The Church as a field hospital

Pope Francis gave a remarkable interview recently to a number of Jesuit journals, including America, the weekly magazine of the American Jesuits. The interview was remarkable in that the Pope said a number of things that are too rarely present in Vatican preaching and teaching.

Among the most striking things the Pope did in the interview was to compare the Church to a "field hospital." The American Protestant theologian Paul Minear has identified 96 images of the Church. Pope Francis’ image is a worthy addition to venerable language about the Church.

The Pope said: "I see clearly that what the Church needs today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity [to the people]. I see the Church as a field hospital after a battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have [first] to heal the wounds. Then you can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. ... And you have to start from the ground up."

He continued: "The Church has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. ... In pastoral ministry we must accompany people, and we must heal their wounds."

"I dream of a Church," he said, "that is a mother and shepherdess. The Church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for people and accompany them like the Good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbor . ... The structural and organizational reforms are secondary – that, they come afterward. ... The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into the people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost."

The Pope names particular groups of people who especially need the Church’s compassionate ministry: divorced and remarried, homosexuals, and same-sex couples. On the second of these, he has been quoted as saying, most notably in his question-and-answer dialogue with reporters on his trip back from World Youth Day in Rio de Janiero, that if a homosexual person "is of good will and in search for God, I am no one to judge."

The Church, Pope Francis points out, needs a new style of moral preaching and practice, one that is not obsessed with a few issues like abortion, contraception and homosexuality. All of these are morally significant, but they must be preached "in context."

That context is compassionate pastoral ministry. Otherwise, he said, the "moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel."

The Pope offers the Sacrament of Confession as a locus for the expression of the Church’s compassionate ministry. Confession is "a sacrament [for] evaluating case by case and discerning what is best to do for a person who seeks God and grace. ... The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better."

Some critics have suggested that Pope Francis is a "liberal" on moral matters. Nothing could be further from the truth. He insists that he is a "man of the Church" and "thinks with the Church." What the new Pope demonstrates is that moral orthodoxy and pastoral compassion are not mutually exclusive, but belong together. This is a lesson that is badly needed today at all levels of the Church.