USING CHURCH FOR PERSONAL AMBITION IS A PLAGUEi

Reported by: Carol Glatz April 3, 2017

CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE

ROME - Do not settle for a worry-free, comfortable life with an unhealthy attachment to
money and an ambitious heart yearning for honors, Pope Francis told seminarians studying in
Rome.

Im telling you this as a brother, father and friend. Please, shun ecclesial careerism. It is a
plague. Avoid it, he said April 1 during an audience at the Vatican with students, faculty,
staff and alumni of the Pontifical Spanish College of St. Joseph in Rome. The college was
celebrating the 125th anniversary of its founding.

Everything hinges on loving the Lord with all of ones heart, soul, mind, and strength, he
said, citing the Gospel of Mark (12:30).

That is what determines whether a person will be able to say yes to Jesus or turn ones back
on him like the rich young man did in the Gospels, he said.

You cannot settle for leading an orderly and comfortable life that lets you live without worry
unless you feel the need to cultivate a spirit of poverty rooted in the heart of Christ, the pope
said.

Priests must have an appropriate relationship with the world and earthly goods if they are
to gain authentic freedom as children of God, he said.

Do not forget this - the devil always comes in through the pocket, always.

Give thanks for what one possesses, he said, and generously and willingly renounce the
superfluous in order to be near the poor and weak.

While Pope Francis said he wasnt asking them to sell their shirt like Blessed Manuel
Domingo y Sol, the college founder, the pope said he was asking them to be witnesses to
Jesus through a lifestyle based on simplicity and austerity so as to be credible proponents
of a true social justice.

Priestly formation cannot depend solely on academic formation, which breeds all the
ideologies that infect the church with every type of clerical academicism.

Studies must intertwine academic, spiritual, community and apostolic formation all together,
and when one of these four legs is missing, he said, formation begins to limp and the priest
ends up paralyzed.

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https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/04/03/pope-seminarians-using-church-personal-ambition-plague/