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In his meeting with his brother Jesuits in Belgium, Pope Francis call secularization a “complex phenomenon” and noted sometimes the Church must “confront forms of paganism.” Speaking to 150 Jesuits in Brussels on Sep. 28, the pontiff answered a question from a member living in Amsterdam, one of the most secularized cities in the world. In his reply, Francis noted he didn’t mean a paganism like the one in the ancient world. “We do not need a statue of a pagan god to talk about paganism: The very environment, the air we breathe is a gaseous pagan god! And we must preach to this culture in terms of witness, service and faith. And from within we must do it with prayer,” he said in his remarks, which were published in La Civiltà Cattolica on Tuesday. “There is no need to think of very sophisticated things. Think of St. Paul in Athens. It went badly for him because he went down a path that was not his own at that time. I look at it this way,” the pope continued. “We need to be open, to dialogue, and in dialogue to help with simplicity. What makes the dialogue fruitful is service. Unfortunately, I often find in the Church a strong clericalism, which prevents this fruitful dialogue. And, above all, where there is clericalism there is no service. For goodness sake, never confuse evangelization with proselytizing,” he said. Francis said Jesuit spirituality and theology gives space to the heart. “But often, unfortunately, we do not give the right space to the heart. This deficiency, in my opinion, is one of the things that then produces forms of abuse,” he said.
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