In Memoriam: The Holy Father, Pope Francis

 

“The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus.”—Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium

I’m sure the world knows by now that Pope Francis passed away early Monday morning, April 21^st.  From Vatican News,” Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025, at the age of 88 at his residence in the Vatican's Casa Santa Marta”: 

 

At 9:45 AM, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church, announced the death of Pope Francis from the Casa Santa Marta with these words:

 

"Dearest brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father. His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of His Church. He taught us to live the values of the Gospel with fidelity, courage, and universal love, especially in favor of the poorest and most marginalized. With immense gratitude for his example as a true disciple of the Lord Jesus, we commend the soul of Pope Francis to the infinite merciful love of the One and Triune God."

It was a sad moment for me as well.  When I woke up that Monday morning and looked at my phone, there had been a news bulletin text that stated Pope Francis had died.  If he had died 7:35, Rome time; it was 1:35 AM here. 

Over the years I have had an evolving reaction to Pope Francis.  I was struck with him when he was first elected.  The charm, the smile, the self-effacing jokes, the humility, the off-the-cuff comments that no one would say.  He was a good humored man with people skills that no pope has had in a long time.  I just loved his pastoral touch.  At the time he was elected some twelve years ago, I offered this in my blog:  

We have these two strands in this pope, the disciplined mind of a scholarly Jesuit with the humility, simplicity, and human engagement of the Franciscan ministry.  The implication is that he’s going to challenge the spiritually indifferent trend of western culture, both through rhetorical argumentation and humble example.  And in him we see the real deal.  He is inherently a humble man, lived in a small apartment, cooked his own meals, rode the subway, embraced the people in the slums.  St. Francis embraced and kissed the lepers; Bergoglio washed and kissed the feet of today’s equivalent of the lepers, AIDs patients.

And then after a few days of Pope Francis meeting the world, I posted again on the new Holy Father, with even more glowing terms: 

 

"The last few days have made it apparent that [Pope Benedict XVI’s] strengths were intellectual at the expense of human contact. Given what I’ve seen of Francis’s human contact approach to his ministry, human contact is much more important than intellectual pontificating, pardon the pun. The intellectual underpinnings of Catholicism are there in the magisterium. Whatever updating B16 did to it is marginal, and non-Catholics weren’t listening anyway. I like what I’ve seen Pope Francis. This contact ministry is the human contact that I’ve argued brings Christ to everyone. Through human contact is where Christ is revealed. Pope Francis is a shot in the arm!"

In 2015, Pope Francis traveled to the United States and celebrated a Papal Mass in New York City.  I was fortunate to be selected to receive a ticket to the Mass representing my parish.  It was such an honor and I had a number of posts leading up to the Papal Mass and then of course the Papal Mass.  You can read those posts and see the pictures I took when you go to this link that calls up those Papal Mass posts.  

I also posted part of Pope Francis’s homily which focused on the isolation of people living in a big city.  I found this part of the homily both moving and penetrating to those who live in a big city such as myself.  

 

But big cities also conceal the faces of all those people who don’t appear to belong, or are second-class citizens. In big cities, beneath the roar of traffic, beneath “the rapid pace of change”, so many faces pass by unnoticed because they have no “right” to be there, no right to be part of the city. They are the foreigners, the children who go without schooling, those deprived of medical insurance, the homeless, the forgotten elderly. These people stand at the edges of our great avenues, in our streets, in deafening anonymity. They become part of an urban landscape which is more and more taken for granted, in our eyes, and especially in our hearts.

 

Knowing that Jesus still walks our streets, that he is part of the lives of his people, that he is involved with us in one vast history of salvation, fills us with hope. A hope which liberates us from the forces pushing us to isolation and lack of concern for the lives of others, for the life of our city. A hope which frees us from empty “connections”, from abstract analyses, or sensationalist routines. A hope which is unafraid of involvement, which acts as a leaven wherever we happen to live and work. A hope which makes us see, even in the midst of smog, the presence of God as he continues to walk the streets of our city. Because God is in the city.

