The Church is a Field Hospital After a Battle – Go, Rebuild My House

Source: The Church is a Field Hospital After a Battle – Go, Rebuild My House

Guest contributor Robert W. McElroy is the Bishop of San Diego, Calif., and this column is drawn from his address “The Pastoral Revolution of Pope Francis: The Challenge for the Academy in Today’s Humbled Church,” given at Sacred Heart University.

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The very nature of the church involves at its heart pastoral action to heal the hearts of men and women who are suffering. Pope Francis outlined this ecclesiological assertion in his beautiful description of the church itself as a field hospital: “I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as 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. And you have to start from the ground up. This is the mission of the church: the church heals, it cures. . . The mission of the church is to heal wounds of the heart, to open doors, to free people, to say that God is good, God forgives all, God is the Father.”

From the pastoral vision of Francis flows a strategy of engagement and accompaniment with the world that at the same time seeks always its own need for healing and grace amidst its sinfulness.