121. Spring Cleaning – Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh

Now as an elder myself and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory to be revealed, I exhort the elders among you to tend the flock of God that is in your charge, exercising the oversight, not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it not for sordid gain but eagerly. [1 Peter 5:1-2, NRSV]

At the threshold of every new lunar year, people of Chinese descent the world over engage in serious spring cleaning as they prepare to welcome the new and bid farewell to the old. This annual exercise to get rid of accumulated dirt is tiring but necessary. We do it every year with a sense of mission. It cannot wait; we have to be ready to welcome in the new, the clean, the fresh.

This vigorous cleaning is done not only to the outside of the house, but to the inside as well. While a new coat of paint might easily do the trick for the exterior, the “inside” job is so much more energy-sapping and more complicated on account of all that stuff and clutter. This seems so true for us spiritually as well. The grease, grime and dirt we need to clean is not so much outside of us as it is inside of us. It is not the sin and faults of others that are the problem. It is the evil and hardness in our own hearts that easily weigh us down. Perhaps for this year’s spiritual spring-cleaning, we should not be worrying so much about the dirt and filth of others as we should be worrying about what are clouding up the windows of our own souls. We should perhaps be concerned first about the filth that is on the inside, about how much worse it really is, and see how much tougher it is to clean.

This year, as spring approaches, we again see Pope Francis clearly on a mission to re-new the vision and mission of the Church, to usher in a new springtime for Christian discipline and Christian witness. He shows a sense of urgency in radically reshaping the Catholic Church, beginning with the bishops and the priests. He starts cleaning from the inside, beginning at the top. This, of course, is doing it right, and many cardinals agree with him. They know too well that what happens in the upper ranks of the church, often filters down.We learn, from Germany, that Cardinal Reinhard Marx agreed with the Pope that change must begin from the top. “I was very often in seminars or courses for heads of companies, and that was always clear,” he said, “the stairs are cleaned from above, not from below — from the top down, not the bottom up.” From China, as her ancient wisdom has it: when the upper beam is tilted, the lower beam is skewed. Everyone knows that for ages the Roman Curia at the Vatican has needed to be seriously shaken up, but none has had the will and stamina to carry any serious reform through to its end. As 2014 drew to a close and 2015 kicked off a fresh new year, Pope Francis did two things that drew attention to his effort at reform.

First, he took a serious departure from tradition by telling Vatican high-level officials gathered for the Christmas cordial greetings session, not some nice and genteel words for the festive season, but a list of 15 diseases that have taken up permanent residency in the Curia administration. Then, on 5 January, Pope Francis, dissatisfied with the slow pace of change in Rome, announced the appointment of 20 new cardinals who reflect his desire for “pastors on the front line of difficult situations,” who can bring a new perspective from the often overlooked outposts of global Christianity. Again reflecting that he is not chained to tradition, his choices include Tonga, Myanmar and Cape Verde on the outer reaches or regions wracked by violence like Morelia in Mexico. In Italy, major dioceses such as Venice and Turin that were expected to each get a red hat were ignored, as was United States for the second time in a row. Two Italian regions that did receive a surprised red hat each are Ancona , a coastal town on Italy’s Adriatic Coast, and Agrigento, a small Sicilian town which has accepted waves of immigrants who arrive in Italy after making a perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea. On the latter, the Italian Interior Minister said the appointment was a sign of the Pope’s focus on charity and hospitality. On his part, the Vatican chief spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi, said the choices showed the Pope’s most important criteria was “universality,” and indicated he was not “chained to tradition” as he moves the balance of power at the highest levels of the church closer to the developing world.

It is, however, the blistering critique of a catalogue of “15 diseases” that plague the highest level of church administration, listed and explained, one by one in detail, that continues to capture imagination at coffee-corner discussions. In this year’s Christmas speech to the Roman Curia, Pope Francis identifies and explains 15 shades of sin, inviting everyone to do serious examination of conscience in preparation for confession before Christmas. The same God who “is born in poverty in a cave in Bethlehem to teach us the power of humility”, was welcomed not by the “chosen” people but by the “poor and simple”, the Holy Father stressed.

The list, readily accessible on the internet, is very telling. We enumerate here only its gist:

1. Feeling immortal and indispensable – A disease of those who “turn into masters and feel superior to everyone rather than in the service of all people. It often comes from the pathology of power, the ‘Messiah complex’ and narcissism”.
2. Excessive activity – A disease that results from neglecting necessary rest, and creating anxiety and stress.
3. Mental and spiritual petrification – A disease of those who “lose their internal peace, their vivacity and audacity, to hide under papers and become ‘procedural machines’ instead of men of God”, unable to “weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice!”
4. Overplanning – A disease that insists on good planning but stifles the freedom of the Holy Spirit, and conveniently falls back on static and unchanged positions.
5. Bad coordination – A disease of members who lose a crucial sense of community, have no team spirit, and fail to cooperate and function harmoniously.
6. Spiritual Alzheimer – A disease of progressive decline of spiritual faculties, holding on to personal “passions, whims and obsessions”, forgetting one’s encounter with the Lord, thus causing immense problems to others who have to answer to their favourite imagination.
7. Rivalry and vainglory – A disease that treasures appearances, colour of vestments, honours and privileges as the first objectives of life, living in falsehood – false “mysticism” and false “quietism”‘.
8. Existential schizophrenia – A disease of living a double life ruled by hypocrisy, mediocrity and creeping spiritual emptiness despite academic degrees, preferring bureaucracy over pastoral services, losing touch with reality and real people, living a hidden and often dissolute life.
9. Terrorism of gossip – A disease that sows discord, gives in to cold-blooded murders of the reputation of colleagues, behaves cowardly like terrorists, and stabs from behind.
10. Deifying the leaders – A disease of of careerists and opportunists who court superiors, live their vocation in terms of gain and not of what they must give, and being complicit with collaborators to gain loyalty and psychological dependence.
11. Indifference to others – A disease that thinks only of oneself and loses the truthfulness and warmth of human relationships, failing to share knowledge and concern in service and for the encouragement of others, even rejoicing in their fall.
12. Funeral face – A disease that is scowling and unfriendly, showing a strict face to those inferior in position, displaying rigidity, harshness and arrogance, hiding an underlying fear and insecurity, and failing miserably to be polite, serene, enthusiastic and joyful persons as Christ’s followers should be.
13. Hoarding money – A disease of those who need to fill the existential void in their hearts by hoarding material possessions.
14. Closed circles – A disease that finds greater importance in belonging to the same clique than to the Body or even to Christ himself, enslaving its members like a cancer.
15. Worldly profit and exhibitionism – A disease where leaders turn service into power, and power into a commodity to gain worldly profits and more power, with no qualms in discrediting others in the media in order to show off their superiority to others, often under pretexts of transparency and justice.

In explaining that while these “diseases” and “temptations” are Curia-specific, they go beyond the Curia and implicate every Christian and every curia, community, congregation, parish, and ecclesiastic movement, the Pope alerts us to their extensive applicability. From family life to business organization, from the universal Church to every gathering in the local church, we can benefit from a serious contemplation of these diseases amongst us. In particular, every diocese, every parish and every lay organization needs to take a hard look at themselves in relation to the “model” proposed by Pope Francis, if they honestly desire to do any spring cleaning of accumulated dirt at all. An administrator who does not draw daily from a “vital, personal, authentic and solid relationship with Christ” will be nothing but a mere bureaucrat.

You are most welcome to respond to this post. Email your comments to jeffangiegoh@gmail.com. You can also be dialogue partners in this Ephphatha Coffee-Corner Ministry by sending us questions for discussion.

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