Healing from the ground up: The church as field hospital

"What kind of church do you dream of?”
 This was the question to which Pope Francis was responding when he famously likened the church—at least the church he would like to see—to a field hospital.

“I see clearly,” Francis said, “that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. And you have to start from the ground up.”

The pope could have answered the question about his dream church with an idealized portrait of the institution, but immediately he turned to the overwhelming reality of suffering; the ideal church is a wounded church, one where wounds are acknowledged first, and the acknowledgment itself begins the healing. Nearness, proximity to wounds—that is where the church needs to be found. The battle rages—all is not well with the world. But rather than condemn the evils of the world from a position of superiority, the church needs to be on the battlefield, not as a participant in the bloodletting but as the medical corps that risks its safety and its very life to bind up the wounds inflicted in the battle.