Pastors cannot negotiate with the ‘world,’ says Argentinean cardinal

Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 13, 2009 / 14:04 pm

The Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, encouraged members of the Bishops’ Conference this week to serve the people as pastors, but to avoid falling into the temptation of the “prudence” of the world, “a prudence born of the surrender to riches, vanity and pride.”

 

During his homily at the opening Mass of the Argentinean Bishops’ Plenary Assembly, Cardinal Bergoglio called on the bishops to accept and fully receive the Holy Spirit in their hearts, in order to “allow ourselves to be introduced by Him into the Mystery, and to be sent by Him as witnesses, so that we may not be a Gnostic or a self-referential Church.”

 

He went on to note that the presence of the Holy Spirit “in our hearts dissipates the darkness of lies and the clouds of these pseudo-truths, these half-truths,” which are expressions of worldliness, where the Holy Spirit cannot enter.

 

“If this spiritual worldliness were to invade the Church and work to corrupt it, attacking her in her very beginnings, it would be infinitely more disastrous than any mere moral worldliness.

 

“Spiritual worldliness is nothing other than an anthropocentric attitude, a subtle humanism that is enemy of the living God—and, in secret, no less an enemy of man—which can take root in us through a thousand ways.”

 

“When a priest negotiates with this attitude, he ceases to be a pastor of the people and becomes a cleric of the state, an official,” the cardinal explained.

 

The Holy Spirit rescues us from this “spirit of the world,” he concluded.