Question 9.143

9.143 Francis criticizes the sterility of egotism. What in particular does he mean by his denunciation of selfish acedia?

Acedia is a sickness of the soul that is expressed in boredom, distaste for prayer, slackening or abandoning one’s penitential practices, neglecting the heart, and indifference toward the sacraments. These symptoms are often a passing trial, but acedia can also lead to genuine spiritual torpor.

In moral theology, acedia is one of the seven capital sins.

Francis has all the more reason to be alarmed by a problem that is so serious that it is reaching worrisome levels in the West. On this point, his speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, in November 2014, was particularly clear.

What other explanation is there for the collapse of the Church’s missionary efforts, if not the self-centeredness and complacency of our hearts? Christians have the vocation to become the salt and light of the world. Nowhere in the Gospel is it written that we were supposed to keep the Word of God for our own petty personal convenience. Selfish flight and a lack of generosity often conceal a lack of maturity and a very impoverished vision of human nature.

It is unthinkable that a Christian would not agree to become involved in a work of transmitting the faith. Francis often vehemently lectures the priests and religious who have become functionaries of the faith, in a rigid form of withdrawing from their identity as priests. No doubt, the priest who builds for himself a comfortable, secure world runs the risk of no longer responding even to the call of his priesthood. The pope asks everyone to set out into the deep so as to embark on the missionary adventure, which means taking risks for the sake of others and being bold for God. The missionary wake-up call will blow open the offices in which the lukewarm or bureaucratic priest may shut himself. A priest who is stingy with the time he spends on his flock is going through a real spiritual storm.

In the same way, personally, I bitterly denounce those priests who, ultimately, are responding only to a desire for human success, for power and personal ambition, for recognition in politics and the media. The cleric is here on this earth to speak about God, to serve God, and nothing else. Fear, feverish activity, and vanity remain the fierce enemies of men who have given their lives to God.

Similarly, the pope is not afraid to say that the greatest threat is ” ‘the gray pragmatism of the daily life of the Church, in which all appears to proceed normally, while in reality faith is wearing down and degenerating into smallmindedness.’ A tomb psychology thus develops and slowly transforms Christians into mummies in a museum. Disillusioned with reality, with the Church, and with themselves, they experience a constant temptation to cling to a faint melancholy, lacking in hope, which seizes the heart like ‘the most precious of the devil’s potions’. Called to radiate light and communicate life, in the end they are caught up in things that generate only darkness and inner weariness, and slowly consume all zeal for the apostolate. For all this, I repeat: Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of the joy of evangelization!” (EG 83).