"The hothouse atmosphere of its own self-absorption"

George Weigel, The Bishop of Rome as Christian Radical:

... Pope Francis believes that the Church in Latin America took a decisive step toward a new future in 2007. Then, at the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, held at Aparecida in Brazil, the leaders of the Church moved far beyond the "kept" Catholicism of the past--the Catholicism that was "kept" by legal establishment or, more recently, cultural habit--and embraced a robustly Evangelical Catholicism in which, as the pope wrote, "the whole of ministry (is) in a missionary key."

The move from "kept" Catholicism to Evangelical Catholicism is for everyone, the pope seems convinced. "Kept" Catholicism has no future anywhere, and not just because of aggressive secularism and other corrosive cultural acids. "Kept" Catholicism has no future because it doesn't merit a future: or, as the pope put it to his former colleagues, "a Church that does not go out, sooner or later gets sick" in the hothouse atmosphere of its own self-absorption, which Francis has also called "self-referentiality."

When the Church is about itself, rather than the gospel and the invitation to friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ, the Church betrays the gospel and the Lord. How? The "self-referential Church" falls victim to "a kind of narcissism that leads to spiritual worldliness and to sophisticated clericalism," which in turn are obstacles to what the bishops at Aparecida called "the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing."...

Awesome Pope we got here. I thought after Benedict I was sure to be disappointed. Who could match him? Turns out, not so!