It's a powerful symbol, really, the one church at the center of the city and the other outside the walls, as Peter is known for the Petrine office and Paul is known as the great missionary. They need each other and should never be separated from each other. The institution needs to be reminded of the mission, as much as the mission needs to be rooted in the rest of the church, like someone who sits still in a rocking boat.</p>
<p>In some sense we've gone back and forth with the last few popes. After this great energy that was released by John XXIII and then Paul VI at the Second Vatican Council, opening the windows and having commerce with the outside world after 500 years of self-preservation, John Paul II and especially Benedict were trying to rein the church in again and bring it back to the center. And now Francis is going outside the walls again. Just hours before they elected him as the new pope, Francis made a speech before the College of Cardinals in which he urged the Vatican to eschew self-absorption and refocus its energies outward. "The church is called on to emerge from itself and move toward the peripheries," he said, not only the geographic ones but also existential ones, "those of sin, suffering, injustice, ignorance and religious abstention, thought and all misery." And he warned about the dangers of stagnation saying that, "When the church does not emerge from itself to evangelize, it becomes self-referential and therefore becomes sick. ... The evils that, over time, occur in ecclesiastical institutions have their root in self-referentiality, a kind of theological narcissism." And that's what he thought the pope should be, someone who could help "the church to emerge from itself toward the existential outskirts."<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>Saint Paul Outside-the-Walls is also a Benedictine monastery, and I think that's where monasticism is best located too, even if inside the walls of a cloister, still outside the walls of the city, in those existential outskirts. Maybe that's a lofty poetic philosophical way of describing the new desert that we are called to inhabit––"the existential outskirts." We have to be on guard against the same thing, we monks: spiritual narcissism, being self-absorbed and self-referential. Every now and then we too need to send someone outside the walls.</p>
<p>Let me add one more thing: feasts of dedications of churches take precedence over all other feasts, even of Our Lady or apostles or martyrs. Why? Because they are never about buildings: they are considered to be feasts of Christ, Christ as the person of Jesus, but also Christ as the whole Body with all its members, and the full Christ toward which we are heading and which we are becoming, the church that<em> is the fullness of the One who fills all things</em> (Eph 1:23). And that fullness is at the center, and also outside the walls, in unexpected places, in the existential outskirts and deserts, among the poor and the lost, in hidden canyons and alleyways, lone voices crying from the rooftops and crying out in the wilderness.</p>
<p>Let's pray with Saint Peter that we could always have the mind of the church and stay close to the center, through the scripture, the sacraments and the tradition. And let's pray with Saint Paul that we would have the courage to spread the liberating Word, and explore the new deserts of the world, and especially the wilderness of our hearts.</p>
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<p>1 Then-Cardinal Bergoglio's gave him a handwritten version his comments, and also gave him permission to divulge its contents. It was published by a Roman Catholic magazine in Cuba. (ANDREA RODRIGUEZ, Associated Press, March 25, 2013.)</p>