A FEW years ago, on a visit to a poor parish on the outskirts of Rome, Pope Francis offered to answer questions from the youngest parishioners. But, when one young boy, aged about six, was invited to step up to the microphone to ask his question, he became suddenly overwhelmed.
“I can’t do it,” whispered the boy to a papal aide. “Go on, go on,” Pope Francis said, sitting on a little stage in front of the children and their parents. Children clapped to encourage the boy, who was called Emanuele. He started to cry. “Come up, Emanuele, and whisper your question in my ear,” the Pope said.
The aide led the boy, still crying, up the few steps to Francis. The boy buried his face in the Pope’s neck and hugged him. Francis patted the boy’s back and placed his hand upon his head. The child began to speak. No one could hear. The crowd sat in silence. The Pope was listening. The boy was speaking. On the Pope’s finger we could see the silver ring that he had worn since he first became a bishop in Buenos Aires. On his wrist we could see his cheap black plastic watch.
Then it was over. The boy was led back to his seat to applause. The Pope spoke to the crowd: “OK. I asked Emanuele’s permission to tell you the question he asked me. And he said Yes. So I will tell you. He said: ‘A little while ago I lost my father. He did not believe in God, but he had all four of his children baptised. He was a good man. Is my papà in heaven?’”
The Pope continued: “God is the only one who says who goes to heaven. But what is God’s heart like, with a dad like that?” he asked the rows of parents. They were silent. The Pope smiled. “This dad, who was not a believer, but who baptised his children and gave them that advantage, what do you think? God has a dad’s heart. Would God be able to leave such a father far away from himself?”
“No,” said a few people in the crowd.
“Louder,” said Francis. “Be brave, speak up. Does God abandon his children, when they are good?” “No,” chorused the crowd. “There, Emanuele, that is the answer. God surely was proud of your father. Because it is easier as a believer to baptise your children than to baptise them when you are not a believer. Surely this pleased God very much.” Smiling at the child, he added: “Talk to your dad. Pray to your dad.”
SO MUCH in this story explains why Francis was special as a pope. He addressed people directly. He spoke to them where they were, not where a moral philosopher might desire them to be. He used the language of the living room. He acknowledged doctrine — “only God says who goes to heaven” — but then drew the whole of the community towards an answer that made the individual feel embraced and included — and that made the community feel included in something bigger, too.
Francis spoke of “a culture of encounter”, which required not just seeing, but looking; not just hearing, but listening; not just passing people by, but stopping with them; not just feeling pity, but allowing yourself to be moved with compassion. And then, “as Jesus did”, to “draw near, to touch and to say: ‘Do not weep.’”
After a pope who was a philosopher, John Paul II, and one who was a theologian, Benedict XVI, here was a pope who was, above all, a pastor. “Reality is more important than ideas,” was one of his oft-repeated mantras. Incarnation, for Francis, meant that people should be at the centre of the gospel message.
More than that, he took to heart the words attributed to his namesake, St Francis of Assisi: “Preach the gospel at all times — and, if necessary, use words.”
Pope Francis was a master of that universal language that requires no words at all. Early on, as he passed through the crowds in St Peter’s Square, he stopped and embraced Vinicio Riva, a 53-year-old man with a facial disfigurement so repellent that mothers would cross the street with their children to avoid him. Francis touched him, Riva said, with hands that were “soft, gentle, and so beautiful”. The Pope bent and kissed his face. “I’m not contagious, but he didn’t know it. He caressed my face, and, while he did it, I only felt love.”
The act was clearly spontaneous, as was his behaviour at a Festival of Forgiveness in St Peter’s, in 2014. He was ushered by the master of papal liturgical ceremonies to take a seat to hear confessions. But Francis avoided his guiding hand and instead moved to the penitent’s side of another confessional. The leader of the Catholic Church then made confession of his own sins, to a startled priest, in full public view of the entire basilica.
SYMBOLIC acts followed one on another, many of them clearly planned. He invited the Vatican’s cleaners and gardeners to attend his early-morning mass. In his first Holy Thursday liturgy, when he washed the feet of inmates in a young offenders’ prison, he included two women, one of them a Muslim — in violation of a Vatican edict from the time of John Paul II which decreed that only men’s feet could be washed.
When Francis visited the Holy Land, he inverted the itinerary set by the two previous popes, and visited the Occupied Territories before visiting Israel. Then he made an unscheduled stop at the wall that Israel has built between itself and the Palestinians. Francis prayed silently for four minutes, with his head pressed wearily against the controversial barrier that bore graffiti such as “Apartheid Wall” and “Free Palestine”. He stopped right next to a slogan that read: “Pope: we need someone to talk about justice.” There were no words, but the photograph flashed around the world as Francis travelled to the Yad Vashem memorial to meet six elderly Holocaust survivors. The Pope bent and kissed their hands, one by one.
Years later, after talks with leaders of the warring factions in Sudan, Francis bent down and kissed their feet, hoping to persuade them to become peacemakers.
Every day, until he died, he made a video call to the Christians in the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza. Francis never had to articulate a precise message, but everyone knew exactly what his action meant.
Some critics were contemptuous of such gestures, suggesting that Francis was all style and no substance. But, as Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, a former Master of the Order of Preachers, put it, “This is a very Catholic way of changing things, because at the centre of our faith is a great gesture — taking the bread and breaking it. Gestures are pregnant. They say more than we can say in words.”
POPE FRANCIS knew that words sometimes got him into trouble, since they could be read with ambiguity. He stumbled into a minefield when he compared “gender theory” to nuclear war and genetic manipulation. But, soon afterwards, he gave a private audience to Diego Neria Lejarraga, who had been born a girl but had undergone gender-reassignment at the age of 40, after years of living in “a body that absolutely didn’t correspond with what my soul felt”.
Neria was being victimised in his parish church in Spain, where one priest called him a “daughter of the Devil”. Francis rang Neria twice. In the first call, the Pope told him: “You are a son of God and the Church loves you and accepts you as you are.” Later, the Pope rang Neria and invited him to the Vatican for a personal meeting — and offered to pay for the flight. When they met, Neria asked the Pope if, after his reassignment surgery, there really was a place for him “somewhere in the house of God”. Francis responded without words. He simply embraced him. “This man has changed my life,” Neira said afterwards. “He loves the whole world.”
Untying the Knots: The struggle for the soul of Catholicism by Paul Vallely is published by Bloomsbury.
