In a talk given in Lisbon during World Youth Day, Pope Francis has expressed his frustration with elements within the American church:
You have verified that the situation in the United States is not easy: there is a very strong, organized reactionary attitude which structures an emotional sense of belonging. I want to remind these people that backwardness is useless, and it is necessary to understand that there is a correct evolution in the understanding of questions of faith and morals as long as the three criteria that were already indicated are followedVincent of Lérins in the fifth century: that doctrine evolve ut annis consolidatetur, dilatetur tempore, sublimetur aetate . In other words, doctrine also progresses, consolidates over time, expands and consolidates and becomes firmer, but always progressing. The change develops from the root upwards, growing with these three criteria.
Let's go to the concrete. Today it is a sin to keep atomic bombs; the death penalty is a sin, it cannot be practiced, and it was not like this before; as for slavery, some Popes before me have tolerated it, but things are different today. So we change, we change, but with these criteria. I like to use the image «upwards», ieut annis consolidatetur, dilatetur tempore, sublimetur aetate . Always on this path, which starts from the root with a lymph that rises and rises, and for this reason change is necessary.
Vincent of Lérins makes the comparison between man's biological development and the transmission from one era to another of the depositum fidei , which grows and consolidates with the passage of time. Behold, man's understanding changes with time, and so also man's conscience deepens. The other sciences and their evolution also help the Church in this growth in understanding. The view of the doctrine of the Church as a monolith is wrong.
But some call themselves out, they go backwards, they are the ones I call "backwards". When you go backwards, you form something closed, disconnected from the roots of the Church and you lose the lymph of revelation. If you don't change upwards, you go backwards, and then you assume criteria for change that are different from those that faith itself gives you in order to grow and change. And the effects on morale are devastating. The problems that moralists must examine today are very serious, and to face them they must run the risk of changing, but in the direction I was saying.
You have been to the United States and you say that you have felt a climate of closure. Yes, I warn you can experience this climate in some situations. But in this way the true tradition is lost and one turns to ideologies for support and support of all kinds. In other words, ideology supplants faith, belonging to a sector of the Church replaces belonging to the Church.
I want to pay tribute to Arrupe's courage. Arrupe found a company that was, so to speak, bogged down. General Ledóchowski drafted the Epitome … do you young people know what the Epitome is [5] ? Not even for a dream, there is nothing left of the Epitome ! It was a selection of the Constitutions and Rules, all mixed up. But Ledóchowski, who was very orderly, with the mentality of the time, said: "I'm compiling it so that the Jesuits have clear in detail everything they have to do". And he sent the first copy to a Benedictine abbot of Rome, a great friend of his, who replied with a note: «With this you killed the Company».
In other words, the Company of the Epitome was formed, the Company that I lived in the novitiate, even with great teachers, who were of great help, but some taught certain things that fossilized the Company. That is the spirituality that Arrupe received, who had the courage to set it in motion. Something got out of hand, as is inevitable, such as the question of the Marxist analysis of reality. Then he had to start clarifying some things, but he was a man who was able to look ahead. And with which tools Arrupe has faced reality? With the Spiritual Exercises. And in 1969 he founded the Ignatian Center for Spirituality. The secretary of this Center, Fr. Luís Gonzalez Hernandez, was commissioned to go around the world to give Exercises and to open up this new panorama.
You, the younger ones, have not experienced these tensions, but what you say about some sectors in the United States reminds me of what we have already experienced with the Epitome, which has generated a totally rigid and boxed mentality. Those American groups you speak of, so closed, are isolating themselves. And instead of living on doctrine, on true doctrine that always develops and bears fruit, they live on ideologies. But when in life you abandon doctrine to replace it with an ideology, you have lost, you have lost as in war.
