The Church’s greatest evil
In an interview with Fabio Fazio on Rai Tre’s Che Tempo Che Fa last Sunday, Pope Francis said “the greatest evil in the Church is spiritual worldliness. It’s the worst thing that can happen to the Church, worse than the libertine popes.” This “makes clericalism grow,” he said, and “clericalism generates rigidity, and under every rigidity there is something putrid. Spiritual worldliness generates clericalism which leads to rigid, ideological positions, where ideology takes the place of the Gospel.”
True meaning of obedience
In an interview with online newspaper Crux Now, Peruvian theologian Rocio Figueroa said: “At the beginning, [obedience] began with the life of the monks: obedience to the superior, to authority, that the superior represented God, so by obeying your superior, you were obeying God. This kind of obedience is problematic, and this kind of obedience has continued until today.
“The obedience in the Gospel is an act of trust, an act of following God’s commandments, and following his love, so it’s an obedience full of love and trust in a relationship between Jesus and God the Father. That’s the core of obedience the obedience of Jesus was always towards the Father, and the obedience that we are asked is an obedience to God, not to human beings.”
Lack of dialogue
In the run-up to elections to be held in August in Angola the country’s Catholic bishops expressed concern that “there is a dangerous vacuum of dialogue between rulers and ruled, between party leaderships, and between the various civic actors, raising the levels of anxiety, radicalism, intolerance, indiscipline, physical, verbal, moral and psychological violence.” They said the state media “contributes in no way to social harmony, to the peace of spirits, and to the culture of dialogue, democracy and fraternity”.
(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)