Apostolic Delegate on U.S. Bishops

America has a great interview of Christophe Pierre, the Apostolic Delegate to the U.S. who was recently made a Cardinal. His duty here has been extended indefinitely.  Betty and I have come to admire him for this well thought out homilies when he presides on feasts at the National Shrine such as All Saints Day.  He was welcomed with full honors with four bishops including the Archbishop who is head of the military diocese and currently the president of the bishop's conference.  

Cardinal Pierre on why the U.S. bishops are struggling to connect with Pope Francis

 Cardinal Pierre said he was “shocked” to learn that many U.S. Catholic bishops did not know that synodality had developed in South America in the last few decades and are still struggling to understand what it is. “We cannot say there are bishops who are on the left and ones that are on the right. This is a false analysis,” he said. They are “good men,” he said, but “they are all struggling” to find ways to evangelize in this new moment in history and to cope with the economic fallout from the abuse scandal.

I began by asking the cardinal about his life and his 46 years’ service in the Holy See’s diplomatic missions worldwide. “My life is a bit complicated,” he said, referring to the fact that he spent 20 years in Africa and 20 in South America.

On March 22, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI appointed then-Archbishop Pierre as nuncio to Mexico. He arrived in Mexico as the milestone Fifth Conference of CELAM (the Episcopal Conference of Latin America and the Caribbean) in Aparecida, Brazil, ended. Archbishop Pierre was welcomed by Bishop Carlos Aguiar Retes, now cardinal-archbishop of Mexico City and one of the president-delegates of the Synod on Synodality.

“I still remember when I arrived at the airport, we talked about Aparecida because he had just arrived back from there the day before. I was interested because I had good knowledge of South America. I was there at the time of liberation theology, and many things had happened from the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, to my arrival in Mexico.”

The Aparecida conference, he said, was “a kind of synodal process of the South American bishops.”

“This is the only continent that has made such a synodal process,” Cardinal Pierre said. “The bishops developed a kind of dynamic of working together and looking for solutions together, to evangelize better, which is what the synod [on synodality] is all about. Nothing else: Better evangelization. And they accompanied the people in their suffering, in their difficulties, and in their challenges.”

At Aparecida, the bishops decided to write a document to address “the difficulty to transmit the faith from one generation to the next” in a new cultural context. Then-Cardinal Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, was elected president of the writing commission by a vote of 112 out of 130.

“When I arrived in Mexico in 2007, I read the document of Aparecida,” Cardinal Pierre recalled. “It was six years before the election of Pope Francis. I read it, and I said, ‘My God, this is new! The bishops finally have developed a pastoral plan which is the result of their synodal approach.’”

“The fruit of Aparecida is a new pastoral approach,” he said. “I saw it working in Mexico. It changes the church.”

When he arrived in the United States, nine years later, in 2016, Cardinal Pierre said, “I was astounded that many of the bishops didn’t know what had happened in Aparecida. They did not know that ‘Evangelii Gaudium,’ the first document of Pope Francis, was rooted in Aparecida.”

“They had not seen what had happened in their own continent, in South America,” he remarked. “This is very serious, because what has happened was not banal. It was the beginning of what we live today. They didn’t know that the pope was one of the bishops at Aparecida, or that the whole South American church had made a tremendous effort of synodality.”

At Aparecida, the cardinal said, “the bishops said the church and society have changed, and the transmission of the faith is not done through the culture as in the past, so we have to provide new opportunities and ways for people to have a personal encounter with Christ through a church that is fitting to the new society, a new way of being Catholic. This demands a readjustment of the pastoral approach, which is very difficult to do because people are, we all are, set in our views, in our ways of preaching and organizing.”

“This is especially true in the United States, where we have a very organized church, which has worked beautifully for many years,” Cardinal Pierre said. “Over 200 years, we have built fantastic church schools, hospitals, parishes, and churches. But almost nobody comes [to church] anymore… so Pope Francis said, ‘Go out of the church.’ But we still remain in the church. Why?”

“Pope Francis said, ‘I want a missionary church. I want a church of the poor that goes out to the poor.’” But, the cardinal recalled, when he arrived in the United States as nuncio in 2016 he was “shocked” to hear some in the church laugh at that and dismiss it as “Bergoglio’s idea.” He insisted: “The reality is that behind the vision of the pope there is Aparecida. Bergoglio is not the inventor of that approach. The Holy Spirit inspired this synodal approach at Aparecida.”

“Six years later, Bergoglio was elected pope by the grace of the Holy Spirit,” he said. “That’s my faith. And the new pope followed in the footsteps of Aparecida.”