 

What is it like, this light travelling through our streets? How do we encounter God, who lives with us amid the smog of our cities? How do we encounter Jesus, alive and at work in the daily life of our multicultural cities?

And then he implored us to go out and embrace the city and all its inhabitants.

 

Prince of Peace. Go out to others and share the good news that God, our Father, walks at our side. He frees us from anonymity, from a life of emptiness, and brings us to the school of encounter. He removes us from the fray of competition and self-absorption, and he opens before us the path of peace. That peace which is born of accepting others, that peace which fills our hearts whenever we look upon those in need as our brothers and sisters.

 

God is living in our cities. The Church is living in our cities. God and the Church living in our cities want to be like yeast in the dough, to relate to everyone, to stand at everyone’s side, proclaiming the marvels of the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Eternal Father, the Prince of Peace.

 

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”. And we, as Christians, are witnesses to this.

As I look back on those words from his homily, Pope Francis had not changed over the years.  The same themes he had at the beginning of his papacy were there at the end.  It was a concern for the outcast, the disenfranchised, the overlooked, the weak, the unaccepted, the lepers of our time.

In time I became somewhat dissatisfied with the Holy Father.  When it came to articulating church teaching, he was not the clearest, and he, also being on the Liberal side of both politics and the Church, his critics conflated his magisterium with his Liberal tendencies so that it gave the appearance that he was either confused or a heretic.  Being conservative myself I succumbed to the worst elements of the conservative’s characterization of Pope Francis.  There is an industry out there, especially in the United States, which is built on making money tearing down the Holy Father and anyone who smacks of not being orthodox.   The conservative language of these radical traditionalists (rad trads for short) tends to lure political conservatives to their side since so much of the jargon overlap.  I too began to conflate Pope Francis’s more Liberal political issues with liberal church teachings.  While I was sure Pope Francis had not taught anything heretical, I assumed he was pushing the Church to some liberal climax of his papacy.

And in some point in the last five years I began to see a disconnect between what I actually read and heard Pope Francis say and what the rad trad critics claimed he taught.  No, Pachamama was not meant to be a fertility goddess, and Pope St.John Paul II also embraced the symbol.  No, Francis never endorsed women priests, never endorsed homosexual lifestyle, and never supported abortion.  He may have had a compassionate heart for those outside the graces of the Church, and he pushed to extend God’s grace to them, but he never overturned Church teaching. 

What I discovered was that this industry was built on distorting Pope Francis’s Magisterial teaching to make it sound he was teaching heresy.  The turning point for me was Fiducia supplicans.  No it does not say that a homosexual union can be blessed.  It says that a couple can be blessed, and if I and my brother walked up to a priest it would satisfy as a couple.  The blessing isn’t even on the couple, it’s on the persons of the couple.  Read it carefully.  Pope Francis kept the doctrine of the Catholic faith while stretching out as far as he could to include the marginalized.  You are supposed to read Papal comments in charity and docility.  When I read this and saw the hysterical outrage and distortions, it dawned on me that there were elements in the Church that were fixated at tearing the Papacy for their own vision of what the church should be.  Well, they weren’t elected Pope.  The Holy Spirit didn’t endow them with anything.  That’s when the scales fell from my eyes.

I’m not going to dwell on the negative.  The Catholic Church has always had its Protestants and Pharisees, and they can find themselves another religion for all I care.  What I care about is Christ going to lepers and healing them.  What I care about is Christ refusing to stone the woman caught in adultery, which can be seen as Christ keeping doctrine while stretching out for the marginalized.  What I care about is the Good Samaritan caring for the injured man.  What I care about is Christ sitting to eat with tax collectors and prostitutes.  What I care about is the Prodigal Son being welcomed back.  What I care about is Christ washing His subordinates’ feet.  What I care about is Christ providing dignity to the Samaritan woman at the well who has had a series of inappropriate relationships.  That is the heart of the Gospel message and that is at the heart of Pope Francis’s magisterial teaching.

