The Franciscan Understanding of the Church

In recent years the Catholic Church in Germany has been marked by fierce clashes between currents within the Church, which have all but paralysed its capacity for renewal and for missionary witness. This is all the worse because the state of society is positively crying out for a Christian impulse to help master its deep-seated problems. In this situation it makes sense to remind ourselves clearly what the Church meant to Francis of Assisi, and how he dealt with the crisis in the life of the Church in his own day.

I would like to examine Francis's understanding of the Church from three points of view, all of which find expression in his Testament:

1. His view of the Church as the community of those who follow Christ.
2. His view of the Church as the place where Jesus Christ can be experienced bodily, too
3. His conviction that we can only change things by changing ourselves

The Church as the community of the disciples of Jesus

For Francis, the encounter with Jesus Christ was the fundamental impulse of his spiritual life, the one that turned everything upside down. A Franciscan theologian once said in a lecture: “For a Franciscan there is only one essential question: who is Jesus Christ?”

So for Francis the Church was not primarily an institution. He took only a passing interest in theology, and he was always sceptical of the sprawling body of canon law. For him the source of following Jesus was the Gospel. That was his programme: to live the Gospel. He says: “And after the Lord gave me brothers, no one showed me what I should do, but the Most High himself revealed to me that I should live according to the form of the holy Gospel. And I had it written down in few words and simply, and the Lord Pope confirmed it for me.”

These sentences speak of the self-assurance of a man who knows that he was created and redeemed by God, and that God loves him unconditionally in spite of his failings. Francis can therefore take himself and his own experience of faith wholly seriously, and he does indeed hold fast, against all opposition, to what he has recognised, through his encounter with the Gospel, as his very own calling.

Anyone who is this sure of their relationship with God (not through their own achievement, but through trust in the merciful God) can also accept other people's experiences of faith, which may be of a different kind. Such a person is ready to take their place within a community, and to let that community question them, too. For Francis this was first of all the community of the brothers, but then also the community of the worldwide Church. Francis went to the Pope to have his way confirmed.

For Francis, then, the Church was the space in which he found kindred spirits, into which he brought his concerns, by which he let himself be questioned and which also protected him. The fundamental experience, however, is the personal encounter with Jesus Christ in the Gospel, which no catechism and no canon law could replace or take away from him.

The bodily nature of the Church

The experience of creation as something bodily is one of the best-known essential elements of Franciscan spirituality. It found perhaps its most beautiful expression in the Canticle of the Sun, but it is evident in many of the legends, too. It goes without saying, then, that for Francis the Church was not confined to a purely spiritual dimension that could only be experienced in the hereafter. The worldly existence of the Church, as a community of people who carry the message of Jesus through history, was quite essential to him. More than that: through the bodily nature of the Church he could experience the bodily existence of Jesus Christ.

Jesus himself neither wrote a book nor developed a self-contained system of teaching; instead, to preserve and spread his message, he founded a community. From the great number of his followers he chose the twelve apostles and appointed Peter as his representative. This emerges from a large number of complementary passages in all four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of the Apostles. The Church thereby becomes the “primordial sacrament”, the holy sign of God's presence in the world. This view of the Church always mattered particularly to Francis. Characteristic of him is this prayer, which he composed and mentions in his Testament: “We adore you, Lord Jesus Christ – and in all your churches throughout the whole world – and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.”

For Francis, then, encountering Jesus meant in any case sharing life and sharing suffering in the community that Jesus founded, that is, in the Catholic Church standing in apostolic succession. He finds shockingly plain words for this: “Afterwards the Lord gave me, and gives me still, such great faith in priests who live according to the rule of the holy Roman Church, because of their ordination, that even if they persecuted me, I would want to seek refuge with them…. And I do not want to see sin in them, because I see the Son of God in them and they are my lords. And I do this because in this world I see nothing bodily of him, the most high Son of God, except his most holy Body and his most holy Blood, which they receive and which they alone administer to others.”

These sentences certainly do not mean that Francis overlooked the faults and weaknesses of priests and bishops. He knew very well about the greed for power and money, the indifference and the lack of education among priests and bishops. But unlike many other poverty movements of his time, he did not draw the conclusion that he should turn away from the Church. He remained faithful to the Church with its priestly order, because for him it was the only link with Jesus Christ in his historical form.

The Eucharist (that is, the Lord's Supper) was for him the central event in the life of the Church, the event that makes the bodily existence of Jesus present again and again. Through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the world is redeemed not only in idea and in spirit, but also in its bodily nature. Just as in faith bread and wine are truly transformed into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, so too the world is being transformed, in a process that cannot be reversed, towards the Kingdom of God as Jesus proclaimed it. This transformation of the world, which has its root and its beginning in the Eucharist, showed itself most clearly for Francis in turning towards the poor and in personal humility.

For Francis, though, the Eucharist was inseparably bound up with the ordained priesthood. Regardless of his personal credibility, the priest has his mandate to celebrate the Eucharist through his ordination by the bishop. The bishop, after all, is a direct successor of the apostles, who were present in Jerusalem when Jesus instituted the Last Supper. Unlike the heretical movements of his time, which disputed the validity of a Eucharist celebrated by an unworthy priest, Francis held that the sacramental event of the consecration was guaranteed not by the priest's way of life but by Jesus Christ himself.

(In all these reflections it is of course important to say that, then as now, there were not only unworthy priests lacking in credibility, but also deeply committed and credible people with very different personalities. The priests I know are as a rule good preachers of the faith and indispensable pillars of parish life. )

Change through our own conversion

Francis saw the gap between the reality of the Church and what it ought to be by virtue of its founder, and he suffered from it. The message he received from the cross of San Damiano, “Francis, go and repair my house, which, as you see, is falling into ruin”, remains the guiding principle of the Franciscan attitude to the Church to this day.

