Pope Francis is calling out to the Church to be a Field Hospital. A Field Hospital is a place for urgent care, where people can get first aid. Though are we like those in the ER where a patient comes in with a grave condition then a nurse intervenes asking the patient his name, age, birth date, address, work, parents, etc. etc. etc..? I bet he would be taken up first in the heavens before he wold be taken up to the rooms and be given an immediate health care.
How can we preach the Good News when our sheep are scattered and does not have a field to graze, where they eat stones and pebbles instead of healthy grass, their wool are but blackened with dust and filled with thicks? This is indeed a critique to the current image of our Church not only today but even before. We speak of mercy but are our structures merciful to those who are in need of mercy? Fr. Jen Secon challenges us in his concurrent session during the Philippine Conference on New Evangelization III (PCNE 3) have a pastoral and missionary conversion that echoes the very words of Pope Francis in the Evangelii Guadium,
“I hope that all communities will devote the necessary effort to advancing along the path of a pastoral and missionary conversion which cannot leave things as they presently are. 'Mere administration' can no longer be enough. Through the world, let us be “permanently in a state of mission” (EG 25).
Now, as a Church, do we or can we move out off our parishes, our shells, our selves, to be out there for those who are in need? Let us resonate in our hearts the very words Jesus, “I know my sheep, and me sheep knows me”. Let us be out there at the peripheries and be with them. Before we can preach, handing out 'prescriptions' and 'medicines' let us know first what they need to be able to truly heal their woundedness; this is how we can become a field hospital to our fellow, to our 'kapwa'.