There are those who say what we needed was a more precise theologian.  Who knows?  I tend to disagree.   Pope Francis was the pope we needed. He showed us how to live in the love of Christ and provide dignity to every human being. What humanity needs is not another theologian—there are tons of those in every Catholic university—but needs someone to show them how to live out Christ. Pope Francis did just that.

That Pope Francis died after Easter and before Divine Mercy Sunday is most appropriate, if not Providential.  If any pope can be identified as the Pope of Divine Mercy, it is Pope Francis.  One of Pope Francis’s analogies for the Catholic Church was that of a “field hospital' which helps the suffering and marginalized through love, mercy, and charity.  Well, goodness gracious, the first reading from the Divine Mercy Sunday lectionary in Year C is this from Acts of the Apostles:

 

Many signs and wonders were done among the people

at the hands of the apostles.

They were all together in Solomon’s portico.

None of the others dared to join them, but the people esteemed them.

Yet more than ever, believers in the Lord,

great numbers of men and women, were added to them.

Thus they even carried the sick out into the streets

and laid them on cots and mats

so that when Peter came by,

at least his shadow might fall on one or another of them.

A large number of people from the towns

in the vicinity of Jerusalem also gathered,

bringing the sick and those disturbed by unclean spirits,

and they were all cured.  (Acts 5:12-16)

 

There is Peter at the head of the “field hospital,” navigating the actions for the cure of those disturbed by unclean spirits!

 

“God is living in our cities. The Church is living in our cities. God and the Church living in our cities want to be like yeast in the dough, to relate to everyone, to stand at everyone’s side, proclaiming the marvels of the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Eternal Father, the Prince of Peace.”—Pope Francis, Homily in New York City, 25 September 2015

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Did I have political disagreements with Pope Francis?  Of course.  I am a conservative and Pope Francis was I think innately a Liberal.  I am a free market capitalist.  I support being tough on criminals.  I want to restrict immigration to just the essential and minimum.  I am skeptical about accommodations with communist regimes.  I support the strengthening of the military in a world where power is used for evil reasons.  Did it really matter Pope Francis might have a different view on these issues?  I don’t think so.  He was the Holy Father and I was not, and in time I listened as a good Catholic should, with docility and respect. 

I cannot say that for his critics, some of whom would bring up my beloved patroness, St. Catherine of Siena as a critic of the pope in her day.  But here is the difference.  St. Catherine of Siena chided Pope Gregory XI in private conversations and in direct letters.  She never criticized Pope Gregory XI in public. 

Have I modified my views in the twelve years of Pope Francis’ papacy?  In thinking it over, though I am not sure if I can attribute it all to Pope Francis, I would have say yes.  I’ve come to the understanding that there must be some sort of accommodation for the lower economic earners in a free market economy; justice cannot be totally achieved by the harshest retributions; I no longer support the death penalty; human dignity must always be upheld; some immigration is charitable and compassionate, and morally required for those escaping human rights violations; use of the military must be implemented with caution and humility.  Over these twelve years I’ve gravitated closer to what President George W. Bush called “compassionate conservatism.”  I think the Holy Father had a hand in that evolution.

Perhaps where Pope Francis influenced me the most was on recognizing the dignity in every person.  Yes, I intellectually, abstractly knew that before, but did I understand it in my bones?  I think in his various papal writings, Pope Francis shaped me to understand it in the encounter with others. 

 

The heart of Christ is ‘ecstasy,’ openness, gift, and encounter. In that heart, we learn to relate to one another in wholesome and happy ways, and to build up in this world God’s kingdom of love and justice. Our hearts, united with the heart of Christ, are capable of working this social miracle”—Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos

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If there is a single theological doctrine I most associate with Pope Francis, it is his “culture of encounter.”  Yes, I raise what appears on the surface to be a simple exhortation to a profound Christocentric idea.  Pope Francis spoke often on this culture of encounter, so I don’t know if I’m quoting from the fullest explanation, but these are the ones that came up in my search.  He made the first exhortation in his homily at Pentecost shortly after being selected in 2013.  From the Address from the Holy Father on 18 May 2013, he exhorts that the Church must be ready to step out:  

 

In this “stepping out” it is important to be ready for encounter. For me this word is very important. Encounter with others. Why? Because faith is an encounter with Jesus, and we must do what Jesus does: encounter others. We live in a culture of conflict, a culture of fragmentation, a culture in which I throw away what is of no use to me, a culture of waste.

