“The Revolutionary Nature of Love and Tenderness”

These words in quotation  are found in nos.88 and 288 of Pope Francis’ first Papal Exhortation with the Latin title, Evangelii Gaudium or Joy of the Gospel.

What is Love and Tenderness to the Pope? Why is it revolutionary?

Those of us who are familar with the history of Philippine revolutions of 1896, 1986 and 2001 usually do not associate love and tenderness with revolution. Our so-called revolutionaries, with few exceptions, were individuals and groups who hardly displayed love and tenderness. The perspective of this new papal statement is not Spanish and American colonialism in our archipelago.. Even the so-called “peaceful revolutions” of EDSA I and EDSA II had an anti-dictatorship background hardly showing love and tenderness..

The perspective of this first pope from Latin America is different. It is the abject poverty of the marginaliized people in the fringes of society. Their misery is the result of pride and arrogance of the powers that be. Our Holy Father sees in the mystery of God becoming human  a new and radical way of liberating relationship which he calls Love and Tenderness. He says, “The Son of God, by becoming flesh, summoned us to the revolution of tenderness”(no. 88). But for us English speaking Filipinos, love expressed in tenderness connotes weakness, softness, blandness, being delicate, comfortable and self-absorbed. Surely, this is not what the Pope means. So, how should we understand this seeming contradiction?

I found the answer in a book in Spanish about the personality of Pope Francis.  Its title is, La Revolucion de la Sencillez. Influenced by Spanish culture like the people of Argentina homeland of Pope Francis, , we Filipinos know what “sencillo” and “sincillez” mean. With this word we refer to a person who is simple, humble, un-assuming andun-pretensious who can be firm and strong.

In number 288 of his exhortation the Pope explains it this way using the Blessed Virgin Mary as example. He says, “Whenever we look to Mary, we come to believe once again in the revolutionary nature of love and tenderness. In her we see that humility and tenderness are not virtues of the weak but of the strong who need not treat others poorly in order to feel important themselves”.

The revolutionary accent of such an attitude, which characterizes the “poor of Yahweh”, is found in the sentence following the above: “Contemplating Mary we realize that she who praised God for ‘bringing down the mighty from their thrones’ and ‘sending the rich away empty’ (Lk 1:52-53) is also the one who brings a homely warmth to our pursuit of justice…This interplay of justice and tenderness, of contemplation and concern for others, is what makes the ecclesial community look to Mary as a model of evangelization”.

To Pope Francis then Love and Tenderness is (as a unique form of conscious behavior) the motive why God took human flesh in the first place; this has to be shared inclusively as Church with every human being but with preference for the poor in the fringes of society in such a manner as to experience  “getting dirty … creating a mess”, “meeting accident” in the process; otherwise the Church “gets sick” and “gets old” for being “autoreferencial”, translated “comfort zone” in English. He calls this “inclusive relationship” with the poor as a way of the new evangelization carried out in dialogue and on pilgrimage where one discovers God’s presence in others.

I notice that the pope in his first papal exhortation addressed to the whole Church is speaking from his cultural, religious and pastoral background which is argentinian. I suspect that he wrote the original in Spanish. Hence the English translation needs to be understood in this context. This background is that of the poor and  characterized by
socio-economic-political tensions. These tensions are happening in many countries around the world. The Philippines is undergoing a similar situation where to many concerned Filipinos a revolution is needed now!

Can our revolutionary evangelizerz be inspired by the words and actions of Pope Francis who is calm, serene, contemplative but intelligently alert, sincerely simple and un-assuming, but strongly compassionate excluding nobody?

It seems to me that Our Holy Father has a deep mystical vision of reality
symbolized by the Christ, with whom he has personal experience, whose presence has an equivalent significance but differently expressed  in other religions and cultures.