Peter Costello
A Church of the Poor: Pope Francis and the Transformation of Orthodoxy
by Clemens Sedmak (Orbis Books / Alban Books, £23.99)
This important book is written with the aim, it seems to this reviewer, of enlarging our sense of what ‘orthodoxy’ ought to mean in the era of Pope Francis.
Prof. Sedmak is a distinguished Austrian theologian who currently holds a chair at King’s College, London. His main interests are in poverty, its origins, and its spiritual consequences and in social ethics. His multitudinous activities should not, he says, obscure the fact that “life is about one thing: to grow in the arts of love”, for which the family unit is the best training ground.
This background informs what Dr Sedmak has to say in this book. He takes his departure from Pope Francis’s call for “a Church that is Poor”. This “vision of an empty church” is challenging enough for many; but beyond that, in the light of the Pope’s encyclicals, the author begins his exploration.
The first part deals with “the joy of the Gospel” as a call to respond to love. But ancillary to that is “the Gospel of joy” being in many ways the key word of both the Pope’s vision, and the theme of this book.
But a call for “a Church that is Poor” also asks us to consider what it means to be poor. Poverty is all too often thought of a third world problem; but, as we all realise, this is not the case.
There is poverty, or rather poverties of various natures across all the developed societies, an unfilled spirituality is as crippling as lack of food.
Having devoted the third part of the book to poverty as “the wound of knowledge” Sedmak moves on the question of what “a Church of the Poor” can be. The demand, as so many people realise and put away from themselves, is the idea of the call for serious change in them. These chapters are enlightening but the final one, entitled ‘Orthodoxy in a New Key’ is the truly enlarging.
This is not that legalistic orthodoxy so often invoked by some in a far from loving manner, but an orthodoxy truly based on community and on Christian love and cohesion.
He leaves the reader aware of just what Orthodoxy has meant, and what it should really mean as Catholics try to move forward in step with the Pope Francis.
This book, inevitably, is aimed at theologians (especially at what are called here “desk-bound theologians”) and students of theology.
But though the language of the professional theologian bothers many, the ordinary reader will find it worth the struggle to understand, for here they will find life changing notions, based on love and joy.
