A quiet warning to the church and society

On January 13, 2017—my 50th birthday—through a series of providential and unexpected turns, I received an unexpected present. I was invited to meet Pope Francis to discuss a subject close to his heart: The Economy of the Poor.

Today, on the day of his transitus, as some believers call it, I find myself remembering that extraordinary encounter.

I don’t come from a Catholic background, yet this man welcomed me warmly. He was the first Pope from Latin America. The first Jesuit Pope. A member of an order founded by Ignatius of Loyola to counter the Reformation—yet one that, ironically, came to embody many of its core principles. Perhaps that’s why, for centuries, the Jesuits were viewed with suspicion within the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps that’s why it took until Pope Francis for one of them to ascend to the papacy. Perhaps that’s also why I often felt a kind of elective affinity with this different kind of pope—a man with a heart for the poor.

I remember his gaze. The light that seemed to surround him—even as darker forces circled near. And I remember his first Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, issued on November 24, 2013—a prophetic text, a call to courage and compassion. I’ve shared a few excerpts below.

As I reflect on his passing—on the Monday of Passover, a day that commemorates the Jewish exodus from Egypt and, for Christians, echoes the mystery of death and resurrection—I can’t help but see meaning in the timing of J.D. Vance’s visit to Rome.

The newly appointed U.S. Vice President—a recent convert to Catholicism—chose to spend Easter there with his family, just hours before Pope Francis drew his final breath. He was, in all likelihood, one of the last people to meet him.

Coincidence—or a calculated political gesture cloaked in symbolism, meant to influence the Church’s future direction?

What’s certain is that the politics Vance represents stand in stark contrast to the heart of Pope Francis’s message: care for the poor, a Church that welcomes everyone, solidarity with the marginalized, the refugees, and the displaced—and an economy, the Economy of Francesco, designed to serve people, not the other way around.

Was it simply the disgraceful act of a brute—showing no reverence for the final hours of a dying man—seizing fragments of his aura to feed the image of a would-be autocrat cloaked in false piety?

Or was it something deeper?

A final warning, whispered like a last breath— that the Church must resist the temptation of “the appearance of godliness while denying its power,” as St. Paul wrote to Timothy, his spiritual son, in the first century of our era.

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Excerpt from Evangelii Gaudium, the Apostolic Exhortation by Pope Francis (2013)

If there is something that should truly trouble us and awaken our conscience, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters live without the strength, light, and consolation of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to welcome them, without a horizon of meaning and hope.

For this reason, I desire a Church that is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but through their own suffering they know the suffering Christ. We must allow ourselves to be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to recognize the saving power present in their lives and to place them at the center of the Church’s journey. We are called to discover Christ in them, to lend our voices to their causes, to be their friends, to listen to them, to understand them, and to embrace the mysterious wisdom that God wishes to communicate to us through them.

It is essential to pay attention to new forms of poverty and vulnerability, in which we are called to recognize the suffering Christ—even when this brings no immediate or tangible benefit: the homeless, the addicted, refugees, indigenous peoples, the elderly who are increasingly isolated and abandoned, and so many others. Migrants present a particular challenge to me, for I am the pastor of a Church without borders, a Church that sees itself as the mother of all. Therefore, I urge nations to adopt a generous openness, one that, instead of fearing the loss of local identity, is capable of creating new cultural syntheses.