The Heart of Pope Francis by Diego Fares

Author:Diego Fares
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crossroad Publishing Company
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Pope, in this way, has turned an “absolute contrast” into a fertile tension: the truth is given to each of us as a path we must follow in the life we live. These illustrations of how to live a culture of encounter help us to listen to and savor when and to whom Francis turns, to hear the music he is hearing within and therefore to move ourselves toward encountering one another.

Going Out to Encounter the Poor

Having noted his talent for knowing when to seize the “opportunity” (which is the key element in any encounter, after all), we can appreciate another basic aspect of encounter that Pope Francis brings to light: urgency. He urges us to “come from an encounter with the poor, with the rejected” (the sobrantes, as expressed in Aparecida). Francis remains consistently inspired in his thought by the refrain “Time is more important than space.” The culture of encounter is a matter of time, and that which characterizes the right moment, the now, is to go out of oneself and seek those on the margins.

On May 18, 2013, on the Vigil of Pentecost (in a statement that, every time we read it, seems more and more inspired), the Pope seemed to be thinking out loud when he affirmed the necessity of going out of ourselves and “finding poverty.”

Poverty, for us Christians, is not a sociological or philosophical category: it is a theological category. I might say, it is the primary category, because that God, the Son of God, came down and made himself poor so as to walk alongside us on the road. And this is our poverty: the poverty of Christ in the flesh, that poverty that brought us the Son of God in his Incarnation. A Church that is poor and that serves the poor begins by turning toward the body of Christ. If we turn toward the body of Christ, we begin to understand, to understand what this poverty is, the poverty of our Lord.12

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