Newsweek: The Crisis That Changed Pope Francis

[Miriam_M]

http://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/31/crisis-changed-pope-francis-279303.html

Some excerpts:

In the slums of Buenos Aires he learned to see the world differently, says Father Augusto Zampini, a diocesan priest from the city, who has taught at the Colegio Máximo where Bergoglio was once Rector. The future Pope did not alter his doctrinal orthodoxy on matters like the church's ban on divorced and remarried Catholics taking communion. But he did not allow church doctrine to overrule his priority of pastoral care for the troubled folk he met in the slums.

"When you're working in a shantytown 90% of your congregation are single or divorced," Zampini says. "You have to learn to deal with that. Communion for the divorced and remarried is not an issue there. Everyone takes communion." Bergoglio's priority became understanding the problems faced by the poor, rather than focusing on obedience to unbending rules.

He showed particular sensitivity toward those living in difficult situations, and those who felt marginalised from the life of the church. "He was never rigid about the small and stupid stuff," says Father Juan Isasmendi, the parish priest in Villa 21 slum, "because he was interested in something deeper."

I'm not gloating over the fact that I speculated much earlier that he considers "personal situations" more important than conformity to doctrine.  It's the personal situations which are to be considered fixed or prime, obedience to commandments secondary to that, or mutable.

[james03]

"When you're working in a shantytown 90% of your congregation are single or divorced,"

Hmmmm...  Maybe Bergolio could think about that for awhile and draw some conclusions.  We'll wait.

[Kaesekopf]

Those idiots are in full communion, seeing sacrilege as small stuff.

Thank God for the Society.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

[Miriam_M]

Those idiots are in full communion, seeing sacrilege as small stuff.

Ironic pun noted.

[angelcookie]

You still have to give correction and truth in charity and mercy- allowing communion in a state of mortal sin isn't a prescription of mercy but of bringing Gods just judgement to these peoples souls. What about the judgement God will bring on the shepherds?

This is just enabling people to live in ignorance, sin and self serving- how they wish. This isn't the same message as "go and sin no more."

And Poverty doesn't equate adultery.

[maryslittlegarden]

You still have to give correction and truth in charity and mercy- allowing communion in a state of mortal sin isn't a prescription of mercy but of bringing Gods just judgement to these peoples souls. What about the judgement God will bring on the shepherds?

This is just enabling people to live in ignorance, sin and self serving- how they wish. This isn't the same message as "go and sin no more."

And Poverty doesn't equate adultery.

Exactly.  To allow someone who is not in a state of grace to receive communion is not pastoral care. 

[james03]

And Poverty doesn't equate adultery.

True.  But adultery (divorce) and fornication (single mothers) often times leads to poverty.  God has a plan.  When you go against it, bad things happen.

[Bl. Karl Hapsburg]

I love liberals. they are always very clear about what they believe

[Parresia]

You still have to give correction and truth in charity and mercy- allowing communion in a state of mortal sin isn't a prescription of mercy but of bringing Gods just judgement to these peoples souls. What about the judgement God will bring on the shepherds?

This is just enabling people to live in ignorance, sin and self serving- how they wish. This isn't the same message as "go and sin no more."

And Poverty doesn't equate adultery.

Exactly right.  It seems like they don't just think the Church started in the 1960's but rather the entire world.  Like we never had poor people that the Church had to minister to prior to that time.  All of those great saints who did work with the poor and outcast, evidently just never even existed. 

[Irishcyclist]

If this is accurate, it makes for interesting reading

The painting spoke to Bergoglio about the tangles he had exacerbated among Argentina's Jesuits through his inexperienced leadership style which, he later admitted, was hasty and authoritarian and led to him being perceived as ultraconservative. He returned to Argentina only to be sent into two years internal exile in the remote city of Córdoba, some 650km from Buenos Aires, where he underwent what he later described as "a time of great interior crisis".

Though it's not possible to see into another person's soul, it is clear that in this period of exile, in which he was given no full-time job to do, Bergoglio found a way to see further into his own.

Bergoglio has always been a man of deep prayer. For many years his habit has been to rise at 4.30am to 5am every morning to spend two hours in silent prayer before the tabernacle before his working day begins. It is in that period of prayer that he makes his big decisions, one of his aides told me. He would also in Córdoba have undertaken the set of spiritual exercises devised by the Jesuits' founder, Ignatius of Loyola. At the heart of these is a process of discernment which helps the practitioner to strip away his layers of self-justification and self-delusion, and penetrate through to the inner core of his behaviour and motivation.

What is clear now is that Bergoglio emerged from that spiritual crisis an utterly different man. He had had a profound conversion that reconfigured his understanding of the way God wanted him to behave. He developed a new model of leadership, one which involved listening, participation and collegiality. When he arrived at his next job, as an assistant bishop in Buenos Aires, the old Bergoglio had vanished. He had transmuted from an authoritarian reactionary into the figure of radical humility who is today turning the Vatican upside down.