Notice the mirrored complexity of that thought: In going out to meet the poor, to use an example, we go out to meet Jesus, and in so meeting Jesus, we, in turn, become Jesus meeting the poor.  This is aligned with the homily he gave in NYC I quoted above, going out to the city because Jesus is in the city.  Jesus is there in the poor.

There is also a meditation from the Vatican documents on Pope Francis homily on 13 September 2013

 

An invitation to work for “the culture of encounter”, in a simple way, “as Jesus did”: not just seeing, but looking; not just hearing, but listening; not just passing people by, but stopping with them; not just saying “what a shame, poor people!”, but allowing yourself to be moved with compassion; “and then to draw near, to touch and to say: ‘Do not weep’ and to give at least a drop of life”. Pope Francis used these words in his homily to describe the message contained in the liturgical readings of the Mass he celebrated at Santa Marta on Tuesday morning.

 

Focusing in particular on the scene of the widow of Nain, from the Gospel of Luke (7:11-17), the Pope highlighted that this passage from “the Word of God” speaks of “an encounter. There is an encounter between people, an encounter between people who were in the street”. And this, he commented, is “something unusual”. In fact, “when we go into the street, every man thinks of himself: he sees, but does not look; he hears, but does not listen”; in short, everyone goes their own way. And consequently “people pass each other, but they do not encounter each other”. Because, Pope Francis clarified, “an encounter is something else” entirely, and this is “what the Gospel today proclaims to us: an encounter between a man and a woman, between an only son who is alive and an only son who is dead; between a happy group of people — happy because they have encountered Jesus and followed him — and a group of people who weep as they accompany the woman”, who is a widow and is on her way to bury her only son.

There is too much in that meditation to quote, but to further develop Jesus’s encounter with the widow and her son, Pope Francis points out the typology of the encounter:

 

“The only son who is dead resembles Jesus, and he is transformed into an only son who is alive, like Jesus. And Jesus’ action truly shows the tenderness of an encounter, and not only the tenderness, but the fruitfulness of an encounter. ‘The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus returned him to his mother’. He did not say: ‘The miracle has been done’. No, he said: ‘Come, take him, he is yours’”. That is why “every encounter is fruitful. Each encounter returns people and things to their place”.

And thus in so many of Jesus’s encounters in the Gospels—the Good Samaritan, the woman at the well, the woman to be stoned for adultery, the lepers and those possessed by demons—Jesus is moved and does more than just pass by. 

Thomas J. Eggleston, writing for the Houston Catholic Worker, I think concisely summarized Pope Francis’s theology of encounter:  

 

With this line of thinking, Christians encounter other people in their imitation of Christ, but on top of that, the disciple encounters other people as a response to having an encounter with Christ in the first place. Francis on a regular basis has spoken of a Culture of Encounter as a goal for human society. A society that espouses a Culture of Encounter facilitates right relationship among humans and involves a spirituality that emphasizes a personal friendship with God who first encounters us in love.

This is not the typical abstract theological thinking of say a Thomas Aquinas nor Pope Benedict XVI.  This is a hands on theology of the moment, one that if I had more space to flesh out is one of an existential nature.  This is not the theology of Ordo amoris that some politicians conveniently want to quote to justify reductions in aiding the needy, but one that forces you to love those before you.  (Pope Leo XIV also weighed in by rebuking such politicians, “Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others.")  Pope Francis was a people person, a people Pope, one who saw the dignity in everyone, who as far as I can tell truly cared for everyone.

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Finally I want to end with I found a very moving tribute, a statement from Dr. David Anders on his EWTN radio show, Called to Communion.  Someone had called in with a question on Pope Francis on his April 25th, 2025 show at about the 21:33 minute mark and lasts for three minutes.. 

