Pope FRANCIS, Go Forth. Toward a Community of Missionary Disciples, edited with an introduction  by William P. Gregory. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2019. Pp. 196 + xxiv. $22.00 pb. ISBN 978-1-62698-326-7. Reviewed by Anthony J. BLASI, 4531 Briargrove Street, San Antonio, TX 78217

Since the beginning of his service as pontiff, Pope Francis has been giving insightful daily homilies, often with spontaneity, as well as delivering formal address and authoring formal encyclicals and other letters. Professor Gregory of Clarke University has drawn numerous excerpts from these sources and edited them by topic. The pope himself and his staff have engaged in a similar exercise, resulting in the recent encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2020). In my reading, the passages in the encyclical read more natually, but are best read a little each day in a contemplative mode; this book is tidier because of its topical arrangement and lends itself better than the encyclical to a reading from cover to cover. Both are inspiring and well worth the time.

Gregory devotes a chapter to each of eleven themes. The first chapter, on witness, affirms that credible witnesses are needed to communicate God’s love and mercy; all Christians are called to be such, and thus to transform the world. Following witness is closeness: the faithful are to go forth from the narrow confines the Church has known, to those in need of a reason to want God. Here Francis counters clericalism. Next is mercy, which sends those who bear it to the margins of Church and society. This requires humility, the theme of Chapter 5.

Subsequent chapters take up the results of being serious about the previous themes. Joy occurs in encounters during prayer and action, and in turn becomes itself a motive. Francis dismisses spiritualities of intrinsic well-being and prosperity gospels as gnostic, not Christian. Then there is solidarity with the poor, and a peace that involves fraternity, dialogue, and justice, not the peace that is a mere absence of violence. Vitality, evincing growth and engagement with the challenges of the times, is opposed to static teachings.

            Two final chapters describe stratagems of the Church herself. Proclamation, which is dependent on living in an exemplary manner, not in proselytizing, should reach out to other Christian bodies and other faith traditions. Accompaniment is a similar outreach, to those whom the institutional Church has hurt, failed, or ignored.