Unlike Pope Innocent, who wanted to reform the Church from above by the use of power, and unlike the heretical movements of his time, which wanted to destroy the Church (often by force) and build a new, ideal Church, Francis began changing the Church with his own person. He begged for building materials and restored the church of San Damiano. He went to the poor and the lepers to help them and to tell them about Jesus. He gave even corrupt clerics a chance, not by provoking and criticising them, but by setting them thinking through the example of his life.

It was extraordinarily important to him to work as a simple believer, without any position of power, solely through the credibility of his life. He unbendingly rejects every kind of privilege: “I strictly command all the brothers, by obedience, wherever they may be, that they should not dare to ask for any letter from the Roman Curia, either themselves or through an intermediary, neither for a church nor for any other place, neither under the pretext of preaching nor on account of bodily persecution; but wherever they are not received, let them flee to another country to do penance with the blessing of God.”

The detailed list of possible cases surely shows that Francis had already gathered plenty of experience of his brothers' excuses. Even so, at the end of his life he says clearly once more what the meaning of Franciscan existence is. We are called to do penance, that is, to turn back to God again and again, to examine our personal lives and to direct them anew towards Jesus Christ.

This attitude certainly does not testify to naivety, or to an individualistic lack of interest in questions that go beyond personal piety. Francis saw the problems clearly and he named them plainly. (It is recorded, for example, that on his journey to Palestine he preached before more than six thousand crusaders and called on them to end the war.) Rather, Francis lived from the conviction that only love and humility can truly help to make the world better. For him the decisive tool for changing reality was the persuasive power of a credible life. His rejection of the use of power extended not only to every form of physical violence, but also to subtler forms, such as playing off legal hair-splitting, or education and learning, against those who are weaker.

Conclusion

I believe that this understanding of the Church and of belonging to the Church, which comes from Francis, can help us to master today's conflicts and to make use of the creative potential that lies within them.

For the conflicts do not arise so much from real abuses as from the often very different views on how the Church should respond, on the one hand, to the great challenges of modernity and, on the other, to the spread of Eastern forms of religiosity. The diversity of Christian experiences of faith, and the different emphases in the personal faith of Christians, are really a great opportunity for the Church, because they bear witness to the variety and the vitality of the Christian faith in our time.

Things become problematic whenever individual groups begin to deny others their right to exist and to present their own way as the only right one. Sadly, this behaviour is to be found on both sides of the conflict. The disparagement of Christians who are loyal to the Pope and attached to tradition, which goes as far as imputing neuroses or a lust for power to them, and on the other side the constant wielding of the orthodoxy hammer (“anyone who says that is no longer Catholic”) are, in my view, not guided by the Gospel, and they serve neither the Church nor one's own convictions of faith.

Of course the Church does have limits in a certain sense, and there are of course people whose intellectual position lies outside these limits. But on precisely this question Jesus himself always behaved very generously: whoever wanted to come to him was allowed to come; he did not check whether the person agreed with his teaching on every single point. The decisive point in the judgement scenes of the Gospels is not the question of dogmatic orthodoxy, but the question: “I was hungry (thirsty, sick, in prison, etc.) – did you help me?”

Being ready to allow for another's experience of faith is not about the various currents in the Church existing side by side without relationship or direction. It is rather about perceiving our common point of reference, namely Jesus Christ, and entering into conversation about him. A constructive attitude in such a conversation does not then consist in looking only for faults and weaknesses in the other, but in asking where the other's approach to faith can enrich me and bear fruit in me.

In other words: it is about not seeing the speck in our neighbour's eye, but making the effort to remove the log from our own.

In the Church there is a legitimate range of experiences of faith and of theological opinions, which cannot simply be reduced to the current catechism. If you take the history of the Church seriously, you see that there have been developments in the life and also in the teaching of the Church that went beyond what had been lived and taught until then. Anyone who compares, for example, the damning statements of Pius X on ecumenism and on dialogue between religions with the conduct and the statements of John Paul II can only marvel at how much change is possible in the relatively short span of a century. In the interplay between faithfulness to the tradition founded by Jesus Christ himself and the effort to understand his message better and carry it into our own time, every group has its task. No side can exist without the other.

It is certainly bitter at times to find that the Pope or the bishops hold positions different from one's own, and steer developments in a direction other than the one hoped for. In fairness, though, we should grant that the bishops, too, are bound by their conscience. Like every Christian, they have to act according to what they have recognised as right. Moreover, the various local churches and currents within the Church place different expectations on the Church's leadership, expectations that are often enough highly contradictory. In a community of more than a billion people it may then be better to wait with changes until a real consensus has formed.

If we trust in Jesus's promise that the Holy Spirit will not abandon the Church, it becomes easier, in a conflict, to let go now and then, to let things take their course and to return to our own true calling. Trusting that the Church has a future given by God is, for me, also a piece of faith lived out in practice.

For Francis it was always entirely natural to accept every person as they were. He did not ask about faith or guilt, but tried to serve everyone in simple humility. It was precisely in this way that he led many people back to God who had already given up all contact with the Church and all hope of salvation. If renewal of the Church is understood as each person's own conversion and a renewed encounter with Jesus Christ, and not as cutting our supposed opponents down to fit our own position, then the different theological approaches could bear fruit in one another, and a real joy could grow in the variety and vitality of the community of those who try, with their weak powers, to follow Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

(The quotations from Francis are all taken from his Testament, which he wrote shortly before his death.)