A few years ago, **María Jesús** enrolled for the first time in what was then a postgraduate course at the Faculty of Theology of Vitoria Gasteiz. She had recently arrived from Latin America, and specifically from northern Chile where **she had been accompanying people living on the streets.** Previously, she had been part of the diocesan Missions team in Ecuador. Many of the enrolled students knew her and called her “Txus.” And that’s how she is still called today.
Your Letter to Pope Leo XIV allowed us to dialogue – as the reader will see – about **two matters** that seem to me **key in current theology and spirituality.** The first of them, regarding whether one can still speak – for evangelical consistency – of **”option” for the poor** or, rather, one should speak of “Christians,” considering that for a follower of Jesus, their identification with the poor is not “optional”: “whatever you did for one of the least of my brothers and sisters you did for me.”
And the second matter, regarding rethinking **what sense the Eucharist is the “source and summit” of Christian life**, if one has in due importance and centrality, such a forceful and clear identification.
**Jesus Martinez Gordo.**
**Dear Pope Leo XIV:**
I address you without yet knowing who you are, how you think and what plans you have for this our Church. I confess that having recovered the traditional vestments and returning to the Apostolic Palace has caused me a certain discomfort. I want you to know that Francis was a Pope with whom I connected very well. And it was because I loved his simplicity, his spontaneity, his sensitivity to the most unfortunate, his ease in recognizing mistakes and asking for forgiveness… in a word: his closeness and humanity!
There are many gods in this “wide world”
From a young age, I have been a person who has always kept God very present because I perceive and feel Him as the Father of ALL, full of love, close, welcoming. But, equally, I felt -and still perceive- Him as the Son who becomes human, thanks to an immense act of love, and, in a particular way, as the Spirit that animates and gives life.
I recognize that **Jesus of Nazareth has influenced, and continues to influence, my life greatly**. I welcome and live Him as a God who humbles Himself and becomes one of us; as a man who suffers and enjoys as you and I do. And, in particular, as a person who freely chooses to be close to his fellow human beings, to help, to forgive, to dignify, and who, overcoming fear, ¡exposes himself even to death to defend the dignity of the most disadvantaged!
I confess that there are many times when I stop to think about the freedom that God has given us in Jesus, and I am amazed at the extent of his love. And the truth is, I don’t like the word “sin,” (because of how poorly it has been used). For me, “sin” is a misuse of that received freedom, resulting in an act of inhumanity. That’s why, sometimes, I speak more of inhumane acts than of sin. I don’t know what you will think of this change of name, but it helps me to be a follower of Jesus and to detect, above all, his suffering presence in the midst of our inhumanities and so many idols that populate our wide world; a wider and more suffering world, especially when I dare to look at it from the fringes.
My relationship with the Church has been -and continues to be- intense
It is true that on many occasions I have felt that a part of the Church and I were taking different paths. But I have to confess that this has not worried me too much. And it hasn’t worried me greatly because I believe that a structure as immense as the Catholic Church, which encompasses so many cultures, so many realities, makes mistakes giving and, sometimes, “imposing the same menu for everyone”.
Don’t you think we should move towards a more inculturated model of Church where – with Jesus at the center – it would be possible to respect the particularities of each place and have as a common denominator the good of humanity and particularly of the last of our world? Don’t you think we should promote justice with all of them, especially distributive justice and that which seeks the recovery or reintegration of those who have committed offenses?
I also confess to you that I am clear, and I feel, that the personal relationship with God needs to be lived in community. But the truth is that sometimes I am put off by those groups or communities –by insisting so much on “their charisma” or “their truth”—that end up becoming closed groups in which, in the end, there seems to be little room for the God of Jesus of Nazareth. As also I am put off by all those religious manifestations to which only external things, commercial interests, and compliance seem to matter… I have difficulty recognizing in them the centrality that God must have through his fullness of humanity, because he has fortunately left us the unfinished Creation, and because he asks us for help to collaborate with Him in making, each day, a world a little more fraternal.
I would like -but I already know that this is a wish, surely naive- that, instead of spending so much energy on “winning converts to put them into our Church,” we were more sensitive and careful with the “anonymous Christians” that K. Rahner spoke of; that is, that we were more aware of those “Christians” who, for not sharing certain truths, but for loving others, are classified, at best, as “anonymous.” I believe that, beyond these classifications, they are not outside the project of the Kingdom of Jesus, but in the center of God’s heart.
