Pope Francis Issues Lengthy Apostolic Exhortation on Universal Call to Holiness

In Gaudete et Exsultate, the Holy Father offers guidance on the many paths to sanctity in today’s world.

By Edward Pentin, Apr. 9, 2018

Pope Francis has issued a long apostolic exhortation on holiness in today’s world, in which he emphasizes the universal call to sanctity, highlights the pitfalls to achieving it, and recalls that the Christian life is one of constant battle against the devil and the forces of evil.

Running at just over 22,000 words, Gaudete et Exsultate (Rejoice and Be Glad) — The Call to Holiness in Today’s World — contains many themes the Holy Father has repeated over the past five years: an emphasis on the importance of discernment, warnings against Gnosticism and neo-Pelagianism, rigidity, doing things as they have always been done, an excessive emphasis on doctrine, and gossip.

He quotes the late Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and the Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar in the text, but also draws on the example of many saints, including St. Bonaventure, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Anthony of Padua, and singles out women saints such as St. Hildegard of Bingen, St Bridget and St. Catherine of Siena.

The document is rich in guidance on how to answer the call to holiness in a world filled with distractions, consumerism and hedonism. Frequently, the Pope stresses the importance of prayer and worship, but gives greater emphasis to acts of love and mercy toward one’s neighbor, especially the poor and those on the periphery.

In one particularly notable section, the Pope stresses that “equally sacred” to defending the lives of the unborn are the lives of the poor, the elderly exposed to “covert euthanasia” and those facing “every form of rejection.”

As with every apostolic exhortation or letter, the document begins with its title: “Rejoice and be glad” — Jesus’ words to those persecuted or humiliated for his sake.

“The Lord asks everything of us, and in return he offers us true life, the happiness for which we were created,” the Pope begins. “He wants us to be saints and not to settle for a bland and mediocre existence,” and he reminds the faithful that the call to holiness “is present in various ways from the very first pages of the Bible.”

In light of this, the Pope says his “modest goal” is to “re-propose the call to holiness in a practical way for our own time, with all its risks, challenges and opportunities. For the Lord has chosen each one of us ‘to be holy and blameless before him in love.’”

The first chapter outlines the essence of the call to holiness. The Pope stresses that the Holy Spirit “bestows holiness in abundance among God’s holy and faithful people,” not just the beatified, canonized, prelates, clergy or religious, but the “saints next door” — “the middle class of holiness.” Often, he says, holiness is shown through patience, such as parents who raise their children “with immense love” or “work hard” to support their families.

Besides making the point that holiness exists “even outside the Catholic Church,” he says that each believer has to “discern” his or her own path to sanctity and that St. John of the Cross “preferred to avoid hard and fast rules for all.” He also stresses the “genius of woman” seen in “feminine styles of holiness,” witnessed especially in times of history when “women tended to be most ignored or overlooked” and whose sanctity led to “important reforms” in the Church.

Holiness is not restricted to those who “spend much time in prayer,” he goes on, and argues that it is “not healthy to love silence while fleeing interaction with others, to want peace and quiet while avoiding activity, to seek prayer while disdaining service.”

Instead, the Pope stresses that the call to holiness can also be answered through “small gestures,” such as refusal to succumb to the temptation to gossip. “Holiness is nothing other than charity lived to the full,” he adds, and “giving your best” in committing yourself “body and soul.”

Distractions and Gadgets

He notes the constant distractions of “new gadgets,” travel and consumerism, asking how we can “stop this rat race” and recover the personals space for “heartfelt dialogue with God.” Quoting Cardinal Martini, he says finding that space may not happen unless “we see ourselves staring into the abyss of a frightful temptation, or have the dizzying sensation of standing on the precipice of utter despair, or find ourselves completely alone and abandoned.”

As he has said before, the Pope calls on the faithful not to be “afraid of holiness” and adds that “to the extent that each Christian grows in holiness, he or she will bear greater fruit for our world.”

He highlights two “subtle enemies” of sanctity — gnosticism and pelagianism. Although the Pope says Placuit Deo, a document on the subject by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued in February, provides the “doctrinal bases” for these heresies, he broadens the definitions considerably, saying gnostics today “judge others based on their ability to understand the complexity of certain doctrines.” They also “reduce Jesus’ teaching to a cold and harsh logic that seeks to dominate everything.”

“When somebody has an answer for every question, it is a sign that they are not on the right road,” he says. “They may well be false prophets, who use religion for their own purposes, to promote their own psychological or intellectual theories.” He also warns against believing that knowledge of doctrine makes one “perfect and better than the ‘ignorant masses.’”

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