The Radical Vision of Jesus: How Pope Francis Lives His First Encyclical

By Bishop John Wester

One of the numerous surprising moments of Pope Francis' young pontificate was the announcement that on Holy Thursday, March 28, he would celebrate the Mass of the Lord's Supper at Rome's Casa Del Marmo Youth Detention Centre. There, in an unforgettable moment, he washed the feet of 12 young inmates. In anticipation of the pope's visit, one of them said, "At last I shall get to meet someone who says he is my father!"

This observation captures the power of the pope's gesture. "True power is service," Pope Francis said in his inaugural homily and later on Twitter. And the power of this particular act of service is that it cast a light where there was darkness, a light that allowed a young person the world had forgotten to experience a father's love for the first time.

In Pope Francis' first encyclical, Lumen Fidei (Light of Faith), published July 5, the pope says that faith is a light that comes directly from an encounter with God. "The light of faith is unique," the pope writes, "since it is capable of illuminating every aspect of human existence."

This includes the past and all the people who have walked the path of faith before us, but also the promises for the future that God makes and keeps because he is faithful. And of course it includes Jesus, the embodiment of God's fulfilled promises.

"Faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus himself sees them, with his own eyes," Pope Francis writes. Christ's way of seeing the world "enables us to grasp reality's deepest meaning" and constantly guides us toward God. It is through this experience of Christ that our lives become "radically open to a love that precedes us, and love that transforms us from within, acting in us and through us in radical, often surprising ways."

It's not a stretch to think that Pope Francis washed the feet of the young inmates because he sees the world with the radical vision of Jesus, who sees that God loves these inmates as much as he love any other person. It also reflects the call of Jesus to serve those at the margins.

Like a light shining forth, faith makes a person go forth into the world. A person of faith must be ready "to come out of himself and find the God of perpetual surprises," Pope Francis writes. Even the Ten Commandments, he writes, aren't about rule keeping so much as "concrete directions for emerging from the desert of the selfish and self-enclosed ego in order to enter into dialogue with God, to be embraced by his mercy and then to bring that mercy to others."

Those who believe in the light of faith, he says, come to see themselves as members of a body, in an essential relationship with others. This relationship goes beyond powerful symbolic gestures like washing feet and applies the same love to big-picture issues like just economic systems, care for creation and forgiving one another. But little gestures are vital, because they allow the light of faith to spread, even reaching places it hasn't been for a long time or maybe has never been before.

Whether it's his Holy Thursday Mass in prison or the July 8 Mass for migrants on Lamedusa Island, how many people have responded to the gestures of Pope Francis with surprise, followed by an enthusiasm for faith and even an openness to Christ and his Church that wasn't there before? What a perfect example for the Church during the Year of Faith. The light of faith is powerful enough to help the whole world to see like Jesus.

Bishop Wester is bishop of the Diocese of Salt Lake City and chairman of the Communications Committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

(CNS Photo/L'Osservatore Romano via Reuters)

Catholics Care. Catholics Vote: Keeping Love in the Debate

Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the bishops' call to political responsibility, is a high-profile document. One reason is that it deals with issues that have major ramifications for the lives and well being of people everywhere. Another is that it provides a guide for the intersection of the values of faith and the world of politics, certainly a tall and delicate order. But another reason it draws so much attention is probably the fact that it covers an area--politics--that everyone likes to fight about.

People like having their arguments validated. And what greater validation is there than to be able to say that the bishops--and by extension, God--agree with this political view or that? This gives rise to regarding Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship not as a guiding tool for understanding Church teaching and forming one's conscience by it but like a Catholic Rubik's Cube with a secret code to crack, a code that provides the definitive Catholic ideological view. And from such a vantage point, of course, a person is then free to attack every other ideological view and the people holding them.

And therein lies a problem. Catholics have a duty to be advocates for issues affecting the common good, both at the ballot box and year round. But they also have a duty to carry out this advocacy in a way that's worthy of their faith. This means not giving into the cultural mentality that it's okay to engage in the scorched earth, zero sum game that American politics have become. In Catholic teaching, ends do not justify means.

In a video on civility in public discourse (part of a series of videos promoting Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship), Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington lists "falsehoods, lies, distortions, half-truths" among the sort of things Catholics should not be saying/spreading. He instead challenges Catholics to "speak the truth with love."

In the worlds of cable news, the blogosphere and comment boxes, both parts of this can be a challenge. Even when one manages to find the truth, there's the added challenge of not using it as a license to be a jerk.

Pope John XXIII famously reiterated a guiding principle that has been attributed to St. Augustine and others: "In essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity." While the first two items fuel endless debate as to what's essential and what's doubtful, "in all things, charity" trumps the rest. The Christian can never stop loving, even when engaging in intense debate over life-and-death issues. The person who does so risks becoming, in the words of St. Paul, a banging gong or clashing cymbal, something that gets attention by being loud and obnoxious, but ultimately lacks meaning or the ability to connect to people.

When Pope John Paul II canonized Edith Stein in 1998, he recalled that she went so far as to insist, "Do not accept anything as truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth."

As Catholics engage the world of politics in 2012, they should view the truths of the Church from the perspective of love: Catholics care about immigration reform because they love immigrants. Catholics care about threats to human life because they love the unborn, the sick and the elderly. Catholics care about marriage because they love the family. Catholics care about religious freedom and domestic poverty because they love the poor and vulnerable and want to serve them freely. Finally, Catholics care about world peace because they love every person on the planet as part of one big, interconnected family.

The sheer importance of the Church's belief in the dignity of each person is what compels Catholics to take their faith into the public square. It follows then that this belief, essentially "Love thy neighbor," should also be translated into how Catholics treat the people they encounter in the public square, even fellow Catholics, no matter how heated the discussion or sharp the disagreement.

It's a challenge to live up to the standard first mentioned in the Gospels: that the rest of the world would recognize the followers of Jesus by their love.