Last week, Pope Francis issued a motu proprio reorganizing the Diocese of Rome. For the most part this is a document that is particular and local. It doesn’t necessarily speak to the rest of the universal Church. In fact, it hasn’t even been translated from Italian.

There are, however, some sticking points about spiritual meaning and instruction. Most commentators have noted that the overall purpose of the motu proprio is to better integrate the peripheries, from which we see and discern much better, with the centre, where we see and discern only with more difficulty. I want to add to this some brief but (I think) important theological observations and reflections.

Vulnerability is another manifestation of beauty

Hidden away in this little apostolic letter is a gem. It’s a nugget that we need to think about. I suspect that this line of thinking is going to become explosive over the next decades. But here we have a lighting of the match.

Pope Francis talks about the beauty of vulnerability. What he says is the following (sticking to the Vatican News translation where available):

A mother [like the Church] is beautiful because she is dedicated to caring for her children and has special eyes for the most vulnerable (fragili) children that make her even more beautiful. Vulnerability (la fragilità) is another expression of beauty that demands our attention. The more we care for the vulnerable (prendiamo cura delle fragilità), the more beautiful we become.

That’s the deal: La fragilità è un’altra manifestazione della bellezza che ci impone attenzione.

But I’d like to point out the order of thoughts here. First, the Pope says that a mother like the Church becomes more beautiful by knowing that she has children who are vulnerable. Second, he says that the children’s vulnerability itself is an expression of beauty. In the same sentence, he adds that we should give that beauty our attention. Third and finally, he says that the more we care for the vulnerable, the more beautiful we ourselves become.

The Holy Father isn’t saying that it’s only the Church’s care that is beautiful. No, he also states that the mere possession of and regard for vulnerable children make the mother beautiful, and the vulnerability of the children themselves is an expression of beauty. Each of these three things is asserted—and I daresay that, even if we don’t disagree with the threefold claim, it is something that most of us would not have thought of saying.

True beauty—a contemplative theme

So, how did we get here? What in the world could commend us to think about vulnerability as beautiful? And why in a document about the reorganization of the Diocese of Rome?

Well, in fact, the whole papal document is about beauty. Its title is La vera bellezza—True Beauty. And this is identified as a fundamentally contemplative theme. The very first sentence of the document is this: “True beauty is Christ, and in him the Church contemplates its only centre.” Thus, what we contemplate is beauty, as Pope Francis himself continually teaches. And at the same time, the entire reorganization of the Diocese of Rome is, then, contemplation-based. There’s some exigency in the contemplative gaze that leads to changing things up in the Pope’s own diocese. Christ is the only centre, so the human peripheries are to be integrated with the human centres. That’s the only way to make this work.

So, from the get-go, we do not have action and administration. We have contemplation at the source. And contemplation is of beauty.

Contemplation elsewhere in the document

Other references to contemplation in La vera bellezza are not (explicitly) about beauty. But they do mention the contemplation of Christ:

Every pastoral effort has the objective of preparing (preparare), supporting (assecondare), and looking after (custodire) the personal encounter between God and the human creature. Revelation itself, by its nature, has a sacramental tension that finds its highest realization in the personal encounter with Christ. All pastoral dynamism tends to this ambitious peak, and this is the beautiful centre to reach, to contemplate, and to look after. There is a time to desire the encounter with Christ, there is a time to contemplate the encounter with Christ, there is a time to look after the encounter with Christ.

Since the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, which is so dear to Pope Francis, identifies Christ with those in need, those on the peripheries, those who are vulnerable (as in the Holy Father’s remarks to a congress earlier this year), it only makes sense, then, that if we wish to contemplate and encounter Christ, we need to move to the places of need, to the peripheries, to the vulnerable. Thus, the whole reorganization of the diocese makes sense. The human centres are integrated with the human peripheries, and as a result, the Christological centre is better opened to the whole human dimension of the Church.

So what does it mean to say that vulnerability is an expression of beauty?

Most people, especially in a post-Cartesian Western world, think of vulnerability as a lack, a deficiency, a bad thing in itself, a characteristic to surmount. But I don’t think this is a Christian thought.

I’ve written about this before, drawing in particular on Jacques and Raïssa Maritain (French Thomists) and Randy Woodley (a Cherokee Protestant theologian), and I’ll say it again, because I am not ashamed to think this: God is the most vulnerable of beings. Think about it. God offers us good inspirations, love, truth, beauty, with an infinite overflow, pouring in at every moment, worldwide, in every crevice of every heart. And we can say no. Not a single gunshot needed. No documentary evidence. Not even a flick of a finger. And something God has wanted from all eternity in his infinite bounty will never be. God is more vulnerable than any of us.

God, of course, is also omnipotent. From every evil he can draw a greater good still. He is crushed—if that could be the right word—but also somehow not crushed, because unlike us, his ability to change “suffering” into joy is infinite. It’s as if speeded up to an infinite rate. That doesn’t mean his motions towards us aren’t frustrated. It just means that we have no conception of the infinite divine compensation for these frustrations, no adequate ideas for what God “suffers” in having something which he has willed for us from all eternity be rejected, discarded, and nullified. God is infinite beatitude. But he is also the most vulnerable of beings. Both/and—not either/or.

This is an unvoiced but necessary belief in Christianity. We don’t think about it, because it smashes against the very edges of imagery and conceptual language. But try to live a Christian life in active denial of either idea—that God is infinite beatitude, that God is the most vulnerable of beings—and you’ll find it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t.

Vulnerability, then, isn’t something ultimately and fundamentally bad in itself—because God is the supreme exemplar of vulnerability. Vulnerability betokens perfection, not limitation. In perfection, vulnerability is combined with the divine ability to change suffering into happiness (and in God, at an “infinite rate,” so to speak).

So, those among us who are vulnerable—they are beautiful. Their vulnerability manifests beauty. That which is of God is beautiful. Even more so when it is of Christ’s Humanity, too, not just his Divinity (but I think, contrary to the expressed, but I think nonsensical, thoughts of the crowd, that God in his gratuitous nature is vulnerable also). Vulnerability, insofar as it has not isolated itself and as it remains open to joy, is an expression of beauty in itself.

And the mother who has children who are vulnerable is equally beautiful in herself. She has the opportunity to care for them. The relational possibility itself is beautiful. Because the mother is then associated with the great beauty that the children can instantiate.

Actively caring for the vulnerable is an action of changing sadness into joy, suffering into happiness. Of course, when I say that, it’s an approximation. The active care is only facilitation. To stick with another metaphor similar to a maternal one—it’s midwifery; it’s maieutic. The one who really births the truth, love, and beauty is the child. The mother of the child is the midwife. But her facilitation of moving suffering into happiness is an act of beauty insofar as it permits or gives space to this transformation, this transmutation, this transfiguration. And as the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats indicates, there is a moral imperative to this suffering-into-joy midwifery.

From this, I think we can understand the paragraph in La vera bellezza on the beauty of vulnerability.

The Holy Father isn’t saying that it’s only the Church’s active care that is beautiful. That would be a profound error—a modern-day Pelagianism even. No, Pope Francis claims that the aware possession of vulnerable children makes the mother beautiful, and the vulnerability of the children themselves is an expression of beauty. And yes, that demands care. Because action results from the contemplation of beauty. Beautiful action.

This is, I think, an integral theology of beauty. And it does justice as few documents of so high an authority ever have, to genuinely Christian thinking on the meaning of vulnerability.