Pope Francis and Young People — An imagined conversation between Pope Francis and

Father Michael Paul Gallagher SJ (1939-2015)

Author(s): Eamonn Conway, Pope Francis and Michael Paul Gallagher
Source: The Furrow , April 2016, Vol. 67, No. 4 (April 2016), pp. 201-210
Published by: The Furrow

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44738337

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Pope Francis and Young People
- An imagined conversation between
Pope Francis and Father Michael Paul
Gallagher SJ (1939-2015)

Eamonn Conway

In his book Dive Deeper (2001) Fr Michael Paul Gallagher S J

created several imagined dialogues on aspects of faith and doubt
between people who never actually conversed. The following
dialogue is a tribute to him and is based on a reading of the texts
and contexts of both Pope Francis and Fr Gallagher.

' Theology must be autobiographical if it is to enfiarne the heart

with love of God' - Sebastian Moore

MPG: Holy Father, I am delighted to meet you. I remember well

my reaction on hearing the announcement of your election. I was
with my community in the Bellarmino1 and we had just finished
evening Mass when the bells rang out, indicating there was white
smoke. We rushed into the sacristy and threw off our vestments and
many of the community made their way immediately to St Peter's
Square. I stayed where I was and awaited the announcement on
TV.

PF: And when you realised that your new Pope was a fellow
Jesuit?

MPG: I was stunned. A Jesuit Pope? After all, we Jesuits have a

special promise against being appointed even as bishops. And none
of the Italian media had mentioned you as papabile } Yet now I am
delighted. It was time for an experienced pastor, a gifted spiritual
1 The residence for Jesuit postgraduate students in Rome where Fr Gallagher was
rector until earlier this year (2015).
2 Likely to be elected as a pope.

Eamonn Conway is a priest of the Archdiocese of Tuam. He is

Head of Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Mary
Immaculate College, University of Limerick.

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THE FURROW

guide, such as you. In particular I love your emphasis on mercy, and

upon the transformation of the human heart through an encounter
with the joy of the Gospel. As my life ends, your ministry brings
me great consolation, in the Ignatian sense.3
For too many people, Christian faith seems not just incredible
but also unreal and unreachable. You are reaching people,
encouraging them to live generously and openly. You are restoring
the confidence of what you like to call God's holy faithful people,
but your leadership has also brought to those outside or on the
margins of the Church a new sense of what I like to call the
disturbing freshness of Christ.
I also welcome your pontificate because I think we have a certain
amount in common.

PF: That should not be surprising if we are both trying to be faithful

sons of St. Ignatius.

MPG: True. But there are some interesting parallels in our

biographies. For instance, we both found ourselves in Rome
relatively late into our vocations. For both of us, being called to
Rome was a surprise. And, at least for me, working in the Vatican4
certainly tried my patience!

PF: That, I can certainly understand!

MPG: Did you know I also spent some time in Latin America? It
was short, only a year, back in 1986. 1 had always intended to return
there to work in religious formation, but it wasn't to be. However,
my time in Paraguay changed both me and how I looked at things,
and I think it helps me understand how you look at things.

PF: How were you changed?

MPG: I learned that my approach to doing theology until then was
too individualistic. Living with the poor, I saw that unbelief (my
constant concern) was more likely a product of a life-style than of
a set of ideas. The German theologian, Johann Baptist Metz5 was
right when he said that secularisation is what happens when the
wellsprings of compassion are blocked, or locked into the private
realm.

PF: I agree with you there. I have asked people to begin each day
by asking themselves: 'How are you going to show mercy and

3 St Ignatius of Loyola (1491 - 1556), who founded the Society of Jesus.

4 Fr Michael Paul spent his first five years in Rome at The Pontifical Council for
Culture.
5 Bom in 1928, now Emeritus Professor at Münster, Germany, he developed from
Karl Rahner (1904 - 84) what became known as a 'political theology'.

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 POPE FRANCIS AND YOUNG PEOPLE

compassion to the weakest and most vulnerable of your brothers

and sisters today?'

MPG: On my return to Dublin I lived for three years in a flat in

Ballymun (then a socially troubled area), commuting each day
by bus to my university work in UCD. The clash of contexts was
fruitful. It opened new horizons for my attempts to theologise.
I never got back to Paraguay. I was called to the Vatican, and
then went on to teach at the Gregorian University. I don't regret
the might-have-been of Latin America, but I do know that it would
have pushed me to think along different lines, the lines along which
you are thinking.
Teaching in Rome was an excitingly international experience
but theology there can suffer from dearth of 'real context'. Both
faculty and students are richly multicultural but there is a genuine
risk of loss of context when there is a lack of rootedness in any one
particular culture.
They say that context conditions consciousness. Coming, as you
do, from a very different background, another place and space, you
offer us a somewhat different reading of faith, Church, history,
spirituality and of the pastoral needs of today. It is taking time for
some of us in the West to get used to this, as I think you know.
You bring the context of the Global South to a world Church that
for too long reflected only European priorities and perspectives,
a Europe that now, as you put it, 'is (like) a "grandmother", no
longer fertile and vibrant'.

