Pope calls on Church to respond to crisis with creativity

Pope Francis has urged Catholics in lockdown due to Covid-19 to be creative in their celebration of Easter this year. He also said the crisis is a moment to reflect on our common humanity and described Pope Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Humanae Vitae as “prophetic”.

He also called on the Church to be “freed in the midst of the crisis” to meet people’s needs, not “closed off in institutions.”

The Pope was speaking in an interview with British journalist and papal biographer Austen Ivereigh.

Asked about how the Church can respond to coronavirus, Francis insists that “we have to respond to our confinement with all our creativity. We can either get depressed and alienated — through media that can take us out of our reality — or we can get creative.

“At home we need an apostolic creativity, a creativity shorn of so many useless things, but with a yearning to express our faith in community, as the people of God. So: to be in lockdown, but yearning, with that memory that yearns and begets hope—this is what will help us escape our confinement,” Francis said.

The Pope also said that priests should not get tied up in rules and regulations to stifle the work of the Holy Spirit. “About a week ago an Italian bishop, somewhat flustered, called me. He had been going round the hospitals wanting to give absolution to those inside the wards from the hallway of the hospital. But he had spoken to canon lawyers who had told him he couldn’t, that absolution could only be given in direct contact. ‘What do you think, Father?’ he had asked me. I told him: ‘Bishop, fulfill your priestly duty.’ And the bishop said, ‘Grazie, ho capito’ (‘Thank you, I understand’). I found out later that he was giving absolution all around the place.

“This is the freedom of the Spirit in the midst of a crisis, not a Church closed off in institutions. That doesn’t mean that canon law is not important: it is, it helps, and please let’s make good use of it, it is for our good. But the final canon says that the whole of canon law is for the salvation of souls, and that’s what opens the door for us to go out in times of difficulty to bring the consolation of God,” Pope Francis said.

The Pontiff warned too much thinking from decision-makers centres exclusively around money. “It’s true, a number of governments have taken exemplary measures to defend the population on the basis of clear priorities. But we’re realising that all our thinking, like it or not, has been shaped around the economy. In the world of finance it has seemed normal to sacrifice [people], to practice a politics of the throwaway culture, from the beginning to the end of life. I’m thinking, for example, of prenatal selection. It’s very unusual these days to meet Down’s Syndrome people on the street; when the tomograph [scan] detects them, they are binned. It’s a culture of euthanasia, either legal or covert, in which the elderly are given medication but only up to a point.

“What comes to mind is Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae. The great controversy at the time was over the [contraceptive] pill, but what people didn’t realise was the prophetic force of the encyclical, which foresaw the neo-Malthusianism which was then just getting underway across the world. Paul VI sounded the alarm over that wave of neo-Malthusianism. We see it in the way people are selected according to their utility or productivity: the throwaway culture.

“Right now, the homeless continue to be homeless. A photo appeared the other day of a parking lot in Las Vegas where they had been put in quarantine. And the hotels were empty. But the homeless cannot go to a hotel. That is the throwaway culture in practice,” Francis warned.

Asked how he is living the crisis spiritually, The Pope said that “I’m praying more, because I feel I should. And I think of people. That’s what concerns me: people. Thinking of people anoints me, it does me good, it takes me out of my self-preoccupation. Of course I have my areas of selfishness. On Tuesdays, my confessor comes, and I take care of things there”.

He also sharply criticised what he sees as hypocrisy from some politicians. “This crisis is affecting us all, rich and poor alike, and putting a spotlight on hypocrisy. I am worried by the hypocrisy of certain political personalities who speak of facing up to the crisis, of the problem of hunger in the world, but who in the meantime manufacture weapons. This is a time to be converted from this kind of functional hypocrisy. It’s a time for integrity. Either we are coherent with our beliefs or we lose everything.

“Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity: the opportunity to move out from the danger. Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption (Laudato si’, 191) and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world. We need to reconnect with our real surroundings. This is the opportunity for conversion.

“Yes, I see early signs of an economy that is less liquid, more human. But let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were. This is the time to take the decisive step, to move from using and misusing nature to contemplating it. We have lost the contemplative dimension; we have to get it back at this time.

And speaking of contemplation, I’d like to dwell on one point. This is the moment to see the poor. Jesus says we will have the poor with us always, and it’s true. They are a reality we cannot deny. But the poor are hidden, because poverty is bashful. In Rome recently, in the midst of the quarantine, a policeman said to a man: ‘You can’t be on the street, go home.’ The response was: ‘I have no home. I live in the street.’ To discover such a large number of people who are on the margins…And we don’t see them, because poverty is bashful. They are there but we don’t see them: they have become part of the landscape; they are things.

“St Teresa of Calcutta saw them, and had the courage to embark on a journey of conversion. To ‘see’ the poor means to restore their humanity. They are not things, not garbage; they are people. We can’t settle for a welfare policy such as we have for rescued animals. We often treat the poor like rescued animals. We can’t settle for a partial welfare policy,” Francis said.

Asked if the fact that public Masses are suspended in large parts of the world, the Pope was asked if he thinks this will mean people are less attached to institutions. “Less attached to institutions? I’d say less attached to certain ways of thinking. Because the Church is institution. The temptation is to dream of a deinstitutionalised Church, a gnostic Church without institutions, or one that is subject to fixed institutions, which would be a Pelagian Church. The one who makes the Church is the Holy Spirit, who is neither gnostic nor Pelagian. It is the Holy Spirit who institutionalises the Church, in an alternative, complementary way, because the Holy Spirit provokes disorder through the charisms, but then out of that disorder creates harmony.

“A Church that is free is not an anarchic Church, because freedom is God’s gift. An institutional Church means a Church institutionalized by the Holy Spirit,” the Pope said.

He added that “a tension between disorder and harmony: this is the Church that must come out of the crisis. We have to learn to live in a Church that exists in the tension between harmony and disorder provoked by the Holy Spirit. If you ask me which book of theology can best help you understand this, it would be the Acts of the Apostles. There you will see how the Holy Spirit deinstitutionalises what is no longer of use, and institutionalises the future of the Church. That is the Church that needs to come out of the crisis,” he said.