The Pope gives Catholics a new sense of "Sunday Duty"
“Pius Aeneas”,
Virgil called him; “Dutiful Aeneas”. The
Latin “pius” meant “duty”, to family, to society, to the gods. So Aeneas is depicted, fleeing from defeat in
the Trojan War, carrying his father and holding the hand of his son.
As the Latin word moved through the flesh and blood of
generations, it became two words, “pity” and “piety”.
I often think that my Catholic churches are mostly inhabited
on Sundays by the pious, those fulfilling their duty to their Father in Heaven,
with their children in tow. I was one of
those children-in-tow, and one of those parents going and towing. I continue, in a blend of duty and gratitude
toward the God of compassion and mercy I continue to find there, to go to Mass,
with no father to carry and my children too distant and grown to tow.
But Pope Francis seems to be calling us not only into church and a sense of dutiful piety, but out of church with a sense of pity,
of compassionate response to those on the margins. In the Gospel of the last Sunday before Lent,
Jesus reached out and touched the leper, becoming ritually unclean by doing so.
Francis writes, in Paragraph 49 of EvangeliiGaudium”:
49. Let us go forth,
then, let us go forth to offer everyone the life of Jesus Christ. Here I repeat
for the entire Church what I have often said to the priests and laity of Buenos
Aires: I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has
been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being
confined and from clinging to its own security. I do not want a Church concerned
with being at the center and which then ends by being caught up in a web of
obsessions and procedures. If something should rightly disturb us and trouble
our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are
living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with
Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and
a goal in life. More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be
moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false
sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which
make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not
tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat” (Mk6:37).
I delight in this Pope’s call not only into my warm Catholic church to be fed at Mass, but out of my warm Catholic church, into the
streets, to feed my brothers and sisters who sleep under cold bridges.
FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