PF: Yes, I did say that to the European parliament. I hope

grandmothers forgive me!

MPG: In particular, you have got us reflecting on the context of the

poor, of those who live in the shadows and on the peripheries; you
take seriously the many different ways people can be marginalized,
discarded, 'thrown away', as you keep saying.
You are constantly urging us to take context seriously. That was
the challenge you put before the recent World Synod of Bishops,
wasn't it? To take seriously the lived reality of family life, which
is often far from ideal, and respond to this reality from the depth
of the Church's tradition. You view even the most challenging of
contexts as privileged thresholds of encounter with Christ. By taking
seriously both the context and the Gospel, Christ is encountered in
a new and fresh way. For you, contexts are more important than
concepts; people are more important than ideas.
This helps me to understand why you are anxious to push for
what you have called a 'sound decentralization' in the Church6.

6 See Evangelii Gaudium (hereafter EG) n. 16.

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THE FURROW

You emphasized this in The Joy of the Gospel , and you spoke about
it at the Synod as well. You have asked those in pastoral ministry,
under the guidance of their bishops, to trust the Holy Spirit and
to trust their own pastoral intuitions when it comes to devising
concrete pastoral responses in their local churches, discerning the
way forward prayerfully, of course, and in communion with the
universal Church.

PF: The Pope cannot take the place of the local church in the
discernment of every issue, including how to respond to young
people. As I said at the close of the Synod, cultures are in fact quite
diverse, and every general principle needs to be inculturated, if it
is to be respected and applied.

MPG: Your confidence that the seed of the Word will always
eventually find fertile soil recalls the conviction of St Ignatius that
God can be found in all contexts.
Moving specifically now to the faith situation of young people,
perhaps the first point you want us to take on board, then, is that
we have to talk with them, not just talk about them, to let them
speak to us. If Christian faith is to be genuinely inculturated in
their context, we need to try to understand their context from the
inside, as best we can. More importantly, we need to equip them to
evaluate and critique their own cultural context.

PF: A lot comes down to education. I know I worried some bishops

when, at World Youth Day 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, I encouraged
young people to make a mess, to make noise, to make themselves
heard in their dioceses. But we really need to waken young people
up, and we need them to waken us up. One of the worries I have
about educational systems is that they tranquilise young people,
especially in poorer countries, but perhaps for different reasons this
is true in richer countries as well. They become too acquiescent,
too accepting of things as they are. Years ago, I said that education
should be the genuine expression of social love. Our educational
systems should really help young people to think critically and
engage in proper moral discernment.

MPG: I have noticed when you speak of education you don't

speak in terms of schools and colleges only. Like Vatican II,
you see formal education as closely linked to the family and the
community.
PF: Yes. At the Second Vatican Council, the Latin American
bishops felt that far too little attention was being paid to local,
community-based and informal educational initiatives, all of
which in our cultural context are as important as schools. Efforts at

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 POPE FRANCIS AND YOUNG PEOPLE

education often fail because we are not attentive to the real needs
of young people.

MPG: One of the great joys I had in my earlier years in Rome

was spending Summer retreats with young people in the Italian
Alps. To be aware of the deeper needs of young people, those of
us entrusted with communicating the joy of the Gospel must spend
time, even 'waste' time, with them. One of the principles you offer
us in The Joy of the Gospel is that 'time is greater than space'.7
You ask us to work at the task of evangelisation slowly, steadily,
but surely, and without being obsessed with immediate results. If
we do not give young people time, then it is difficult for us to give
them anything else. When we listen to young people, we convey
respect. We convey to them the sense that Christ, too, is taking
them seriously.

PF: It is a two-way process, an exchange of gifts, when you spend

time with people, especially the most vulnerable. Every person we
meet, but especially the poor and the vulnerable, represents the
prolongation of the incarnation for us.8 As bishop in Buenos Aires,
when a priest from one of the slums would phone up looking for
help for Masses on a Sunday, I myself jumped at the opportunity to
help out. I always got more than I gave.
And young people have so much to give us, to give to the
Church. The elderly bring with them memory and the wisdom
of experience, which warns us not foolishly to repeat our past
mistakes. Young people call us to renewed and expansive hope, for
they represent new directions for humanity and open us up to the
future, lest we cling to a nostalgia for structures and customs which
are no longer life-giving in today's world.9
I also greatly treasure the ecological sensitivity of young people,
and their sensitivity to injustice generally.10
In so many of our cities young people are already 'street
preachers', joyfully bringing Jesus to every corner of the
earth!11 Despite the present crisis of commitment and communal
relationships, many young people are making common cause
before the problems of our world and are taking up volunteer work
in the Church and beyond.
We are on the wrong track if we are asking how to evangelise
young people. Instead, we need to ask how we can share the task of
evangelisation with them, by which we will all deepen our sense of
7 EG n 222ff
8 EG n. 179
9 EG n 108
10 Laudato Si' (hereafter LS) n 109.
1 1 Callejeros de la fe, EG 106

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THE FURROW

the joy of the Gospel. In proclaiming Christ we ourselves encounter

him and are transformed by the joy of that encounter.

