Tag: Gunning fog

The Church is not only for good people

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Due to the brief break in masses at Pope Francis’ residence – the Domus Sanctæ Marthæ – over the Christmas holidays, the set of 43 sermons he delivered there since the beginning of September until the end of 2013 can be considered their second season.1 In this post, I will again look at his sermons’ textual features, compare them against the first season and share with you some of my favorite moments from Francis’ homilies during this period, that haven’t already been referred to in the blog posts I wrote over the same period, which are frequently inspired by them or at least make reference to them.

In terms of the latest season’s language, it very much remained like that of the the first, with a heavy focus on Jesus – by far the most frequently used word throughout. The remaining nine of the top ten most frequently-used words were: God, Lord, you, our, him, Church, people, life and Christian (in that order) which means that eight of the top words from the first season remained unchanged, with only “love” and “what” dropping our of the top ten, being replaced by “Christian” and “people.” The specific shifts of these words are also worth noting from the following figure:

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While even a relatively small dataset like the above fifty pairs of word frequencies is big enough to have lots read into it, it’d still venture to make the following observations: first, that “Lord” no longer outweighs “God,” second that the gap between the frequency of “our” versus “you” has dropped significantly and third that “Church” and “people” are on almost equal footing instead of the former being said almost twice as often as the latter in the previous season. I don’t mean to build an elaborate analysis on the above features, but they strike me as indicators of an even greater closeness between Francis and his audience.

Worth noting is also the further reduced Gunning-Fog readability Index (from an already very low 6.6 to 6.3), which indicates an increased ease of the text and that this is achieved at the same time as an almost doubling of the text’s lexical density (from 15.2 to 25.3). All of this points to Francis’ words being very accessible, while at the same time holding substance.

Both as an example of his style and as a way to pick out some of my favorite moments from these last three months, the following five are passages from Francis’ homilies that particularly spoke to me:

  1. “Those who live judging their neighbor, speaking ill of their neighbor, are hypocrites, because they lack the strength and the courage to look to their own shortcomings. The Lord does not waste many words on this concept. Further on he says that he who has hatred in his heart for his brother is a murderer. In his first letter, John the Apostle also says it clearly: anyone who has hatred for his brother is a murderer, he walks in darkness, he who judges his brother walks in darkness. And so, every time we judge our brothers in our hearts – or worse still when we speak ill of them with others, we are Christian murderers: A Christian murderer…. It’s not me saying this, it’s the Lord. And there is no place for nuances. If you speak ill of your brother, you kill your brother. […] Gossip always has a criminal side to it. There is no such thing as innocent gossip. […] Some may say that there are persons who deserve being gossiped about. But it is not so: Go and pray for him! Go and do penance for her! And then, if it is necessary, speak to that person who may be able to seek remedy for the problem. But don’t tell everyone! Paul had been a sinner, and he says of himself: I was once a blasphemer, a persecutor, a violent man. But I have been mercifully treated. Perhaps none of us are blasphemers – perhaps … But if we ever gossip we are certainly persecutors and violent. We ask for grace so that we and the entire Church may convert from the crime of gossip to love, to humility, to meekness, to docility, to the generosity of love towards our neighbor.” (13th September)
  2. “You can’t govern without loving the people and without humility! And every man, every woman who has to take up the service of government, must ask themselves two questions: ‘Do I love my people in order to serve them better? Am I humble and do I listen to everybody, to diverse opinions in order to choose the best path.’ If you don’t ask those questions, your governance will not be good. The man or woman who governs – who loves his people is a humble man or woman.” (16th September)
  3. “The Church is not the Church only for good people. Do we want to describe who belongs to the Church, to this feast? The sinners. All of us sinners are invited. At this point there is a community that has diverse gifts: one has the gift of prophecy, another of ministry, who teaching … We all have qualities and strengths. But each of us brings to the feast a common gift. Each of us is called to participate fully in the feast. Christian existence cannot be understood without this participation. ‘I go to the feast, but I don’t go beyond the antechamber, because I want to be only with the three or four people that I am familiar with …’ You can’t do this in the Church! You either participate fully or you remain outside. You can’t pick and choose: the Church is for everyone, beginning with those I’ve already mentioned, the most marginalized. It is everyone’s Church!” (5th November)
  4. “When we look at a father or a mother who speaks to their little child, we see that they become little and speak with a voice of a child and with the manners of children. Someone looking in from the outside think, ‘This is ridiculous!’ They become smaller, right there, no? Because the love of a father and a mother needs to be close. I say this word: to lower themselves to the world of the child … If the father and mother spoke to them normally, the child would still understand; but they want to take up the manner of speaking of the child. They come close, they become children. And so it is with the Lord. The Greek theologians explained this attitude of God with a somewhat difficult word: “syncatabasis” or “the humble and accommodating disposition of God who lowers Himself to make Himself one of us.”” (12th December)
  5. “There is a third coming of the Lord: that of every day. The Lord visits His Church every day! He visits each of us, and so our souls as well experience something similar: our soul resembles the Church, our soul resembles Mary. The Desert Fathers say that Mary, the Church and our souls are feminine, and that what is said about one can be said analogously of the others. Our soul is also in waiting, this waiting for the coming of the Lord – an open soul that calls out, ‘Come, Lord.’” (23rd December)
1 For a review of the “first season,” see here.

