World Youth Days stir some and leave others untouched. But they are always interesting because they allow the Pope to address enthusiastic young people in a variety of contexts. He has the chance to talk of what he believes important to pass on to the next generation. In the talks the distinctive themes of a papacy can emerge.
So it is instructive to compare the way in which Pope Francis addressed the young adults at World Youth Day in Brazil this week with Pope Benedict's style of address. Unsurprisingly they have much in common. Both men emphasise that Christian faith in the Catholic Church is the privileged way of finding meaning in life. Both compare Christian faith with other competing ways of finding meaning. Both call for a deeply grounded faith and solid formation in it.
But within these shared themes there are differences. They are of style, but substantial. To hear the two men speak is like hearing sermons from a representative of the Evangelical wing of the Anglican communion and one from the Anglo Catholic wing. Both commend the same Gospel, but they differ particularly in the centrality that each gives to the Church and its traditions.
The differences can be best understood through images, inadequate though they are. Benedict might picture the Church as a museum or treasury of all the beliefs, relationships, liturgical details and traditions that compose its life. He tries to draw young people into the treasury to appreciate its beauty and coherence and to find in it a home. In his language he puts on display the rich symbolic resources and intellectual power of the Catholic inheritance, just as in his celebration of liturgy he brought out significant treasures from the Vatican vaults.
He sees the enemy of the Church to be impoverished intellectual traditions which seduce people and have to be combated with robust intellectual argument. These alternative treasuries promise much but are empty.
The task of the curators of the treasury — bishops and priests in particular — is to be present in it and safeguard its contents. They are also to draw people in by their enthusiasm for the beauty of what it contained, and are to explain faithfully the living connections that unify the collection.
Francis might imagine the Church as like a dispensary from which health workers go out to share their life saving medicines. They have something precious to offer people, too precious for them to waste their time in the dispensary. In Brazil Francis urged the young people repeatedly to go out among people, to take risks, even at the risk of annoying their bishops. This has been a constant theme of his pontificate. He speaks in the salty, epigrammatic and concrete language of the market stalls.
For him the enemy is not intellectual systems but concrete things like money and wealth and security that crush people's ability to see what matters more deeply. These things lead people to see wealth as something for personal accumulation and not for the common good, so perpetuating human misery. The world to which he sends people out is the world in which asylum seekers are mistreated, in which there is little compassion for the poor and neglected, and where people are driven by fear of losing their possessions. This breeds fear, the globalisation of indifference, and eventually leads to violence against imagined enemies.
Francis believes that if Catholics are to commend the Gospel to the poor they must appeal to the heart, not primarily to the mind. So the Gospel needs to be presented as something joyful and simple, not in its complexity. He acknowledges the role of theologians, but it is to serve the health workers, not to mystify the medicine.
The virtues that Francis seeks in bishops and priests (and in young people) are not the curatorial gifts of security, reliability and arcane knowledge, but the entrepreneurial gifts of passion about what they have to offer, travelling light, becoming part of the people whose healing they seek. Shepherds must smell like their sheep. Their greatest failure would be to waste their time in the dispensary and to be ambitious for administrative positions.
The perspectives of Benedict and Francis are different, but each has its place in the Catholic tradition. Benedict's perspective is Benedictine, Francis' is Franciscan; one reflects the world of the monastery where the monks spend their lives, the other the world of the friary from which friars go on mission among the people. But in a world that is changing and a Catholic world that is disconcerted, the reception that Francis has received suggests that the path to Catholic renewal may be Franciscan.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Health image from Shutterstock