Pope wants an inclusive church, reaching out on the streets
— n his first nine months as leader of one billion oman Catholics, Pope rancis has parceled out glimpses of his vision for remaking the church — in homilies and news conferences, interviews and offhand remarks to visitors.
n Tuesday, he announced his agenda in his own unfiltered words, reaffirming the impression that he intends to olt the church out of complacency and enlist all Catholics in his ambitious pro ect of renewing the church by confronting the real needs of people in need.
n a challenge to the atican hierarchy, rancis called for decentralizing power in the church, saying the atican and even the pope must collaborate with bishops, lay people and in particular women.
prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security,” rancis said in the first teaching document of his papacy that he alone composed.
do not want a church concerned with being at the center and then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures,” he wrote.
The document, called vangelii audium,” the oy of the ospel , is an apostolic exhortation — less authoritative than an encyclical, but an important pronouncement. e drafted it in August in Spanish, said a atican spokesman, the ev. ederico ombardi, as a reflection on a synod of bishops last year that took up the new evangelization.”
rancis prescription for the church is inextricably tied up with his analysis of what is wrong with the world. e devotes many pages to denouncing the dictatorship” of a global economic system and a free market that perpetuates inequality and devours” what is fragile, including human beings and the environment.
ow can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points ” he wrote, in the folksy language that has already marked his as a memorable papacy.