Pope Francis in The Interview: facing a pastoral emergency

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 25, 2013

One more thought—and it probably won’t be my last—about that papal interview: Just before the passage that has drawn so much critical attention, the Pope made this arresting observation: “I see the Church as a field hospital after battle.”

In the Pope’s view, the Church is dealing with emergencies. He continues:

It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.

In comparing our society to a gravely wounded soldier, Pope Francis is saying something that runs directly counter to the message of popular self-help books. I am not OK; you are not OK. Our society is full of seriously injured people, and it would be foolhardy to assume that we ourselves are not among them. We and our neighbors are hurting. We’re wounded. We’re losing blood. We need help, stat!

In an emergency one sets aside niceties, and so the Pope warns against a preoccupation with “small-minded rules.” First things first: stop the bleeding. The Holy Father translates that urgent message into pastoral terms: “The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you.”

From that point, it’s revealing that the Pope launches directly into a discussion of Confession. He criticizes the “rigorist” confessor who stresses prohibitions, but he is equally scornful of the “loose minister” who “washes his hands by simply saying, ‘This is not a sin,’ or something like that.” We must recognize the need to be saved; we must recognize our own sin. Then, as repentant sinners, we can experience the enormous healing power of the truth that Jesus saves us.

The world is full of people who, like you and me, are bleeding from interior wounds: self-inflicted wounds, the consequences of our sins. (A bit later in the interview he refers to irregular marital situations as “open wounds.”) So the Church is a busy field hospital, with priests constantly doing meatball surgery in the confessionals. It’s a vivid image of an extreme situation.

But the worst thing of all is that many people don’t even know they’re injured. You might say that they’re in the spiritual equivalent of shock. They’re hurting—we’re all hurting—but they don’t know why. They aren’t listening to our suggestions about the path to spiritual health; they aren’t interested in our rules for a happy life. We aren’t reaching them.

”The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant,” Pope Francis says. “It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.” Get the wounded soldiers into the emergency room. Stop the bleeding; start the IV. “Then we can talk about everything else.”