Go with the Flow: Francis Quotes Martin Luther

Francis invoked a “better world” in an article he published on the oligarch Corriere.it (November 22).

The text is part of a book he will publish next week. Francis mentions the “transforming force” of Christianity which is only a “collateral effect” of the “spiritual intensity” of the Christians.

The origin of this force is “the primate of grace,” Francis explains, which doesn’t lead to passivity but increases energy and sensitivity to injustice.

Although his Fratelli tutti is the longest encyclical ever written, Francis warns of moralism and of Christian words which “are losing their meaning.”

Then, he uses a long quote of Martin Luther to moralise about not helping a poor is also stealing, and again Luther and the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (+1971) to explain the commonplace that justice must be accompanied by mercy.

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