This reminder leads me to not forget the passage in which, when the apostles wanted to forbid preaching to some “because they were not walking with them… because they were not of their group,” because they weren’t part of their circle, the very Jesus wouldn’t allow them to be silenced: “I am the door, and through me, if anyone wants to come, he will not be denied.” And he didn’t allow it because he understood the announcement and practice of the Kingdom in an inclusive way. Don’t you think we should be happy that other people love you, follow you, and even confess you in ways different from our own?
My God, “now it is our turn to help You.”
Dear Pope, there are many occasions and behaviors in which it seems to me that we are a Church that is little humble and, therefore, presumptuous and overly concerned with ourselves … with our dogmas, certainties, and rules.
If there’s a reason I favorably welcome your appointment, it’s because, **being an Augustinian, I suspect you will foster a Church presided over by the saying attributed to the Bishop of Hippo** and that you well know, is a magnificent summary of the Gospel: **”Love Jesus truly and passionately and believe what you want.”** In light of such a saying, I hope that all those in their lives who are subject to a profound experience of God’s love cannot settle for the mediocrity that, too often, presides over our communities.
How much I would like this pontificate to be presided over by fostering this mature and profound love of God that I have perceived in your Apostolic Exhortation “Dilexi te”: “in the face disfigured by the poor we see imprinted the suffering of the innocent and, therefore, the very suffering of Christ”!
And I would like because I suspect that only in the light of this experience of a Jesus who is close and sensitive to pain, **faith can have a healing power in a world like ours**, immersed in more than fifty wars or armed conflicts -even if they don’t appear on television screens-, battered by abuse, mistreatment, illegal occupations… And I suspect, equally, that it was that experience of mature and profound love that, faced with the question that Etty Hillesum asked about where God was in the transit camp of Auschwitz, which was Westerbork, led her to answer herself in these terms: “You can’t help us now, it’s our turn to help you.”
When I face this experience of encountering God and I confront it with the group of people who, last December, prevented the Red Cross from sheltering vulnerable people—people coming from a massive eviction in Badalona—in a church… I can’t help but remain perplexed and ask myself these questions: where is man here? Where is woman? What has humanity been reduced to? **Why do we remain silent when you speak to us and address us, you, in the immigrants (our brothers and sisters), whom we treat as if they were animals?**
“Lord, what would you do?”
But that’s not all. **How is it possible that two weeks ago, at the funeral of a young person, the priest presiding over it said that “illness and death are the fruit of sin”?** Sin of whom? Who is “God” to this priest? Is it the God of Jesus of Nazareth? The one who included and had a particular weakness for his “little brothers”? The one who identified with the poor? The one who ate and drank “with sinners” and looked at them “with affection”? The one who allowed himself to be “caressed by a prostitute”?
Who became poor and was born of a poor woman? **How I would like us not to tire of asking ourselves every day, as the Chilean Hurtado** (who built housing for people experiencing homelessness) **did:** **”Lord, in this situation, at this moment, facing these situations, what would you do?”**
If we were invited to ask ourselves this question or another similar one every day, I believe that our Church – at least, the one I know – would be a little more prophetic, would not be so “in its cloud,” and would look more at the example of indigenous communities and less at other things, which, frankly, seem irrelevant compared to the pain of so many people.
I hope that your pontificate is guided by what is stated in number 26 of your “Dilexi te”: “one cannot love God without extending one’s love to the poor! Love for one’s neighbor represents the tangible proof of the authenticity of love for God.” I love hearing and being reminded of this key point for every Christian and every community! Whoever loves and lives this way believes the fundamental. And if, moreover, they do so truly and passionately, they not only know God and are in God, but they are proclaiming that “love is the greatest of divine virtues.”
I know that there are people for whom all of this that I am now sharing with you is a waste of time, an illusion, a fantasy, and even possibly a stupidity. To these people, I want to say what Antonio Mijangos, a priest friend, retired in the Alavesa region of La Rioja, used to say when faced with questions of this style or similar: “if it ever turned out that all of this is a dream… it doesn’t matter. It will have been worth it! Simply because the faith in a God companion on my journey who has made me a participant in his project of universal love has made me happy. For that reason, I will always be grateful to him.”
With affection and hope
María Jesús Olarte
Religion Digital
English version translated with AI