Summary: <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> “I see clearly that the thing the church needs<br> most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the<br> faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital<br> after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high<br> cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his<br> wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the<br> wounds … and you have to start from the ground up.” <br> <br> <br> <br> – Pope Francis, America: The National<br> Catholic Review, September 2013 <a href="http://americamagazine.org/pope-interview">http://americamagazine.org/pope-interview</a><br> <br> <br> In 2013, Pope Francis famously likened the<br> church to a field hospital. Renowned theologian, William Cavanaugh, takes hold<br> of this metaphor and explores the meaning of it in his latest book, ‘Field<br> Hospital: The Church's Engagement with a Wounded World’.<br> <br> <br> “I think in some senses, what Pope Francis<br> is trying to do is to recapture the sense that you find in the earliest church<br> where things are very decentralized,” Cavanaugh explains. “What you had was not<br> very tightly institutionalized, but was more based on small communities of<br> people taking care of each other’s needs.”<br> <br> <br> “It’s a response to the kind of one-on-one,<br> flesh-to-flesh encounter with another person who suffers.”<br> <br> <br> In this episode of Life & Faith, we<br> talk about how the church can operate as a ‘field hospital’, and why it is<br> important for the church to do so. <br> <br> <br> <br> ---<br> <br> <br> SUBSCRIBE to our podcast: <a href="http://bit.ly/lifeandfaithpodcast">http://bit.ly/lifeandfaithpodcast</a><br> <br> <br> <br> JOIN US at this year’s Richard Johnson<br> Lecture with William Cavanaugh: <a href="http://www.richardjohnson.com.au">http://www.richardjohnson.com.au</a><br> <br> <br> <br>
