For the Love of the Word - Commonweal

I wonder, however, if another reason might be that we’ve tacitly reduced Francis to a political figure whose role is limited to moral and organizational leadership. As important as such leadership is, the pope has a prior claim to an even more important role: to help us grow in our relationship with God. Engagement with the scriptures is essential to this project. Toward this end, I think that the Sunday of the Word of God is actually more important than it looks. 

North American Catholics who lived through the Council know that an explosion of interest in the scriptures followed it, but that passion gradually faded. In Latin America, however, Scripture reading became an integral part of the daily life of the Christian base communities and achieved lasting significance as a lay phenomenon. Indeed, it was at the request of two missionary bishops from Argentina, Jorge Kemerer and Alberto Devoto, that the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy included a warm recommendation of “Bible services” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 35.4).

Kemerer was the first bishop of Posadas, a remote community first evangelized by Jesuits in the seventeenth century (the so-called Reductions of the Guarani in the Jesuit Province of Paraguay were made famous to a U.S. audience through the 1986 film The Mission). Priests were so few that Kemerer wrote a guidebook for Celebrations of the Word in the absence of a priest soon after he arrived in 1957. Devoto, the bishop of Goya, was also a groundbreaking figure who chose to live in poverty, close to his people. A major influence in the Third World Priests movement, and an inspirer of liberation theology, his desire to share God’s Word was part of a living faith. According to writer Marguerite Feitlowitz, to this day peasants keep pictures of him on altars at home, and refuse to believe he’s dead. “No, he’s a saint,” they say. 

Now here comes another Argentinian, sure that the Word will help us. Francis’s proposal is a gesture with roots in Vatican II, popular movements, and the experience of how the Word can kindle light and joy among the poorest of Christ’s poor. He could have produced a teaching statement, but instead he decided to inaugurate a liturgical observance—a wise choice, perhaps, because even if we missed it this time around, there’s always next year.

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