October 14, 2025 - Reading Bonhoeffer's "Life Together": Chapter 4 and a Homily of Pope Leo XIV

This week, I was fortunate to read both Bonhoeffer’s description of disciplined humility in Life Together, Chapter 4, and Pope Leo XIV's Homily at the Jubilee of the Migrants, delivered at St. Peter's Square on October 5, 2025. Two different voices but both address how to see community and the mission of the church

To live into a vision shared between these two voices, Bonhoeffer’s disciplined humility and Pope Leo’s compassionate mission, is to understand ministry as a rhythm of listening and responding, of contemplation and action. It is to realize that the Gospel is carried in small acts of service as much as in grand preaching. It is to understand that the boundaries between what we used to call the “mission field” and “home” have dissolved. Every encounter is sacred ground. The Church’s credibility lies not in its power, but in its hospitality.

In Chapter 4 of Life Together, Bonhoeffer writes that the foundation of all ministry within Christian community is humility a relinquishing of self-importance for the sake of others.

The believer is called to “place oneself beneath the other,” to bear the burdens of the community without judgment or pride. He speaks of the ministry of listening, the ministry of helpfulness, and ultimately, the ministry of proclaiming, but always in that order. Listening precedes speaking; serving precedes teaching.

Bonhoeffer insists that Christian ministry is never about asserting our own righteousness or authority; it is about Christ’s presence through us. “He who would learn to serve must first learn to think little of himself.” True ministry, then, is a form of holy attentiveness to God, to the neighbor, and to the suffering of the world.

Pope Leo’s homily calls the Church to rediscover its missionary heart, not as conquest or conversion, but as compassionate accompaniment. He takes Pope Francis’ idea of being “permanently in a state of mission” and reinterprets it as remaining, remaining with those who suffer, remaining in solidarity with migrants, the poor, and the forgotten.

This is a profound re-framing of “mission”: it’s not about departing to foreign lands, but about remaining present in love wherever human need cries out. Mission, for Pope Leo, means seeing the migrant’s journey as sacred, the “seas and deserts” as places of salvation. It’s about bringing the Gospel not only in word but in hospitality, listening, and welcome, an echo of Bonhoeffer’s ministries of listening and bearing.

Both texts challenge the Church to be a community of presence rather than performance. Bonhoeffer’s small seminary at Finkenwalde was a community under pressure, a spiritual resistance to the dehumanizing ideologies of his time. Pope Leo speaks to a global Church facing new pressures: mass displacement, polarization, and indifference. Yet the response both envision is the same: a community of faith, rooted in humility and love, witnessing through presence.

For Bonhoeffer, this presence takes form in bearing one another’s burdens. For Pope Leo, it takes the form of welcoming the stranger. In both cases, the Church’s mission is not power but proximity. God’s nearness made visible through human solidarity.