There was another gun in a mall — and a school.
Another young man, loved but painfully depressed, kills himself.
There’s debt, death, pain, blindness, filth.
It’s in our politics, culture, family life.
So much of it can tempt us to despair.
And yet over the last eight months, many — of varied and no creeds — keep taking note of Pope Francis with a hopeful curiosity. They’re inspired. They’re consoled. They’re surprised.
People see him embracing the sick, living humbly and engaging people from all walks of the Church and life. People see a man of joy. And they want something of it, they want to follow. They see an evangelizer.
In his first solo major document, “The Gospel of Joy,” released last week, Francis wrote primarily about joy. He was writing specifically — although clearly not exclusively, given everyone seems to be watching him — to Catholics doing the work of evangelization. It’s a transparently pastoral document where he calls out “the gray pragmatism of the daily life of the Church, in which all appears to proceed normally, while in reality faith is wearing down and degenerating into small-mindedness.”
He exposes what he refers to as a “tomb psychology” that develops among the faithful that “develops and slowly transforms Christians into mummies in a museum.”
While Christians are “[c]alled to radiate light and communicate life,” we can wind up “caught up in things that generate only darkness and inner weariness, and slowly consume all zeal for the work of the Gospel.” In one of many themes that Pope Francis keeps repeating, he pleads: “Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of the joy of evangelization!”
These are not just words but snapshots of and exercises for a Church in renewal. The images out of Rome and his apostolic journeys that keep captivating the Internet are windows into this. During a celebration of the family this past month, a young boy ran up to and stayed with this Holy Father during his sermon; it went viral as we were enchanted by the innocence, the playfulness, and an image of fatherhood on display.
It was a refreshing, even healing, sight after priest scandals, and for a culture that seems to have lost a love of the most simple, natural gifts.
Francis does a lot of pleading. He wants people to know they are loved by a Creator; that this Father sent His Son and offers a mother who knows the deepest pain of this world as a human model of sanctity; that He never leaves us alone.
Pope Francis has become a phenomenon. Elton John praises him. The Italian Vanity Fair puts him on its cover. He’s an undeniable man of the year.
There is also some skepticism, fear and disappointment. Media and critics can run wild with two paragraphs of more than 40,000 words or a sidebar to a long conversation.
But what Pope Francis is saying to Catholics and the world is so much more than a headline about capitalism or abortion.
When he talks about meeting the needs of the poor, for instance — as he sounds alarms over our use and abuse of one another as disposable, as he warns against indifference — he is not only talking about material poverty. We are bodies and souls! And that’s the pope’s business: Changing lives and saving souls.
If we’re going to look to Pope Francis as a sage among international pundits, then we can keep looking for hot headlines that miss the point. But if we’re looking for something more fulfilling, if we’re looking for an alternative lifestyle to secularism, there is a challenge to accept.
Like any good Jesuit, Pope Francis is trying to stretch the Christian heart, so that we might live examined lives of discernment, recognizing good and evil, nourishing the former and rejecting the latter. If you actually believe Christ is God among us who conquered death, your life ought to be radically different than the frequently and epidemically low expectations we seem to set for ourselves and one another (even as we all too often have an opinion about everyone and everything).
“May God give us the grace to commit our hearts again totally to the proclamation of the Gospel,” the man we now know as Francis wrote in a reflection on hopelessness before he got called to a new duty in Rome.
This is what he is urging. This is what he is modeling. This is what we can expect more of. It’s about conversion: not to be satisfied simply identifying as “Christian,” but to be transformed by sacramental, prayerful, self¬-sacrificial encounter with Christ.
Nothing is truly Catholic without this. That’s his point.
Sin and scandal comes when this is not the heart of a Catholic life. That’s why Francis summons the world to a “revolution of tenderness.” Overwhelm the world with love, mercy and justice and we just make see how God eradicates the hopelessness which batters the human heart, robbing our lives, our politics and our culture of cohesion, coherence and joy.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online and director of Catholic Voices USA.