Added to this are the deep wounds caused by sexual and spiritual abuse, institutional failures and polarization within the Church. Many people have not left the Church out of anger. It has simply become alien to them.
Sociological data reflect this transformation. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of Christians in Europe fell from approximately 554 million to 505 million, while the number of people with no religious affiliation rose significantly. Europe, therefore, is experiencing more than an organizational crisis within the Church. It is undergoing a spiritual stripping away.
It is precisely here that Francis becomes surprisingly relevant. Not because he left us a pastoral program for the 21st century or because his example makes necessary structural reforms redundant. His question goes deeper: what will remain of the Church when many of the things on which it has relied for decades or even centuries, its social standing, property, influence, people and institutional power, are taken away?
Francis does not respond primarily with a strategy. He brings us back to the center: Christ.
Perhaps that is why the Church’s contraction need not mean only decline. It could also become a revelation, painful but healing, of what the Church truly lives by.
The question, then, is not how to preserve as much as possible of the Church’s old form, but what a shrinking Church could become if, precisely in its poverty, it became more decisively evangelical.
A Different Perspective: Discovering Christ on the Margins
Francis was not born a saint. As the son of Pietro di Bernardone, a wealthy cloth merchant, he initially shared the aspirations of a prosperous urban society: fine clothes, entertainment, recognition, adventure and chivalric glory.
War, captivity, illness and dashed hopes shook this vision of life to its core. Francis himself, however, identifies his encounter with lepers as the decisive beginning of his conversion. In his Testament, he writes: “The Lord himself led me among them.”
He does not say, “I decided to be a better person.” He says, “The Lord led me.”
And he was led precisely where he would hardly have gone on his own. For Francis, the leper represented illness, disfigurement and exclusion, everything he had previously shunned. Early tradition captures this experience in the well-known “kiss of the leper”. What had once seemed bitter to him was, in his own words, transformed “into sweetness for the soul and the body”.
What happens here is more than a moral transformation. At first, the world does not change at all. Francis’s eyes do. The person he wanted to avoid becomes his brother. And at the edge of the world he had known, he discovers Christ.
Here lies the first answer to the crisis facing European churches. We are right to discuss offices and leadership styles, finances and real estate, pastoral units, synodality, canon law and reforms. But no structural reform can replace an inner transformation. Without it, even the best structure will remain spiritually empty.
The question is not merely: How do we organize a shrinking Church? It is also: How do we become people in whom it is evident that Christ has transformed the way they see the world?
This is especially true where the Church itself has sinned. In dealing with victims of sexual and spiritual abuse, defending the institution must never take precedence over facing the truth, listening, admitting guilt and seeking justice for those who have been harmed.
A Church that speaks of a merciful Christ must also be judged by how it treats those harmed by its own leaders.
Francis reminds us of an uncomfortable truth: Christ sometimes waits precisely where the Church would rather not look.
Perhaps that is why it must go where its familiar certainties end: to the lonely and the searching, to young people who no longer understand the language of religion, to people with different views, to the sick and refugees, to the poor and the disillusioned. Even to those who say, “I want nothing to do with the Church.”
And there, the Church will not only have something to give. It can itself gain a new perspective on humanity and on Christ.
“Repair My House”: Reform Begins with the Individual
The path then leads to San Damiano. Francis prays before the cross in a small, dilapidated church. Franciscan tradition associates this place with Christ’s call: “Francis, go and repair my house.”
At first, he takes the command literally. He gathers stones and repairs dilapidated churches. Only as his life unfolds does the deeper meaning of these words become apparent. This is precisely what makes his message relevant today.
Faced with crises within the Church, we tend to devise large-scale programs, pastoral plans, structural processes, real estate strategies and plans for the future. Much of this is necessary.
Francis, however, reminds us that renewal can begin with a single person who listens and lays the first stone.
Above all, Francis begins with himself. He does not found an anti-Church, declare others to be the problem or make himself the standard by which the Gospel is measured.
He allows the Gospel to judge him. That is the source of his credibility as a reformer. Francis did not write a program for a poorer Church. He became poor himself. He did not develop a theory of evangelization. He began to live the Gospel.
