Piety and Pity: Pope and “pius” in Paragraph 49

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.

Where are You Bound?

Yesterday I was moved by the circumstance of Mary and Martha in John's Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus.  They had lost their brother.  It was memory of my niece, the heartbreak of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law fresher on the anniversary of her death that made me think of the grief of those left behind by death.

But I have been moved since then by the call to enter the story as Lazarus, and what is in my mind is how he was bound, bound, bound.  Two weeks ago, it was the Samaritan woman at the well whose attitude of stubborn self-determination that bound her.  It took repeated logical argument to draw her beyond her suspicion and hostility to trust and hope.  Last week it was the blind beggar who was given sight not instantaneously by magic mud, but also by going where he was sent and doing as he was told.  They were not zapped, healed in a moment by the touch of the healer like they do on some of those “faith healer” TV shows. 

Healing is not an event, but a process of letting go of what binds us. 

So I’m Lazarus.  Bound, bound, bound.  The stone is rolled away, and the voice calls, the voice of my friend Jesus is one I recognize even through these wrappings.   I’ve awakened from my acceptance of the Big Sleep, and decided to return to the life I left, with the complex love of my sisters for each other and for me.  I’ve decided to return to the world of mornings and their call to action, and nights and their call to rest.  I’ve agreed to accept hunger and thirst in exchange for savor and refreshment. 

But I emerge haltingly, my hands and feet tugging at the rags of my shroud, like a convict being let into court in shackles.  And I do not weep at the sight of blue sky or the faces of my sisters, or Jesus.  My sight is obscured by that same shroud, even as the coins had fallen from my eyelids when I’d sat up.  It strikes me that Lazarus is bound in his mobility by the shroud...and all of his senses too.  I see in myself that when I was given freedom to retire, to be released from the daily requirement of going to work, that I discovered that I was not able to move around freely, my mobility bound by another layer of binding.  I discovered that my senses were not open to my new surroundings, bound as I was to my past.

So here we are nearing Holy Week, called to drop our daily grind like the Samaritan Woman and accept our gift of sight like the beggar, and now to let go of our bindings, bindings, bindings that we have allowed ourselves to be imprisoned in, just as Lazarus.  We’ll not climb Calvary in our shroud.  We have a couple of weeks to get with the program, to not only emerge from our cave but to reclaim our mobility and respond to our senses as we try yet again to believe that we can take on death with Jesus, and emerge from it.