I have just read the text of Pope Francis' address to the Bishops of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during his current visit to the African continent. It reminds me that the Church in that country lives amidst an ongoing context of violence, a context that must give a very different sense to Catholic life than that which is experienced in a country such as our own. The full text can be found here: Meeting with Bishops.
It was this passage, however, that caught my attention, as it reflects a theme characteristic of Pope Francis:
Above all else, may we never open the door to the spirit of worldliness, for this makes us interpret ministry according to the criteria of our own advantage. It makes us become cold and detached in administering what is entrusted to us. It leads us to use our role to serve ourselves instead of serving others, and to neglect the one relationship that matters, that of humble and daily prayer. Let us remember that worldliness is the worst thing that can happen to the Church, the worst. I have always been moved by the end of Cardinal De Lubac’s book on the Church, the last three or four pages, where he puts it like this: spiritual worldliness is the worst thing that can happen, even worse than the time of Popes who were worldly and had concubines. It is the worst thing. And worldliness is always lurking. So let us be careful!
The reference to Cardinal de Lubac is to the last two or three pages of his book The Splendor of the Church; and de Lubac in his turn cites a passage from Dom Anscar Vonier's The Spirit and the Bride. Pope Francis' most complete treatment of the theme is in Evangelii Gaudium nn.93-97, which includes a citation from the passage of de Lubac.
The passage from Anscar Vonier, from a book first published in the 1930's, reads as follows:
To become worldly is a peril that is never absent; when we say that worldliness is her snare we mean by worldliness a more subtle thing than is usually meant by this expression. We generally understand by worldliness the love of wealth and luxury amongst the Church's dignitaries; this is, of course, an evil, but it is not the principal evil. Worldliness of mind, if it were ever to overtake her, would be much more disastrous for the Church than worldliness of apparel. By worldliness of mind we understand the practical relinquishing of other-worldliness, so that moral and even spiritual standards should be based, not on what is the glory of the Lord, but on what is the profit of man: an entirely anthropocentric outlook would be exactly what we mean by worldliness. Even if men were filled with every spiritual perfection, but if such perfections were not referred to God (suppose this hypothesis to be possible), it would be unredeemed worldliness.
It may be worth appreciating that Dom Vonier goes on to suggest that it is the Holy Spirit who saves the Church from this evil by means of the seven gifts of the Spirit, and theme of the Holy Spirit in the Church is the context of his observations on worldliness.
As with his remarks about ideology (see Luigi Giussani's The Religious Sense), it is useful to recognise that Pope Francis' words on a type of spiritual worldliness are well founded, and should not be seen as directed against just one particular group in the Church of today. Anscar Vonier's The Spirit and the Bride is a natural read for someone familiar with the Charismatic Renewal; and The Religious Sense is foundational work for those familiar with Communion and Liberation. Pope Francis' familiarity with both these movements in the Church is useful in helping us to understand what he has to say about these two themes.
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