MPG: At the same time, we cannot be innocent about the ways in

which contemporary culture wounds young people.

PF: Indeed, we must not. My great concern for young people is that
they get trapped in what I call 'a technological paradigm.' Don't
get me wrong. I have nothing against technology, which is a power
for good when it enhances our God-given creativity. However, a
technological mindset can mislead us into thinking that everything,
even other people, may be manipulated to our own ends.
It is only a small step from believing that aspects of nature
are exploitable or disposable to believing the same about human
life.12 People think that Laudato Sť is only about the environment,
but it is also about human ecology, about the urgent need for us
humans to respect 'the rhythms inscribed in nature by the hand of
the Creator'.13

MPG: I am interested in how you see this 'technological paradigm'

affecting young people, and indeed all of us.

PF: It prevents us from living at depth. Mistakenly, we think

that everything and everyone around us is subject to our mastery,
possession, control and manipulation. The sad truth is that nowadays
we have only a meagre awareness of our own limitations.
A technological way of looking at the world can fill us
with delusions of grandeur. It can make us forget that we are
interdependent creatures.

MPG: Which is very different from the biblical vision of creation

and human life.

PF: Yes. Laudato Si ' is about highlighting this contrast. A formation

in Christian faith for young people should begin by helping them
to accept that we humans are not God. Still, we are unique and
pre-eminent among creatures because we are addressed personally
by God. And this is true of all humans, rich and poor, unborn and
elderly. Our dignity is a gift, not something we earn by our own
efforts.
Our pre-eminence as creatures gives us no right to think that the
rest of nature exists for us. All creatures have value of their own in
God's eyes and we are to cooperate with God in caring for them.
Sin and evil occur when we fail to respect our limitations as
humans. The Good News is that, despite us, God triumphs over
evil, every time!
12 LS nn 118, 120
13 LS n 71

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 POPE FRANCIS AND YOUNG PEOPLE

I am really confident that young people will rise to the challenge

I have put to them in Laudato Si' In the final chapter, about
education, I have said 'good education plants seeds when we are
young'. At the same time, I know that many young people have
grown up in a milieu of extreme consumerism and affluence. This
makes it difficult to develop other habits.
Educators should help young people to realize that the mere
amassing of things and pleasures is not enough to give meaning
and joy to the heart.
But enough about my thoughts. How, Father Michael Paul,
would you describe the present cultural context and the challenge
that faces young people, ministers and educators?

MPG: We spoke earlier about the importance of context. I have

tried hard, over the years, to map the lived culture of people today,
their ' real context' .
Beyond the levels of visible structures or of 'espoused beliefs
and values', there is a more hidden level where people live by
unstated perceptions of what is taken for granted. At that level
there are forces at work that block the possibility of faith; forces
that render people unfree.
Despite what they might think, young people suffer from various
'unfreedoms' today, and this shows itself above all in the fragility
of their sense of identity.
Among these unfreedoms is the lingering myth of scientism. By
this I mean that science is accepted as the only road to 'real' truth.
Yet, as Martha Nussbaum has said, some forms of knowledge are
accessible only through love.
All around me I see an isolated and disengaged individualism, a
sad shrinking of the self, an underlying woundedness.
PF: And so do I. You know that I have said that what the Church
needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the
hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. You know my
image of the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to
ask people who are seriously injured if they have high cholesterol!
You have to heal their wounds.
In terms of evangelisation, unless people have encountered
personally the love and the mercy of Christ, it is difficult for them
to understand the demands that the Gospel makes in terms of how
they should live their lives. The experience of being 'mercied', of
having wounds healed, must come first.

