Fioretti– The Little Flowers of Pope Francis

Fioretti– The Little Flowers of Pope Francis.  By Andrea Tornielli, Ignatius Press, 2014.

 

Over the past year and a half, it has become increasingly apparent that if people want to get a better idea of what Pope Francis is saying and doing, then the traditional media is definitely not a good place to go for information.  Time after time, the religion reporters of the major papers and news services have been caught distorting the Pope’s messages, deliberately misrepresenting his statements, and potentially making comments up out of whole cloth.  This has given many individuals, ranging from staunch Catholics to disinterested nonbelievers, erroneous perceptions about Pope Francis’s goals for his papacy and his message for the world.  

 

People from all walks of life are raising questions.  Is the Pope radically changing Church teachings on certain subjects?  Is the Pope in danger for taking such radical stances?  What does this mean for the future of the Church?  Increasingly, religious bloggers have become the go-to source for reliable information and educated commentary about Pope Francis and his papacy, providing factual correction for the radically distorted narratives widely disseminated in the media, such as the alleged “blistering attack on the Curia” at Christmas (Dawn Eden gives a much more nuanced examination of that statement here, stressing that it wasn’t the lambasting that many news stories asserted it was: http://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2014/12/24/did-pope-francis-really-give-his-own-curia-a-blistering-attack-for-christmas) to the recent “all dogs go to heaven” story that was later proven to be a largely baseless non-story created by unscrupulous reporting (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/pope-francis-didnt-say-dogs-can-go-to-heaven.html).  The corrections have gotten minor attention in the general press, and not nearly as much ink and air time as the original, debunked stories, especially since the retractions tend to come a few days after the first news stories break.

 

In Fioretti, Tornielli is trying to explain to readers what Pope Francis is really saying and doing.  As a longtime journalist at the Vatican, Tornielli provides a professional’s view of what is being said and done, as well as providing extensive quotations as to what is really being preached.  As he explains his goals in publishing this books, Tornielli describes his work as follows:

 

“This book contains incidents, excerpts from homilies, testimonies, encounters, telephone calls that have Pope Francis as their protagonist.  The title echoes the Little Flowers of St. Francis, the famous collection of stories about the beloved Francis of Assisi, whose name the Pope adopted for himself.  The present work makes no claim to completeness, nor does it intend to offer a systematic account of the first months of Francis’ pontificate or to present analyses and commentaries.  It merely tries to offer a collection of fragments, a little selection which page after page, may help the reader to become better acquainted with the Bishop of Rome who came “from the end of the earth.”” (p. 15).

 

The purpose of Fioretti is to present a picture of what Tornielli sees as the real Pope Francis, who comes across as a man of great kindness and charity who is determined to not allow the world and the Church to remain in ineffective old patterns and bad habits.  Early in the book, Tornielli writes:

 

“The message that Francis considers most important, as he himself said in his homily at the Mass in the Vatican parish of St. Anna on March 17, is the message of mercy.  “Without mercy,” he said to the Brazilian bishops during his journey to Rio de Janeiro, “we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of ‘wounded’ persons in need of understanding, forgiveness, love.”  He added, “We need a church able to make sense of the ‘night’ contained in the flight of so many of our brothers and sisters. … We need a church unafraid of going forth into their night… a church capable of meeting them on their way.”  (pp. 12-13).

 

The Pope’s words are quoted extensively as a means of creating a patchwork quilt of Pope Francis’s  “greatest hits,” so to speak, thereby creating a mega-sermon with commentary by Tornielli, who comes across as a staunch supporter of the Pope, who in turn comes across as a man of preternatural warmth and kindness.  In Fioretti, the “little flowers” are examples of how love needs to be an integral component of religious life and evangelization.  The following words are from Pope Francis:

 

“The structural and organizational reforms are secondary– that is, they come afterward.  The first reform must be the attitude.  The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost.  The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials.  The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind.  But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.

 

Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.  The ones who quit sometimes do it for reasons that, if properly understood and assessed, can lead to a return.  But that takes audacity and courage.” (pp. 13-14).

 

Tornielli observes that sometimes the most dangerous impediments to faith and spiritual improvement come from within the hearts of average individuals.  Sometimes the barriers that stand in the way of someone finding comfort or fulfillment inside the Church are self-imposed, and though Tornielli’s message ought to provoke guilt in those who are not accustomed to introspection, it serves as a profound set of directions for self-help, even though the path to holiness is not an easy one.

 

“We live in a society where we become less and less accustomed to acknowledging our responsibilities and blaming ourselves for our mistakes: indeed it is always someone else’s fault.  Other people are always the immoral ones; someone else is always at fault, never me.  We also experience a certain view of the Church that sees her only imposing requirements and prohibitions that stifle freedom and weigh down everyday life, which is already burdensome.  The message of mercy knocks down both clichés at the same time.

 

There is no doubt that these words of the Pope made an impression on the hearts of many people.  Above all on the fallen-away, on those who have distanced themselves from the Church and from the practice of their faith.  Many pastors from all parts of Italy have testified to this, speaking about the increase in the number of confessions in the Easter season and about the fact that many penitents specifically cited Francis’ words about mercy.”  (pp. 22-23).

 

This is a short book, and at times Tornielli cites the same quotes by Pope Francis multiple times.  This is not meant to be a thorough analysis of the Pope’s sermons and homilies, but it does select some recurring themes that have proven crucial to the pontiff’s worldview and agenda.  This little volume is meant to be a rebuttal to the unpleasantly common view that Pope Francis is reducing the Church’s teachings to a simple “be kind and follow your conscience.”  Instead, Tornielli’s selections from Pope Francis’s writings come across as a far more complex and challenging argument, indicating that nothing is being taken away from the Church’s teachings, but instead, the blinding sins and foibles that people carry with them and nuture through poor decisions need to be torn away in order for people to be brought closer to Christ.

 

 

–Chris Chan