I transcribed what Dr. Anders said, and I present it here, removing some minor verbal ticks that an ad hoc oral expression will have:

 

“He [Pope Francis] sounded a very consistent note from start to finish through his entire pontificate, and that was that our attachment to the Gospel of Christ must sensitize us to the dignity of the marginalized, the poor, the migrant, the other, those on the peripheries—and sometimes the peripheries could be conceived of in political terms and other times conceived of the guy or the lady in the parish who can’t receive compassion in the confessional—and he always had a heart for whoever is falling through the cracks of the Church’s ministry, how we’re failing to reach them, and a deep willingness to challenge the Church’s traditional ways of doing things, habits and customs that we might be working to defend to prop up the status quo than challenging the status quo in the interest of the apostolate, and ultimately reaching souls.”  -Dr. David Anders, Called to Communion, April 25^th, 2025. 

That brought a tear to my eye.  That stands as the best statement on Pope's Francis the man and his pontificate that I heard anywhere.

May the Holy Father rest in peace. 

 

”In the Lord’s Paschal Mystery, death and life contended in a stupendous struggle, but the Lord now lives forever. He fills us with the certainty that we too are called to share in the life that knows no end, when the clash of arms and the rumble of death will be heard no more. Let us entrust ourselves to him, for he alone can make all things new!”—Pope Francis, Urbi et orbi, Easter 2025

Faith Filled Friday: Photos from the Papal Mass

I posted on my experience at the Papal Mass of September 25^th at Madison Square Garden in NYC when Pope Francis made his way in the United States.  I promised some pictures.  Here’s a photo essay of it.

Here’s Madison Square Garden with people approaching and being redirected.

And here’s the billboard for the event.

I mentioned we were queued up for perhaps a half mile.  Here’s the line trying to move forward once they started letting people in.  It became a semi disorderly swarm. 

This was the view from my seat, though I think the camera is zoomed out and makes it look more distant.  But there is the stage, a large TV monitor in front, and below you can see the lighting and TV controls.

Here’s more of a zoomed in look at the stage.  I think that was Gloria Estafan performing.

I got a zoomed in snap of the hanging crucifix. 

The monitor provided close up views with lyrics and captions.  Here’s Harry Connick Jr. performing. 

I could not get a great picture of the Holy Father rounding the perimeter in the golf cart.  It was all moving too fast.  This was the best I could do.  You can see the back of his head and waving.

DSCN1636

Zoomed in from far back and people moving, pictures got blurry, but these two kind of show his face.

The procession coming in.

With the Holy Father coming in at the end, the last one in the green.

Some pictures off the monitor.

Here’s a few zoomed in not off the monitor.

The white frocked priests up the ramped seating behind the altar made for a great backdrop.  And finally the procession out.

It really was a great experience.

The Papal Mass, Christ in the City

Friday, September 25th, was the Papal Mass and it was quite a day.  I got into Manhattan slightly after noon.  The information packet said to be there around two PM but I had no idea what the traffic would be like.  They were saying that the city would pretty much be locked down.  What I typically do when I go into the Manhattan for something or other is drive over to Brooklyn—I live across the Verrazano Bridge in Staten Island—park the car near a subway station, and take the subway the rest of the way in.  Manhattan traffic stinks and parking is impossible unless you want to pay at least $50 for the day.  I did not run into any slowdowns either on the drive into Brooklyn or the subway ride to midtown Manhattan.  So I was early. 

On my walk from the train station to Madison Square Garden, I grabbed a sausage and peppers sandwich from a hot dog stand—I didn’t realize hot dog stands sold sausage and peppers now—and a Snapple and leaned against some building while I wolfed it down.  It was pretty good, but I still felt hungry and came across a pizzeria on a side street and got a slice as well.  The pizza men didn’t even look Italian--all ethnic groups can make pizza now.  Mmm.  I wolfed that down too.  I have to say the food in Manhattan, even off the street and some side street, no-name pizzeria that’s not run by Italians is delicious. 

