"Spiritual Worldliness--the Greatest Danger for the Church"

The corpus of Pope Francis' magisterial terminology of the urgent need to return to evangelical simplicity is influenced by Henri de Lubac as noted in an article of Carl E. Olson on the Catholic World Report Blog.  The original article is actually from Sandro Magister.

The influence of de Lubac, one of the finest Jesuit theologians of the past century, on Bergoglio is... obvious in this 2007 interview, which ends with this remark:

[Q:] For you, then, what is the worst thing that can happen in the Church?

BERGOGLIO: It is what De Lubac calls «spiritual worldliness». It is the greatest danger for the Church, for us, who are in the Church. «It is worse», says De Lubac, «more disastrous than the infamous leprosy that disfigured the dearly beloved Bride at the time of the libertine popes». Spiritual worldliness is putting oneself at the center. It is what Jesus saw going on among the Pharisees: «… You who glorify yourselves. Who give glory to yourselves, the ones to the others».

De Lubac wrote several significant works of ecclesiology, including The Splendor of the Church(Ignatius Press, 1986, 1989; French original in 1953) and The Motherhood of the Church(Ignatius Press, 1982; French original in 1971). The quote mentioned by Bergoglio comes at the very end of The Splendor of the Church, in the chapter titled, "The Church and Our Lady":

The-Church-as-Mother is never at the end of her labor to deliver us to the life of the Spirit, and the greatest danger we are to the Church, the most subversive temptation, the one that is ever and insiduously reborn when all the rest are overcome, and even strengthened by those victories, is what Abbot Vonier called the temptation to "worldliness of the mind ... the practical relinquishing of other-worldliness, so  that moral and even spiritual standards should be based, not on the glory of the Lord, but on what is the profit of man; an entirely anthropocentric outlook would be exactly what we mean by worldliness.  Even if men were filled with every spiritual perfection, but if such perfections were not referred to God (suppose this hypothesis to be possible) it would be unredeemed worldliness."

If this worldliness of the spirit were to invade the Church and set to work to corrupt her by attacking her very principle, it would be something infinitely more disastrous than any worldliness of the purely moral order...

Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ, founder and editor of Ignatius Press, says:

In the early days of Ignatius Press, one of the most important books we published was the English translation of Fr. Henri de Lubac’s classic Meditations sur l’Eglise (The Splendor of the Church). Fr. de Lubac was my mentor when I studied theology in Lyons, France from 1969-1972 and it was he who introduced me into the great Tradition of the Church, especially the Church Fathers. I came to regard him as many others already did, as a modern Father of the Church. The translation of his works into English was one of the principal motives for founding Ignatius Press in 1978.

Fr. de Lubac was one of the only two then-living theologians cited by Pope John Paul II in his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis (the other was Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar). Pope Benedict XVI in his short autobiography Milestones writes: “…meeting Balthasar was for me the beginning of a lifelong friendship I can only be thankful for. Never again have I found anyone with such a comprehensive theological and humanistic education as Balthsar and de Lubac” (p. 143). And now we find that de Lubac was cited by Cardinal Bergoglio in one of the final pre-conclave congregations of cardinals.

My gratitude for all that Fr. de Lubac had done for the Church and for me personally was expressed in a short dedication I wrote to the Ignatius Press edition of The Splendor of the Church:

"This re-edition is
dedicated to Cardinal de Lubac
in the year of his ninetieth birthday.

"My personal debt of gratitude to this
extraordinary scholar, loyal churchman,
gracious and patient teacher, and fellow Jesuit
is but a small part of what is owed him
by the countless numbers of men and women of every land
whose faith has been so profoundly enriched
by his life’s work.

"Cardinal de Lubac is above all else
a man of the Church, homo ecclesiasticus,
such as he himself portrays in these pages.
He has received all from the Church.
He has returned all to the Church.

"This book which, characteristically, he so humbly describes
in its introduction, is a testament which will endure
to his lifelong love of his mother and ours
the Immaculate Bride of the Lamb,
Holy Church."

For more about de Lubac (1896-1991), who was named a cardinal by Bl. John Paul II in 1983, visit his author's page at IgnatiusInsight.com.