Nice op-ed piece about Pope Francis's first year today by John Cavadini.

The Francis transformation

How the Pope has changed the church

By John C. Cavadini / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"Buona sera. Good evening.” With these simple words exactly one year ago, the newly elected Pope Francis greeted the crowd in St. Peter’s Square.

Although the whole world, through the media, had its eyes riveted on the balcony overlooking the square, Francis chose a greeting specifically for the gathered throngs. In his native Argentina, it was afternoon, and in Australia, it was morning, but in Rome it was evening, and so: “Good evening.”

Paradoxically, the whole world, watching and waiting, was charmed. We received his greeting as our own. Everyone felt the warmth of words that were not addressed to an abstract collective, but to real people who had stood in the rain all day.

The recognition of personal presence and appreciation for it, though necessarily tied to one time and one place, is a universal language that everyone understands, and it touched everyone’s heart.

This greeting nicely sums up Francis’ first year as Pope and the significance of his accomplishments. One of Francis’s oft-cited accomplishments is effective outreach to the media and use of mass communications. But to be more precise, Francis is less interested in “the media” than in the person in front of him who is asking questions.

This person, to Francis, is not an instrument of access to the world, but is irreducibly a person whose questions are always deeper than what is needed for a news report. But because Francis speaks not to a media outlet but to a person whose company he enjoys (as he once remarked), everyone else feels personally addressed, too.

Many of Francis’ accomplishments can be listed. They include an insistence on institutional reform in the church; his overhauling of the Vatican system of finance to enhance accountability; his establishment of a commission to improve the church’s pastoral care of victims of sexual abuse; his establishment of a commission of cardinals to oversee further reforms, and initiatives toward world peace. These include his plea for a day of fasting and prayer in the context of a threatened U.S. intervention in Syria. The dramatic response to his plea surely shifted the burden of proof to those who would escalate the conflict.

But Francis’ significance is misleading if it is catalogued so simply. For this Pope, the Gospel is first and always an encounter with a person, the crucified and risen Jesus. This means that the individual can never be subordinated to an abstraction or group but commands the love and mercy attendant on his or her dignity as a human being.

This is the soul of Francis’ accomplishments, enabling him, in one short year, to accomplish the one thing that is most difficult, almost impossible, and yet most needed, in our highly secular age, and that is to have established himself as a credible spiritual leader. And as such, his appeal extends both to Catholics and to persons far beyond the boundaries of the church.

Francis did this partly by reminding the church that it does not exist for its own preservation. “I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security,” he wrote in the Evangelii Gaudium released last year.

He did this partly — and again paradoxically — by deflecting attention from himself as Pope, as spiritual leader, embracing instead a “sound decentralization.”

Above all, he did this by insisting that the church turn itself back to its basic message, one that “would actually reach everyone without exception or exclusion,” emphasizing “the essentials, the most beautiful . . . and at the same time most necessary.”

Encountering the person of Christ focuses attention especially on the poor, those who are always on the edge of depersonalization and exclusion: “I want a church which is poor and for the poor,” he said, one “touching the suffering flesh of Christ.”

Contrary to many reports on his tenure, Francis did not disown any of the church’s moral teachings, even the more controverted ones — but, like Pope Benedict XVI, he reminded the church that a decontextualized list of “don’t”s inspires no one.

He told us to stop being sourpusses. “Why not turn to God?” he asked, convinced that an openness to the transcendent could even bridge the separation between the economy and the common good. And, insisting on the rights of the unborn, he also reminds us we must assuage the misery that often prompts people to resort to abortion.

Perhaps people today, even those hostile to the church, are always half hoping that such an ancient institution with a claim to spiritual wisdom could actually have some wisdom that could speak anew. Francis’ major achievement is that, beginning with a simple “Good evening,” he has showed, convincingly to many, that this is true.

Cavadini is a professor of theology and director of the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/francis-transformation-article-1.1719646#ixzz2vsDy58f9