A way with words: Pope Francis wove vivid metaphors

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — A few days before Pope Francis was elected in March 2013, he told his fellow cardinals, “I have the impression that Jesus is locked inside the church and that he is knocking because he wants to get out!”

With this short, simple phrase, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires gave a clear, powerful snapshot of what he felt was needed for the church today: missionary disciples who head to the peripheries with the joy of the Gospel.

He later said the church will get sick if it stays locked up safe inside, being a “hairdresser,” fluffing and curling its flock’s wooly fleece, instead of seeking, like Christ did, the sheep who are lost. His sentences often sounded like proverbs with a recap and wise reflection wrapped in just a few lines.

Teaching high school literature before and after becoming a priest, Pope Francis possessed an extensive background in the themes and devices in literature and cinema. As a native-Spanish speaker who grew up with Italian-speaking relatives in Argentina and had Jesuit training, his wide and eclectic knowledge supplied him with elements that he’d mix and match with a religious message creating such metaphors as “the babysitter church” to describe a parish that doesn’t give birth to active evangelizers but only worries about keeping parishioners out of trouble.

“Armchair Catholics,” meanwhile, don’t let the Holy Spirit lead their lives. They would rather stay put, safely reciting a “cold morality” without letting the Spirit push them out of the house to bring Jesus to others.

For the pope, who saw Christ as a “true physician of bodies and souls,” there was no shortage of medical metaphors.

He pined for a church that would be “a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds.”

The consequence of pride or vanity, he warned on another occasion, “is like an osteoporosis of the soul: The bones seem good from the outside, but on the inside they are all ruined.”

Another medical problem afflicting souls is “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” a condition that renders some people incapable of remembering God’s love and mercy for them and, therefore, unable to show mercy to others.

If people were to get a “spiritual electrocardiogram,” he once asked, would it be flatlined because the heart is hardened, unmoved and emotionless or would it be pulsating with the prompting and prods of the Holy Spirit?

And whether people recognize it or not, God is their true father, he has said. “First of all, he gave us his DNA, that is, he made us his children; he created us in his image, in his image and likeness, like him.”

The Ignatian spirituality that formed him came through many of his turns of phrase. Just as a Jesuit seeks to use all five senses to find and experience God, the pope did not hesitate to use language that involved sight, sound, taste, touch and smell.

And, so, he urged the world’s priests to be “shepherds living with the smell of sheep” by being with and among the people, seeing their challenges, listening to their dreams and being the mediator between God and his people to let God’s grace pass through.

Food and drink held numerous lessons. For example, Catholic elders need to share with the young their insight and wisdom, which become like “fine wine that tastes better with age.”

To convey the corrosive atmosphere a bitter, angry priest can bring to his community, the pope said such priests make one think, “This man drinks vinegar for breakfast. Then, for lunch, pickled vegetables. And, in the evening, a nice glass of lemon juice.”

Grumpy, gloomy Catholics with “pickled-pepper faces” are too focused on themselves rather than on the love, tenderness and forgiveness of Jesus who sparks and fuels true joy, he said.

Even country living held lessons. He once told parishioners to bother their priests like a calf would pester its mother for milk. Always knock “on their door, on their heart so that they give you the milk of doctrine, the milk of grace and the milk of guidance.”

Christians must not be boastful and shallow like a special sweet his Italian grandmother would make: from a very thin strip of pastry, the crunchy dessert bloats and swells in a pan of hot oil. They are called “bugie” or “little lies,” he said, because “they seem big, but they have nothing inside, there’s no truth, no substance.”

To explain the kind of “terrible anxiety” that results from a life of vanity built on lies and fantasy, the pope said, “it’s like those people who put on too much makeup and then they’re afraid of getting rained on and all the makeup running down their face.”

Pope Francis never shied away from the gory or gross, calling unbridled capitalism and money — when it becomes an idol — the “devil’s dung.”

He equated the media’s love for “dirt” and scandal with “coprophilia,” a fetish for feces, and he said the lives of the corrupt are “varnished putrefaction” because, like whitewashed tombs, they appear beautiful on the outside, but inside they are full of dead bones.

Meeting once with cardinals and the heads of Vatican offices for an annual Christmas greeting, the pope explained the reform of the Roman Curia was more than just a face-lift to rejuvenate or beautify an aging body, but a process of deep, personal conversion.

Sometimes, he said, reform “is like cleaning an Egyptian Sphinx with a toothbrush.”

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