ROME — Pope Francis said Tuesday that the Catholic Church will always be “in crisis” because crisis is a sign of life.
“The specific vocation of the Church is evangelization, which isn’t proselytism, no. Its vocation is evangelization; even more, the Church’s identity is evangelization,” the pope said during a video message announcing his prayer intention for the month of August, “Church on the Way.”
“Let us remember that the Church always has difficulties, is always in crisis, because she’s alive,” Francis said. “Living things go through crises. Only the dead don’t have crises.”
Each month, the pope offers a specific prayer intention and invites members of the Church throughout the world to join him in praying for that intention.
“We can only renew the Church by discerning God’s will in our daily life and embarking on a transformation guided by the Holy Spirit,” the pope said in Tuesday’s video, speaking in his native Spanish.
“Our own reform as persons is that transformation,” he continued. “Allowing the Holy Spirit, the gift of God in our hearts, remind us what Jesus taught and help us put it into practice.”
In his message the pontiff returned to a leitmotiv of his pontificate: that Catholics must overcome “rigidity” and inflexibility, which he associates with the Pharisees and doctors of the law of Jesus’s time.
“Let us begin reforming the Church with a reform of ourselves, without prefabricated ideas, without ideological prejudices, without rigidity, but rather by moving forward based on spiritual experience — an experience of prayer, an experience of charity, an experience of service,” he said.
Francis also insisted, as he has on numerous occasions, that true evangelization does not mean proselytism, understood as an effort to convince another person to convert to the faith.
“I dream of an even more missionary option: one that goes out to meet others without proselytism and that transforms all its structures for the evangelization of today’s world,” he said.
“Let us pray for the Church, that she may receive from the Holy Spirit the grace and strength to reform herself in the light of the Gospel,” he concluded.
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