Francis’ “grammar of simplicity”

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Yesterday the 28th World Youth Day has come to a close in Rio de Janeiro and there would undoubtedly be a lot to say about it. Instead, I would like to look at a different, yet related, topic today, which is that of Pope Francis’ daily morning sermons, delivered at the Domus Sanctæ Marthæ (DSM). Since his election in March, Francis has been inviting different groups of Vatican staff and other visitors to join him for morning mass at his residence of choice, during which he’d deliver a short, off-the-cuff-style reflection, inspired by the day’s readings. Since these morning masses, and the homilies they contained, have now been suspended for the summer months, one can consider their first season, so to speak, as complete, and reflect on them as a whole. These, by my count 123, homilies form a corpus that is not only important in terms of the themes that it addresses, but also as a body of linguistic content, and it is both of these aspects that I would like to reflect on here.

Before proceeding to the DSM homilies, it is worth hearing the following point made by Francis on Saturday, during a lunch with Brazilian bishops, since it is the key to unlocking their language:

“Another lesson which the Church must constantly recall is that she cannot leave simplicity behind; otherwise she forgets how to speak the language of Mystery. Not only does she herself remain outside the door of the mystery, but she proves incapable of approaching those who look to the Church for something which they themselves cannot provide, namely, God himself. At times we lose people because they don’t understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and import an intellectualism foreign to our people. Without the grammar of simplicity, the Church loses the very conditions which make it possible “to fish” for God in the deep waters of his Mystery.”

With the above in mind, let’s turn to the DSM homilies. According to the Vatican’s spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi, the morning homilies are spontaneous instead of delivered from a prepared written text and a “‘complete’ publication, therefore, would necessarily entail a transcription and a reworking of the text at various points, given that the written form is different from the spoken one, which in this case is the original form chosen intentionally by the Holy Father.” The result would be “‘something else’, which isn’t what the Holy Father intends to do [with his daily homily] each morning.” As a result of this primarily spoken and spontaneous form of the morning homilies, only summaries and quotes from them are available, instead of full transcripts. These summaries, furthermore, include notes on who was present at the individual masses, on what the readings of the day were and addenda like “the Holy Father said,” “pope Francis noted,” etc.

As a direct linguistic analysis of the summaries would be skewed by the above additions, I first parsed the 123 summaries and removed from them any text that went beyond a transcript or paraphrasing of Pope Francis. The end result are 27K words, resulting in an average of 220 words per sermon, which corresponds to about half a page of written text. The end result are only snippets of what Francis said and a degree of separation between his full, albeit short, sermons and the record available publicly is inevitable, and indeed in accord with Francis’ own wishes.

