Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down
As PopeWatch has often noted, Pope Francis comes closest to revealing what he really thinks when giving off the cuff remarks. This most definitely was the case in the plane interview given while the Pope was flying back from Romania:
Fernandez (COPE): Holy Father, yesterday in the meeting with young people and families you insisted again on the importance of the relationship between grandparents and young people so that young people have roots to move forward and so that grandparents can dream. Holy Father, you do not have a family nearby, but you have said that Benedict XVI is like having a grandfather at home. Do you continue to see him as a grandfather?
Pope Francis: More. Every time I go to visit him I feel like that, I take his hand and get him to talk. He speaks little, slowly, but with the same depth as always, because Benedict’s problem is his knees, not his head. He has a great lucidity, as always. When I hear him speak, I become strong. I hear this history of the Church, which is not something like a museum, tradition. No, tradition is like a root which gives us the juice to grow and so you would become like roots, no! You flower, you grow, you give fruit, and you are the seeds that are the roots of the other. The tradition of the Church is always in motion.
In an interview made by Andrea Monda in L’Osservatore Romano a few days ago (do you read L’Osservatore Romano?) there was a situation of the musician Gustav Mahler that I liked so much. Speaking of tradition, he said that tradition is the guarantee of the future and not the keeper of ashes. It is not a museum. Tradition does not preserve ashes; the nostalgia of fundamentalists [is] to return to the ashes. No, tradition is the roots that guarantee the tree grows, flowers and gives fruit. I repeat with that piece by the Argentine poet I like so much: “All that the tree has in bloom comes from that which it has underground.”
Go here to read the rest. So for the Pope the past of the Church is so much ashes and the purpose of tradition is to guarantee the future. Well, no one can say that the Pope has not acted in accord with these beliefs.
