Careerism is a leprosy

At 12:15pm today, in the Sala Clementina of the Vatican Apostolic Palace, the Holy Father, Pope Francis received in audience, the members of the Community of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, and took the opportunity to address them a few words of encouragement.

Address of the Holy Father, Pope Francis

to the Community of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Accademy

Dear brothers in the Episcopate,

Dear priests, sisters and friends,

I wish each of you the most cordial welcome!  I cordially greet your President, Monsignor Beniamino Stella, and thank him for the friendly words which he has addressed to me in your name, remembering the welcome visits that I have made to your home.  I also remember the cordial insistence with which Monsignor Stella convinced me, two years ago now to send to the Academy a priest of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires!  Monsignor Stella knows how to knock at the door!  A grateful thought is also reserved for his collaborators, the Sisters and the personel, who offer their generous service in your community.

Dear friends, you are preparing yourselves for a ministry of particular commitment, which will put you in direct service to the Successor of Peter, of his charism of unity and communion, and of his solicitude for the entire Church.  He who agrees to serve as a Pontifical Representative engages in a service which requires, like any type of priestly ministry, a great interior freedom, great interior freedom.  Live these years of your preparation with commitment, generosity and greatness of soul, so that this freedom can really take shape in you!

But what does it mean to possess interior freedom?

First of all, it means that you must be free from personal projects, be free from personal projects, from some of the concrete ways in which perhaps one day, you had thought of living your priesthood, from the possibility of planning the future; from the perspective of remaining for a long time in your place of pastoral action.  It means that you must be free, in some fashion, even from the culture and mentality from which you came, not in order that you should forget it, or to deny it, but to open you up in charity to the comprehension of various cultures and to the encounter with men who belong to worlds which are far away from yours.  Above all, it means that you must strive to be free from ambition or personal aims, which may also cause so much harm to the Church, taking care to always put in the first place of importance not your own realizations, or the recognition that you could receive within and outside of the ecclesial community, but the highest good which is that of the Gospel and the accomplishment of the mission which will be entrusted to you.  And this freedom from ambition or personal aims is important to me; it is important.  Careerism is a leprocy, a leprocy.  Please: no careerism.  For this reason, you must be open to integrating your entire vision of the Church, even the legitimate facets, every personal idea or assessment, with the wider horizon of the gaze of Peter and of his particular mission of service to the communion and the unity of the flock of Christ, to his pastoral care, which ebraces the entire world and which also, thanks to the work of the Pontifical Representatives, is made present above all in the places most often forgotten, where the necessity of the Church's presence is greater for the good of humanity.

In a word, the ministry for which you are being prepared, because it is a ministy, is not a profession; it is a ministry.  This ministry calls you to move outside of yourself, to develop a self detachment that can only be achieved through an intense spiritual journey and a serious unification of life around the ministry of the love of God and the inscrutable design of his call.  In the light of faith, we can live the freedom of our plans and our wishes, not as motives for frustration or emptiness, but as an openness to the superabundant gift of God, which makes our priesthood effective.  Living the ministry in service to the Successor of Peter and to the Church, to which you are being invited, can seem demanding, but it permits you, so to speak, to be at and to breathe from the heart of the Church, from her Catholicity.  This constitutes a special gift, for, as Pope Benedict XVI recalled of your community, where there is openness to the objectivity of Catholicity, there is also the principle of authentic personalization (Address to the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, June 10, 2011).

Take great care of the spiritual life, which is the source of inner freedom.  Without prayer, there is no interior freedom.  You can create precious treasure from the insturments of conformity to Christ especially in the priestly spirituality, cultivating the life of prayer and making of your daily work the gymnasium of your sanctification.  I would like to recall here the figure of Blessed John XXIII, of whom we celebrated only a few days ago, the fiftieth anniversary of his death: his service as a Pontifical Representative, was one of the areas, and not the least significant, in which his holiness took shape.  Re-reading his writings, he always impressed the care they put in guarding his own soul, in the midst of the most varied occupations in the Church and politics. Here arose his inner freedom, the source of the joy that he transmitted externally, and of the effectiveness of his pastoral and diplomatic ministry. He wrote in his Journal of a Soul, during the Spiritual Exercises of 1948, while he was Nuncio in Paris: The more I mature in years and experience, the more I recognize that the surest way for my personal sanctification and for the best success of my service to the Holy See, remains in my vigilant effort to reduce everything: principles, addresses, positions, business, to the maximum of simplicity and calm, always with attention to pruning my vineyard foliage of what is just useless ... and going right to what is truth, justice, charity, especially charity. Any other system which is involved in posturing and looking for personal affirmation, soon betrays itself and becomes cumbersome and ridiculous (Cinisello Balsamo, 2000, p. 497). He wanted to prune his vineyard, to kick away the foliage, to prune. And a few years later, he reached the end of his long service as a Papal Representative. Now Patriarch of Venice, he wrote: Now I am in full direct ministry to souls. In truth I have always believed that for a so-called ecclesiastic, diplomacy must always be imbued with pastoral spirit, otherwise it does not count for anything, and turns a holy mission to ridicule (ibid., p. 513-514). This is important. Listen closely: when in a Nunciature there is a Secretary or a Nuncio who does not seek the way of holiness and gets involved in many ways, in so many undertakings of spiritual worldliness, he becomes ridiculous and everyone laughs at him. Please do not make yourself ridiculous: either be saints or return to being a parish priest in the diocese, but do not be ridiculous in diplomatic life, where for a priest there are many dangers to the spiritual life.

I wish also to say a word to the Sisters – thank you! – who are engaged with religious spirit and exercise their daily service in your midst.  They are good Mothers who accompany you with prayer, with their simple and essential words, and above all with the example of their faithfulness, their dedication and their love.  Together with them I wish to thank the members of the lay staff who work in the House.  They are a hidden but important presence, which permits you to live with serenity and able to commit your time at the Academy to the task that is yours.

Dear priests, I wish to thank you for undertaking this service to the Holy See with the same spirit as Blessed John XXIII did.  I ask you to pray for me and I entrust you to the care of the Virgin Mary, and of Saint Antony, the Abbot, your patron.  May the assurance of my thoughts and my blessing, which I also extend to all your loved ones, accompany you.  Thank you.