Running a textual analysis on the above corpus yields very interesting results, which make plain the simplicity of the language Francis employs:

  1. The total of 27,132 words result from using only 4,118 different ones, which is less than the typical vocabulary of a 6-year-old.
  2. The Gunning fog readability score of the text, which derives from the number of words per sentence and the percentage of complex words used, is 6.6. This is at the very bottom end of the scale and matches that of the Bible (with popular novels coming in at 8-10 and academic texts at 15-20).
  3. The average sentence length here is 13 words, where 17 is typical and 11-13 is considered easy.
  4. Word length too is at the low end of the scale, with an average of 1.49 syllables per word (as compared with typical language having 1.66).

That Francis speaks simply can easily be seen when listening to him and the above just underlines how consistently and persistently he does so during his morning sermons.

Turning to the content of his homilies, the word cloud at the top of this post shows the 50 most frequently used words, where font size is proportional to frequency. As can be seen immediately, “Jesus” is the word that Francis uses by far most often (2.3% of the time), followed by “Lord” (1.5%), where the two top words are in fact synonyms in this context. Comparing this to an analysis of his first sermons after being elected pope, it can be seen that his focus on the person of Jesus is a constant feature of his preaching. If we combine these two words, the second most frequent word becomes “our,” which, to my mind, underlines the sense one gets of Francis being one of us, referring to issues and ideas applicable to an “us” that includes him, rather than a “you” that he is removed from. Worth noting is also that the highest-ranked verb among the 4K words used in these homilies is “love” (7th among all words). A final point to pick up on in terms of word frequency is that of the top 50 words, only two imply obstacles or prohibition by themselves: “cannot” (48th) and “without” (49th). Looking at four word phrases, the most frequent one is “the word of God” (used 41 times in these 123 homilies) and in third place comes “the name of Jesus.” Francis continuously stays close to the person of Jesus, even just from the perspective of the vocabulary he employs, stays close to the congregation he addresses and is overwhelmingly positive.

Since I have already written at length about some of Francis’ DSM homilies in earlier posts, I would here just like to highlight some of the aspects that stood out to me while editing the text of these 123 sermons:

  1. Francis uses the term “pope” quite generously: he refers to the apostle Paul by saying that he “is a Pope, a builder of bridges.” and he also refers to Tawadros II in the same way, and has the following to say about him to the morning mass congregation: “Today there’s a good reason for joy in this house, where we are hosting the Pope of Alexandria, the Patriarch of the See of St Mark. He is a brother who has come to visit the Church of Rome to talk and to make a journey together.”
  2. Similes are a great favorite of Francis’, and he uses them liberally: “The confessional is not a laundromat,” “To solve the problems of life it is necessary to look reality in the face, ready like the goalkeeper of a football team to grab the ball whatever side it comes from,” that God is “not an indefinite God dispersed in the air like a spray”, that Jesus is “like an engineer, like an architect; He tells them what He will do: ‘I am going to prepare a place, in my Father’s house is my dwelling’,” that the Church is like a mother (“How would you feel if someone said: she’s a domestic administrator? ‘No, I am the mother!’ And the Church is Mother.”) and that some Christians are like pickled peppers (“Sometimes these melancholy Christians faces have more in common with pickled peppers than the joy of having a beautiful life”) are just a couple of examples.
  3. Francis draws inspiration from a very broad range of sources, including his grandmother (who’d tell him and other children in the family: ‘Look he is dead, but tomorrow he will be Risen!,’ when visiting the tomb on Good Friday), a man who worked for the diocese of Buenos Aires (“before going to do any of the things he had to do, he would always whisper to himself: ‘Jesus!’”), Pope Paul VI (who “said that you cannot advance the Gospel with sad, hopeless, discouraged Christians”), the martyrs of Nagasaki (“each one helped the other, they struggled mightily and spoke of Jesus as they awaited the moment of their death”), the garment factory collapse in Dhaka (which “killed hundreds of workers who were being exploited and who worked without the proper safety preoccupations. It is a title, which struck me the day of the tragedy in Bangladesh: ‘How to die for 38 euros a month’”), an electrician who prayed for his daughter’s recovery (“Miracles do happen. But we need to pray with our hearts: A courageous prayer, that struggles to achieve a miracle, not prayers of courtesy”) and a priest, who, when he was appointed bishop worried about his unworthiness (to which his confessor told him: “But do not worry. If after the mess Peter made of things, they made him Pope, then you go ahead!”).