The following are more quotations from Pope Francis’s interview featured in various Jesuit periodicals.
Love Mary
“This is how it is with Mary: If you want to know who she is, ask theologians; if you want to know how to love her, ask people. Mary loved Jesus with the heart of the people, as we read in the Magnificat. We should not even think that ‘thinking with the Church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the Church.”
Importance of prayer
“Prayer for me is always a prayer full of memory, recollection, even the memory of my own history, what the Lord has done in his Church or in a parish. For me, it is the memory St Ignatius speaks of in the First Week of the Exercises in the encounter with the merciful Christ crucified.
“I ask myself: ‘What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What should I do for Christ?’ It is the memory of which Ignatius speaks in the Contemplation for Experiencing Divine Love, when he asks us to recall the gifts we have received.
“I also know the Lord remembers me. I can forget about Him, but I know that He never, ever forgets me.”
Strive for genius
“Humans are in search of themselves, and, of course, in this search they can also make mistakes. The Church has experienced times of brilliance, like that of Thomas Aquinas. But the Church has lived also times of decline in its ability to think.
“We must not confuse the genius of Thomas Aquinas with the age of decadent Thomist commentaries. Unfortunately, I studied philosophy from textbooks that came from decadent or largely bankrupt Thomism. In thinking of the human being, therefore, the Church should strive for genius and not for decadence.”
Development of teaching
“St Vincent of Lerins makes a comparison between the biological development of man and the transmission from one era to another of the deposit of faith, which grows and is strengthened with time. Here, human self-understanding changes with time, and so also human consciousness deepens. Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem.
“So we grow in the understanding of the truth. Theologians help the Church to mature in her own judgment. Even the other sciences and their development help the Church in its growth in understanding. There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning. The view of the Church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.”
Living, not just studying
“When it comes to social issues, it is one thing to study the problem of drugs in a slum and quite another thing to go live there and understand the problem from the inside.
“There is a letter by Fr (Pedro) Arrupe to the Centre for Social Research and Action on poverty, in which he says one cannot speak of poverty if one does not experience poverty, with a direct connection to places in which there is poverty.
“The word insertion is dangerous because some religious have taken it as a fad, and disasters have occurred because of a lack of discernment. But it is truly important.”
Love for cinema
“La Strada, by Fellini, is the movie I loved the most. There is an implicit reference to St Francis. I watched all of the Italian movies with Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi when I was between 10 and 12 years old. Another film that I loved is Rome, Open City. My parents who used to take us to the movies quite often.”
(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)
Concluded.