While delivering a homily to lay employees of the Vatican bank yesterday morning, Pope Francis warned that if we are not faithful to our baptismal call, we risk turning the Church into a “babysitter” for sleeping children.
Vatican Radio is reporting that the Pope was reflecting on the day’s readings about the evangelization efforts of the early Christians who had nothing but “the power of baptism” that “gave them [their] apostolic courage, the strength of the Spirit.”
“I think of us, the baptized: do we really have this strength – and I wonder – do we really believe in this? Is Baptism enough? Is it sufficient for evangelization? Or do we rather ‘hope’ that the priest should speak, that the bishop might speak …”
He went on to ask, ” . . . (A)nd what of us? Then, the grace of baptism is somewhat closed, and we are locked in our thoughts, in our concerns. Or sometimes think: ‘No, we are Christians, I was baptized, I made Confirmation, First Communion … I have my identity card alright. And now, go to sleep quietly, you are a Christian. But where is this power of the Spirit that carries us forward?”
We must be faithful to the Spirit, to proclaim Jesus with our lives, our words, our witness, he said.
“When we do this, the Church becomes a mother church that produces children [and more] children, because we, the children of the Church, we carry that. But when we do not, the Church is not the mother, but the babysitter, that takes care of the baby – to put the baby to sleep. It is a Church dormant. Let us reflect on our Baptism, on the responsibility of our Baptism.”
According to veteran Catholic journalist John Thavis, the need to be faithful to our baptismal call was a favorite theme of the pope while serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Thavis resurrected a 2011 interview with AICA news agency when then-Cardinal Bergoglio was asked about the Catholic faithful in Argentina.
“We priests tend to clericalize the laity,” he said. “We do not realize it, but it is as if we infect them with our own disease. And the laity — not all, but many — ask us on their knees to clericalize them, because it is more comfortable to be an altar server than the protagonist of a lay path.”
He added: “We cannot fall into that trap —it is a sinful complicity.”
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