When, during Mass, he hears Jesus’ words about sending out the disciples, he recognizes in them the pattern for his own life. Before any institutional reform, therefore, he asks a more personal question:
What Would Christ Have to Change in Me?
This does not absolve the Church of responsibility for its structures. Where power is abused, structures must change, guilt must be addressed and consequences must follow. The Church needs law and governance, responsible leadership, transparency, theological education and professional competence.
Spiritual reform, however, goes beyond questions of how things function. It asks: What kind of life allows Christ to become more visible?
“Repair my house”, therefore, does not mean restoring everything that once existed as faithfully as possible.
Francis did not restore a bygone era. He took the Gospel seriously in his own time, and that is precisely how something new came into being.
Nor do the European churches need to restore the social conditions of the past. At the same time, they need not discard everything they have inherited simply because it is old.
The question is: What serves the Gospel, and what obscures it?
Christ at the Center
We must also guard against oversimplifying Francis himself. There is a version of Francis who fits perfectly into postmodern Europe: he loves nature, is peace-loving, lives simply, is open to people of other religions and is critical of material possessions.
This Francis is likable. But he is incomplete.
At the heart of his life lies neither a romantic relationship with nature nor universal brotherhood, abstract global ethics or religious self-realization.
At the center stands Jesus Christ: the Crucified One of San Damiano, the child of Bethlehem, the poor itinerant preacher, Christ in the Gospel and the Eucharist, the suffering and risen Lord. Without this center, Francis easily becomes a canvas onto which we project our modern ideas.
His poverty does not stem from a belief that possessions are inherently evil. It is a response to Christ, who became poor. Francis seeks peace because Christ is his peace. He loves creation not because nature is divine, but because it is God’s creation.
This is particularly evident in his Eucharistic devotion. Francis marvels that the Son of God entrusts himself to human hands. For him, the Incarnation and the Eucharist are part of the same movement of God’s humility: the Most High humbles himself, the Incomprehensible becomes tangible, God gives himself.
Here lies the root of Franciscan poverty. Francis does not renounce possessions for the sake of renunciation. He responds to God, who has given himself.
And in doing so, he poses a simple yet uncomfortable question to the European churches: Do we still dare to speak of Christ?
Not merely about humanity and solidarity, sustainability, peace, justice and spirituality. All of these are part of Christian witness. But the Church loses its center if it limits itself to reaffirming values that society already broadly recognizes.
Non-believers, too, can advocate convincingly for human dignity, justice, peace and the protection of creation.
What is most essential to the Church lies deeper. Its treasure is not a particular moral insight. Its treasure is a person: Jesus Christ.
From him, the poor receive their inalienable dignity; creation becomes a gift; reconciliation grows out of forgiveness received and in the face of death, hope turns to the Risen One. Francis’s Christ-centeredness does not exclude others. On the contrary, it sets him free for the world.
Ownership, Homelessness and Freedom
From this, we can also understand his poverty. It is not a cult of deprivation. Hunger is not romantic, homelessness is not a spiritual ideal and poverty is not holy.
Franciscan poverty means freedom: nothing should stand between Christ and a person.
This, too, is surprisingly relevant to the Church today. Possessions provide security. But what we own can gradually begin to own us.
We protect what we have until preserving it begins to consume more energy than the purpose it was originally meant to serve.
The same applies to the Church. It needs buildings, finances, administration, educational institutions and professional structures. It bears responsibility for people, cultural heritage and institutions built up over generations.
But means can become ends in themselves. We maintain buildings simply because we have them. We preserve structures simply because they exist. And one day, we may lose sight of the question: What is all this for?
Francis reverses the perspective. The Church does not exist to preserve itself. It exists to bear witness to Christ and serve people.
The loss of Church institutions cannot be romanticized. When communities disappear and monasteries close, spiritual homes, cultural memory and human relationships are lost.
Yet such losses can force us to clarify our priorities. The question is not: How little are we allowed to own? It is: How free are we for the Gospel?
What makes prayer, proclamation, service and community possible? What ties up resources that are more urgently needed elsewhere? And what, on the other hand, is so precious that preserving it itself serves faith and cultural memory?
Francis does not give us a blueprint for managing real estate. He does, however, give us a criterion: everything we own must serve what we have received.
This article was originally published on the DoKostola website.