When I got to the Garden (New Yorkers refer to Madison Square Garden as “The Garden”) there were tons of people around, including to my surprise some Protestant evangelizers handing out proselytizing pamphlets, which I found kind of tacky.  I’m mean really, what are they thinking?  If one is devout enough to go to a Papal Mass, do you think you’re going to convert because of some street handout? 

I was still early at around 12:30-ish but I figured I would go see where I needed to enter and if I could enter I figured I might as well sit and read rather than just walk around.  Cops told me I could not enter and that I needed to go to the back of the line, a line that was building south along the avenue.  So I looked to my left and—oh—there was a line.  At the end of the block I started to get on queue when the last person said the line continued on the next block.  What?  OK.  I walked to the back of the next block, and then the next, and then the next.  I went about eight blocks down before I finally reached the end.  And within short order it kept building behind me.  I don’t know how far behind me it went but ten city blocks in New York is roughly a half mile, and I think it went beyond that.

And then we waited.  While waiting I bought a Papal flag off a street vendor, a chubby lady with a Spanish accent and spoke in broken English.  My son would love it.  Street vendors kept coming by with stuff.  I bought from a tall Caribbean street vendor in dreadlocks a rosary made of black wooden beads with an image of St. Benedict on the cross.  I bought it for my mother, who has asked for just such a rosary.  I thought the image of St. Benedict was that of Padre Pio—my mother’s favorite saint—but I realized after I had bought it I was wrong.

I did read a little while standing but then I struck up a conversation with the family standing in front of me.  It was a family of four—father, mother, daughter in her teens, and a son maybe around twelve.  The son was in a motorized wheelchair and from what I could tell was a quadriplegic.  His hair was blond and he had glasses and a studious face.  I was struck by the way his family took care of him, fixed his hair that the breeze blew out of place, adjusted his seating position, took off a jacket when it got warm.  His father even spoke sternly to him when the son insisted on something or other, just like any father might with any son.  They were from out of the City, a good hour and a half north in a rural area.  The father said they had to get a ride down since the special van he had that accommodates the son’s wheelchair was taller than standard vans, and, the other times he drove in, it couldn’t fit in the parking garages and he didn’t think he could find street parking.  It must have cost them a pretty penny to get a specialized ride down and I assume a ride home.  The mother said over the years her son had received individual blessings from their priests, their monsignor, their bishop, and now the Pope.  “Who would have thought?” she said.  “We thought the Bishop would have been the last, but then the Pope came into town.”  Their church got them tickets just so their son could attend.   The father did tell me they used to come down to New York City regularly to bring his son to a particular hospital for some sort of treatments. 

My throat just swelled with emotion for the boy.  Internally I kept praying to God to bless that poor kid.  God, may he walk some day, and God, if we can’t have that miracle, may he have a full and happy life.  Bless him Lord.  I never did ask how the son became a quadriplegic.  I assume he wasn’t born that way.  When the line started to move up we kind of got split up in the walk up to the Garden.  It became a bit of a disorganized scramble and people jumped ahead and others got angry, and I saw the father protecting his son and making sure his wheelchair wasn’t pushed around by the crowd.  Even a set of nuns obliviously cut the line.  Some people shrugged, some people were miffed.  Later, inside, just before the Mass started I came across the father and daughter seated.  I asked about the son and he said he was up at a balcony for wheelchairs with his mother.

You may ask why I’m giving all this preliminary detail but I’ll come to that later.

So finally I made it in and seated.  Oh that felt good.  That was about four PM, so from the time I got on queue to being seated was three and a half hours.  So much for being early.  I could have showed up late and gotten in just the same.  My back was hurting, and so were my feet.  Was I upset as some in the crowd were?  No.  I have always wanted to go on some sort of pilgrimage, and if I couldn’t take this burden then what kind of a lousy pilgrim would I be?  I thought for sure I would have missed the great musical entertainment that was advertised.  But no, it hadn’t started yet. 

