FRANCIS' FIVE - #3

FIVE YEARS OF POPE FRANCIS 

March 13, 2013 - the day Pope Francis took on the divine mandate of leading the People of God. It has been five years and there are FIVE strong orientations that this wonderful person of God has given the Church and the world. 

3. PERIPHERY - where leads your Christian Faith

Periphery has been a predilected word of Pope Francis... go to the existential peripheries, he has called the Church repeatedly. 

Existential Periphery is not a geographical region, we know it well. It is the existential condition of humanity where fundamental identity is sacrificed at the altar of sophisticated modernity - a condition where projects matter more than persons, money matters more than truth, pleasure matters more than relationships, comfort matters more than necessities, uniformity matters more than dignity, development matters more than equality, progress matters more than peace! Can the Christians remain silent about it, worse still, can they become perpetrators of it? Can the Church be blind to it? Pope Francis would respond with an emphatic NO. 

I would prefer a bruised, hurt and bleeding Church to a Church that is so self conscious about its vulnerability, he has affirmed. Bringing good news to the blind and the deaf, the dumb and the maim, the oppressed and the imprisoned, the downtrodden and the marginalised, is not a task that can be done merely from your desks and your offices. The Church has to come to the streets. Reaching out to the poor is not merely writing projects and undertaking development works but being with them, empathising with them,  empowering them and enabling them. The Church has to look at this as the Primary form of evangelisation, insists Pope Francis.

His heart has always been drawn towards the sick in the crowd, the poor in the society, the migrants in the cities, the refugees in the world - they are the peripheries just around us and we need to reach out to them. Our faith, if truly living, will lead us right there, to the peripheries!