves and go out, with their evangelizing task, to the social peripheries so that the pastors have “the smell of the sheep.”
- His defense of the environment.
- His call and actions for a life and preaching of a Church without hypocrisy, without asking for renewal outside, “ad extra” of the Church, if there is no renewal within the Church itself. Hence, his urgency for the renewal of the Roman Curia and its measures to combat the scandals and sexual crimes of pedophilia involving the clergy.
- His ongoing fraternal and ecumenical concern for interreligious dialogue.
- His proximity and concern for youth causes were demonstrated, especially in the successive World Youth Days.
- And a long etcetera of the much good and the “fresh wind” that the magisterium of Pope Francis has been for all humanity.
And yet, and to our sorrow and shame, neither the Catholic Church, in general, nor the Latin American Church, in particular, have aligned with the pontificate of Francis. In the bosom of the Church itself, like Jesus among his closest, most intimate companions, those who ate with him (Mt 26:23), Pope Francis has found misunderstandings, detractors, and traitors to his shepherding and message.
We can seek the explanation for these betrayals in the contaminants of the Church mentioned above because – as Jesus himself strongly said, referring to the Pharisees of his time and people: “You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition” – to the power, wealth, pleasures, and comforts of the world (Mk 7:8).
But the Gospel itself teaches that the authenticity of following Christ is marked by suffering and the cross. These are sufferings, persecutions, and a cross born of the clash of criteria between the world’s logic and the Gospel’s. Today, within the Church, Jesus’ rebuke can be applied to some: “Get behind me! You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” (Mt 16:23); and to Francis, the beatitude: “Blessed are those who suffer for the sake of the Gospel...” (Mt 5:10-12).
Some strive and desire to pigeonhole Francis’ magisterium into ideologies or partisanship of the right or left. Still, the only label that fits Francis is that of being an authentic disciple of Christ.
Pope Francis, faithful to the Gospel and with a clarity and strength that impress at his 88 years of age, remains active and fixed in his evangelical convictions, like “a voice proclaiming in the wilderness” (Is 40:3; Lk 3:4) about postmodernity, light culture, and death; in a proud society, which while priding itself on material, scientific, and technological advances, seems to be on a downhill slope in the best values of the human spirit; a world that is being built from afar, behind our backs, or definitively against God and his Gospel.
The Pope continues his evangelizing task of proclamation and denunciation. As a pastor of the Catholic, the universal, and a prophet of our time, he is interested in, cares about, and takes on all the problems of humans and humanity to illuminate everything with the light and criteria of the Gospel. This was recently demonstrated, for example, in a letter to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops concerning the new immigration policies proposed by President D. Trump.
With these lines that recognize the good legacy and immense contributions of Pope Francis for all humanity, I write as a most affectionate testimony, from my Christian and personal experience as a committed layman, for the honor and privilege I have had all my life to follow, very closely, the person and message of Pope Francis: from my youth as a philosophy student in literature classes at the Jesuit University of “El Salvador”, in Buenos Aires – Argentina, to recent years, in the periodic meetings that I have had with Pope Francis in Rome.
As I conclude writing this article, it is world news that Pope Francis was admitted to the Gemelli Hospital in Rome due to respiratory distress. I invite you to pray for the recovery of his health and to thank the Pope and God for all the good that his pontificate and magisterium have meant for the Church in the world, during these twelve years.
Pope Francis will be remembered for having put the Gospel first in the being and work of the life and history of the Church; for repeatedly and insistently inviting us to return to the Gospel, to live according to the logic of Jesus of Nazareth, which is the wisdom of God and lived through fraternal love, to achieve the construction of a more humane world and, therefore, one that more closely aligns with God’s will.
Mario J. Paredes is a member of the General Board of Directors of the Latin American Academy of Catholic Leaders.