My seat was decent, a bit distant but facing the stage—which in this case was the altar.  I was seated behind the ground level section of the Garden, in the first section of the sloping stands.  It must have been fifty yards or so, but I had a direct view and a large screen directly in front of me.

Before the events started I did go outside the auditorium and look for souvenirs.  Now I wanted something for myself.  I collect little pins that you can put on a lapel or fishing hat, and unfortunately all the Papal pins were sold out.  “All gone within an hour,” one vendor said.  I smirked in disappointment.  They did have baseball caps and several types of official rosaries, varying in price.  I liked the rosaries.  The cheapest one was $45 and it was beautiful and strong, so I took it.  I’ll have to take a picture of it for another post.

The musical entertainment was exactly those advertised, and they each performed one song: James D Train Williams, Gloria Estefan, Kelli O’Hara, Norman Lewis, Jennifer Hudson, and Harry Connick Jr.  They were all brilliant, but I have to say that Kelli O’Hara’s rendition of The Lord’s Prayer was incredible.  She was in tears at the end, and so was I.  I had never heard of her but what a voice and how she communicated with it.  If she ever records The Lord’s Prayer, buy it; it will be worth it.

The Pope finally made a startling entrance twenty-some minutes early than the 6:30 start.  He circled the ground level section in what looked like some sort of cart.  Everyone was cheering and applauding.  I could see him waving, and when I caught sight of his face he had that famous smile.  Then he circled back out and came in behind the Entrance Procession.  When he led us in the sign of the cross, the emotion hit me and I started to choke up.  You could feel the electricity in the air.

The Mass then settled down into the liturgy.  Pope Francis did the Preparatory Rites and the Collect in his broken English.  The alternate readings were read in Spanish and then English, with the Gospel reading in English, Matthew 5:38-48, the passage on loving your enemies.  The Holy Father than gave his homily, and he read the prepared text in Spanish, but there were English subtitles on the screen.  I couldn’t catch the entire gist of his homily, but I caught images and phrases.  “Light, Christ, smog, streets.”  “Living in the city.”  “The people walk and breathe.”  “A light walking in the streets.”  “Encounter Jesus.”

He was giving a homily on city life and how Christ is there amongst us in the city.  I have lived in this city since three years old, which means I’ve lived here for fifty years.  City life is all I really know.  I certainly have had a love-hate relationship with this city.  I couldn’t grasp the Holy Father’s exact message but I intuitively understood it.  Life in the city is different.  We walk by people.  We fail to see the ones who are in need.  We walk right by them or are scared of them. 

And so this is why I gave such a long introduction to this post.  I tried to capture the sights and moments of city life, the boy in the wheelchair, the family who cautiously cares for him, the rush of people jostling to get ahead in the queue, the people we bump into, the many faces we don’t even register as they stand right beside you, the frustration and anger you feel from people cutting ahead after you waited so long.  Afterwards I went and found the entire text of the homily.  You can read it here.  Here is what I think is the key passage:

But big cities also conceal the faces of all those people who don’t appear to belong, or are second-class citizens. In big cities, beneath the roar of traffic, beneath “the rapid pace of change”, so many faces pass by unnoticed because they have no “right” to be there, no right to be part of the city. They are the foreigners, the children who go without schooling, those deprived of medical insurance, the homeless, the forgotten elderly. These people stand at the edges of our great avenues, in our streets, in deafening anonymity. They become part of an urban landscape which is more and more taken for granted, in our eyes, and especially in our hearts.

Knowing that Jesus still walks our streets, that he is part of the lives of his people, that he is involved with us in one vast history of salvation, fills us with hope. A hope which liberates us from the forces pushing us to isolation and lack of concern for the lives of others, for the life of our city. A hope which frees us from empty “connections”, from abstract analyses, or sensationalist routines. A hope which is unafraid of involvement, which acts as a leaven wherever we happen to live and work. A hope which makes us see, even in the midst of smog, the presence of God as he continues to walk the streets of our city. Because God is in the city.

What is it like, this light travelling through our streets? How do we encounter God, who lives with us amid the smog of our cities? How do we encounter Jesus, alive and at work in the daily life of our multicultural cities?

