Abstract
References to Pope Francis must sell books! Andrea Riccardi has written a readable account of the need for the Roman Catholic Church to move to the margins. However, other than referencing some speeches by Pope Francis in the Introduction and Conclusion, this is not another book about Pope Francis. It is so much more.
Riccardi calls his church to pay heed to the margins – to go forth from comfort zones—and reach all peripheries. The margins are ‘not just poor suburbs on the outskirts of big cities but areas, situations and people that are marginal or marginalized’ (p. 1). The focus of the book is on urban conglomerations—60% of the world population will be urban by 2030 (p. 163)—and how the church needs to address this.
Chapter 1 sets the scene of the global city and the marginalization produced by globalization. It presents experiences from cities in the global south which no longer develop along classic European models of centre and peripheries. The centre is not a space of encounter but one of abandonment in many cities like Sao Paulo or Johannesburg. ‘Cities are deeply divided between first-class citizens and the marginalized (p. 11). In Chapter 2, Riccardi demonstrates how ‘margins have a decisive importance in the Bible’ (p. 31). He uses the Exodus narratives and the Galilean model from Old and New Testaments to reinforce his point. The chapter also makes room for Church History introducing some stories of the margins from Patristics. This gives a nice introduction to Chapter 3 when Riccardi introduces Orthodox Christianity. He begins Chapter 3 by recalling the ‘fools for Christ’ in the Orthodox tradition, highlighting how ‘holy fools [were] monks who, after having led a life of prayer, returned to the city and lived in peculiar ways’ (p. 66). Through a series of stories of ‘fools for Christ’ Riccardi draws out the anti-institutional and anti-hierarchical nature of their life and message. He underlines, however, the importance of living faith in the city even if in unorthodox ways. In Chapter 4, the book turns to major challenges presented to Christianity in the twentieth century. The masses of urban poor and working classes concentrated in the urban conglomerations were dechristianized by their experiences. The church—with its parish citadel (p. 97)—had no effective means at its institutional disposal to reach the urban poor and working classes. Ricardi recounts pastoral concerns of Paris’ Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard to go to the margins. He also revisits the French worker-priest movement and, in a nice turn to complement with earlier desert father stories, he references Charles de Foucauld and the margins of the desert.
The book concludes with a call for the church ‘to be reborn on the margins, to make room for Christian communities and experiences that arise from there’ (p. 168).