22/07/2013
Pope Francis did not choose the destination of his first international trip. The same happened to his predecessor in 2005. The two have seen a World Youth Day already in their agendas, 4 months after their choice in both cases, and in a place close to their places of origin, in Cologne and Rio de Janeiro.
The first visit of the first Latin American Pope to Latin America has aroused extraordinary excitement. But the enthusiasm would have been the same in Europe or Asia. Francis is a prophet in his land, and would be so anywhere in the world. He is listened to carefully, while Benedict XVI was only known to much of the public by the prejudices spread by certain media.
The paradox is that Pope Ratzinger has decisively contributed to the dismantling of stereotypes and reductionisms about Christianity. He presented Christianity with its original lustre, highlighting the essential, knowing that you cannot take faith for granted anymore. "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction", he wrote in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est.
Christianity is not a set of dogmas and the Church is not a bastion waging a heroic struggle against progress that is nevertheless doomed to fail. The Gospel leads all humanity to fullness, Benedict XVI explained to the young people in Cologne: "Christ takes from you nothing that is beautiful and great, but brings everything to perfection for the glory of God, the happiness of men and women, and the salvation of the world."
But only a poor Church can be credible, a Church that is "liberated from material and political burdens and privileges"; only a Church that is renewed and purified in faith will be able to let Christ shine through us and communicate "the experience of God's goodness", he warned in Freiburg at the end of his third visit to Germany.
Somehow, the now emeritus Pope was leaving his successor the layout of his program. Now the time had come for someone capable of embodying that message and of breaking down the wall of prejudice installed in much of the world against Christianity. The Cardinals found that person in Francis. With him a new period has begun, with a change of geographical axis, from the old Europe to a Latin America full of vitality.
"We have come to worship him", to meet Jesus Christ, was the theme chosen by Pope John Paul II for the World Youth Day in Cologne. Now, the church has entered a new era, a more missionary one. The Pope never tires of talking about the need to "go out to the peripheries" to meet all men. "Go and make disciples of all nations" is, by the way, the theme left by Benedict XVI for Rio 2013.