On the church as field hospital

Pope Francis’s comparison of the church to a field hospital is great, on all sorts of levels. It does insist that we are actually trying to heal people; but it allows for the sense of slight shambles, and people rushing to and fro, and confusion as another bunch of people on stretchers come in. Field hospitals are not places of perfect performance, they’re places where kind of the medicine of the spirit is being applied at speed as best we know how.

Field hospital. Not … you know, it’s in a tent, there’s a cross on the roof, it’s in a field somewhere. It’s not some shiny, immaculate, perfect building. In a way all that Christian architecture is misleading. We’re improvising.