And then he implored us to go out and embrace the city and all its inhabitants.

Prince of Peace. Go out to others and share the good news that God, our Father, walks at our side. He frees us from anonymity, from a life of emptiness, and brings us to the school of encounter. He removes us from the fray of competition and self-absorption, and he opens before us the path of peace. That peace which is born of accepting others, that peace which fills our hearts whenever we look upon those in need as our brothers and sisters.

God is living in our cities. The Church is living in our cities. God and the Church living in our cities want to be like yeast in the dough, to relate to everyone, to stand at everyone’s side, proclaiming the marvels of the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Eternal Father, the Prince of Peace.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”. And we, as Christians, are witnesses to this.

The media is obsessed with the Holy Father’s political issues, and I wish the Pope wouldn’t thrust himself so directly into politics.  But that’s him, for better or worse.  What gets obscured by his political message is that such a fine pastoral message as this gets lost.  The metaphors, the similes, the imagery, this was a brilliant homily, one of the best I’ve ever heard. I now recall that Pope Francis, when he was still Cardinal Bergoglio, was from Buenos Aries, the large city of Argentina.  I remember a picture of him riding in anonymity on the subway.  He knows the city.  He’s from the city.  His homily made me love New York City in a way I have never loved it before. 

I wondered how they would do communion for some 20,000 people.  If you look behind the altar you’ll see what must be over a hundred men in white robes.  Those are all priests and deacons.  The communion lines all proceeded out the auditorium and then circled back, so that it went remarkably smooth.  But the height of the Mass must have been when just before Dismissal Cardinal Dolan gave a remarkable tribute to Papa Francesco.  You can see the entire Mass on this video, but go to the 1:38:00 to see the tribute and the wonderful standing ovation.  It was a great moment.

And so it was over.  I again stopped at that pizzeria for another couple of slices before I got back on the subway.  Parishioners were on the streets and I struck up a couple of conversations.  We were all New Yorkers, and Christ was in the streets.  We all thought the experience was extraordinary.  

Pictures to follow on another post.

Personal Note: Papal Mass Update

A week and a half ago I mentioned I had tickets to the Papal Mass on September 25^th at Madison Square Garden when Pope Francis makes a visit to New York.  I also mentioned that for security reasons I had to be at the event before 2:30 PM, even though the Mass wouldn’t start before 6:30 that evening.  We were not told what we could do inside while we waited, but now that have released a list of entertainers that will perform during that long down time.  From the NY Times:

 

To persuade the thousands of Roman Catholics who will attend Pope Francis’ Mass at Madison Square Garden next week to arrive early, the Archdiocese of New York announced on Monday that the Mass would be preceded by a two-hour show with prayer and devotional music performed by stars including Harry Connick Jr., Gloria Estefan and Jennifer Hudson.

And  

The show announced on Monday, called “A Journey in Faith,” will begin at 3 p.m. Among the other performers will be Kelli O’Hara, Martin Sheen, James (D Train) Williams and Norm Lewis. The Broadway Inspirational Voices, a Grammy-nominated gospel choir, and the St. Charles Borromeo Choir will also sing. The performance will include the recitation of the rosary and the sacrament of reconciliation. 

Whoa!!!!!  Who would have thought!  God is so good! 

 

 

I guess those are all Catholic entertainers.  I know Gloria Estafan, Harry Connick Jr., and Martin Sheen are.  I’ve never heard of Kelli O’Hara, James (D train) Williams, and Norm Lewis.  Obviously the St. Charles Borromeo Choir is Catholic.  Anyone heard of those people I don’t recognize? 

Now can you imagine some people have been so slimy as to do this: 

Last week, the city distributed 80,000 tickets to the procession through a lottery. (Some of those tickets have since turned up on eBay and Craigslist, where they are listed for hundreds of dollars. The scalping has been condemned by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York, and by city and state officials.) 

There’s just no accounting for people’s morals.  Anyway I feel so blessed to be able to attend.