MPG: I have spent some time trying to identify the injuries of

which you speak. I call them 'street wounds', wounds inflicted in
the course of our daily lives in contemporary culture. If these are

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THE FURROW

left untended, people find it difficult to develop a robust religious

identity.
I have spoken about a wounded imagination, a wounded
memory, and a wounded sense of belonging.
The imagination can become undernourished by a diet of
cultural 'junk food' and shrink into superficiality.
The memory , which is the receiver of the word through a living
tradition, can suffer from a kind of alienated immediacy, without
past or future, as if imprisoned in an ahistoric present.
Belonging with others is compromised when old anchors are lost
and a strange loneliness goes hand in hand with a frenetic lifestyle.
In this sense, what I have called 'cultural desolation' involves a
certain restlessness and rootlessness, inducing an inner paralysis in
spite of outer mobility.
When these conditions become widespread in society they can
infect the sources of imagination, memory and relationship, which
are all key to a healthy Christian identity.
So I can see, Holy Father, why you put such emphasis on the
need to awaken compassion, and to overcome the various ways our
society anaesthetizes us, without offering any real cures for what
truly ails us.
But it is not all desolation, and I think, from what you have said
about your hopes for young people, you believe that too.
PF: How, as Christians, could we believe otherwise? I have no
doubt whatsoever that the Spirit is at work in individuals and in
communities.

MPG: I see all around me a genuine hunger for 'something more',

beyond the emptiness of secularized living, a hunger that is less shy
than a generation ago. I like to call this a 'spiritual' postmodernity,
and I believe it represents a different cultural tone that should not
be dismissed too fast, even if it seems to satisfy itself with sub-
Christian answers. It is, at the very least, a groping towards the
mystery.
Now, Holy Father, since my time is short, may I finish by telling
you about what I call the 'D' triangle?
PF: The 'D' triangle? Please do - but remember my English is not
very fluent!

MPG: In my view there are three aspects to faith formation that

today require our attention: faith as disposition, faith as decision,
and faith as different.
Disposition means our openness or closedness to faith. It works
more on the level of attitudes than of ideas. After Ignatius, I learned

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 POPE FRANCIS AND YOUNG PEOPLE

about disposition from Cardinal Newman14, who from a dispute

about religion with his brother realized that rejection of faith often
arises from 'a fault of the heart, not of the intellect.'
If a person remains self-sufficient, with no need for God, then
unbelief is a natural outcome; this is usually not an intellectual but
an existential stance.
Where we stand influences what we see, or fail to see. This is
why I welcome your insistent call to open our hearts to the poor,
to the vulnerable. And to be honest with ourselves about our own
poverty and vulnerability.
Formation in the sacraments and in doctrinal teaching remain
crucial, but I sense that they are no longer in the front line of a
pastoral response capable of meeting the crisis of faith today.
Without an experience of vulnerability, Christian faith is like an
answer to a question we are incapable of asking or grasping.
My second 'D', decision , refers to the decision for faith, for
Christ. Today, faith must be a personal decision, and it will be one
taken against the cultural tide. It can only happen in response to
a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. It will be blocked by a
diminished understanding of what it is to be human, duped into
believing that truth is accessible only through science. A pedagogy
that expands our understanding of what it is to be human helps us
to be free to decide. We need to be rendered free to decide for faith,
to find the courage to say 'yes' to God's 'yes' to us. Then the gift of
that moment totally transforms our human horizon. We experience
Christian faith as comforting and true, but at the same time as a jolt
to our system. Authentic faith is never merely therapeutic.
My third 'D' is different. To be a Christian today is to be
different. In Europe it used to take courage to be a nonbeliever.
Today, the opposite is the case. To be a Christian entails not only a
decision, but even a battle against dominant values.
The challenge is to be confidently different: by this I mean without
finding ourselves adopting either a defensive or an aggressive
stance. We need to be both proud of our faith and humble about it,
at the same time.
Many people have moved from what was really a superficial
form of faith to what is now a fairly superficial form of unbelief,
encouraged by the dominant cultural mood. We won't be heard if
all we have to say is that the new culture is utterly decadent. We
have to listen to the new sensibility of young people instead of
imposing old answers too rapidly.

14 John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), priest and theologian, founder of

the Catholic University in Ireland, beatified 2010. The heart, Newman said, 'is
commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination,' a phrase
often cited by Fr Gallagher.

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THE FURROW

PF: Indeed! I have told bishops that harsh and divisive language
does not befit the tongue of a pastor, it has no place in his heart;
although it may momentarily seem to win the day, only the enduring
allure of goodness and love remains truly convincing.

MPG: It is striking that, faced with the challenges of the

Reformation, St Ignatius 's advice to his companions was to avoid
theological confrontation and instead to deepen the pastoral agenda
through experiences of spiritual renewal. This is what I hear you
inviting us to do.
But it is time, now, for me to go on my way. Even though the
externals of death seem daunting, when I listen to my heart I know
I am made for more life than I can yet imagine.15
Thank you, Holy Father, for our conversation.

PF: Ah yes, Fr Michael Paul, Ignatius so much delighted in the

4 magis ' - the 'more'. Hence our Jesuit motto: Ad maiorem Dei
gloriami 16 Thank you for the thoughts you have shared here,
and for the lifetime of reflection and ministry behind them. And
remember, pray for me!

15 From 'The Prospect of Dying' in The Messenger , November 2015

16 Meaning 'for the greater glory of God' - the Jesuit motto.

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