General Audience with Pope Francis
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) October 6, 2021: Most OEN readers have probably heard of Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical about the urgent need for us to take care of our earthy home. It was widely reported and widely read. (For those who are interested, an English translation of the pope's lengthy 2015 eco-encyclical is available at the Vatican's website.)
The pope's 2015 eco-encyclical is part of the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church - the magisterium, from the Latin term magister, teacher - known in church parlance as the church's social teaching (to difference the church's teaching about individual personal matters of faith and morality). Given the extent of the church's social teaching, popes have to rely on what I will refer to as the trickle-down practice of dissemination of the church's social teaching through the writing and preaching of Catholic theologians and priests and properly informed lay writers and speakers.
Now, in this trickle-down spirit of dissemination, Cardinal Michael Czerny and Father Christian Barone have just published a book in Italian about the official social teaching of Pope Francis (as distinct from his unofficial remarks in interviews and homilies at Mass). Their book includes a "Preface" by Pope Francis himself.
An adapted version of his "Preface," translated by Griffin Oleynick, has been published at the website of the magazine Commonweal, a magazine run by lay American Catholics:
In the pope's essay, he refers to the following five passages by the early Christian theologians in texts of the New Testament: (1) Mark 1:12-15; (2) Romans 8:19-24; (3) Matthew 13:31-32; (4) Matthew 13:24-30; and (5) Luke 4:43. So I will now quote these five key passages in the order in which he mentions them in his text, using the English translations in the Revised English Bible (formerly known as the New English Bible), the Oxford Study Edition of which I regularly used in the introductory-level survey course on the Bible that I taught about twenty times over the years at the University of Minnesota Duluth. (I retired at the end of May 2009.)
(1) Mark 1:12-15: "At once the Spirit drove him [Jesus] out into the wilderness, and there he remained for forty days tempted by Satan. He was among the wild beasts; and angels attended to his needs" (on the theme of the wilderness in American Protestant cultural history, see Perry Miller's 1956 book Errand into the Wilderness);
(2) Romans 8:19-24: "The created universe is waiting with eager expectation for God's son [Jesus] to be revealed. It was made subject to frustration, not of its own choice but by the will of him who subjected, yet with the hope that the universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and is to enter upon the glorious liberty of the children of God. Up to the present, as we know, the whole created universe in all its parts groans as if in the pangs of childbirth. What is more, we also, to whom the Spirit is given as the first-fruits of the harvest to come, are groaning inwardly while we look forward eagerly to our adoption, our liberation from mortality. It was with this hope that we were saved."
(3) Matthew 13:31-32: "This is another parable he [Jesus] gave them: 'The kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed, which is smaller than any other seed, but when it is grown it is taller than other plants; it becomes a tree, big enough for the birds to come and roost among its branches'" (for a perceptive discussion of King imagery, see Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's book The King Within: Accessing the Kind [Archetype] in the Male Psyche [and also in the Female Psyche], revised and expanded 2nd ed. (2007).
(4) Matthew 13: 24-30: "Here is another parable he [Jesus] gave them: 'The kingdom of Heaven is like this. A man sowed his field with good seed; but while everyone was asleep his enemy came, sowed darnel [a weed similar in appearance to wheat] among the wheat, and made off. When the corn sprouted and began to fill out, the darnel could be seen among it. The farmer's men went to their master and said, 'Sir, was it not good seed that you sowed in your field? So where has the darnel come from?' 'This is an enemy's doing,'' he replied. 'Well then,' they said, 'shall we go and gather the darnel?' 'No,' he answered; 'in gathering it you might pull up the wheat at the same time. Let them both grow together till harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, "Gather the darnel first, and tie it in bundles for burning [as in the burning in Purgatory?]; then collect the wheat in my barn."'"
(5) Luke 4:43: "But he [Jesus] said, 'I must give the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, for that is what I was sent to do.'"
Now, if you were to try your hand at constructing a meditation/essay in which you interweaved these five key passages from the theologians in the New Testament, how would you proceed to develop your meditation/essay?
As I have indicated above, I would urge everybody, including Pope Francis, to interpret all biblical references to the Kingdom of God as expressing the surfacing of the King archetype in the human psyche. (According to Robert Moore, there is also a Queen archetype in the human psyche.)
In any event, let's look at what Pope Francis says in his "Preface" to the book by Cardinal Czerny and Father Barone.
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