Here’s a challenge to get your week off to a good start: Google “Pope Francis” and “disability,” click on Google images or Google Videos then … get ready to be moved.
You’ll be bombarded with images of Francis interacting with people with disabilities. Your challenge: Not to allow your eyes to fill up with tears and spill down your face. Maybe it’s just me, but I cannot pass this challenge, nor do I necessarily want to.
After nearly a week in the United States, Pope Francis has returned to the Vatican. His trip was full of speeches before venerable institutions and numerous moving encounters with people at the margins of society. While pundits will debate the meaning of Francis’s words, few can argue with the power of the images. I have described this phenomenon before at length. But it was on particular display during Francis’ U.S. visit.
In Philadelphia, Francis made an unscheduled stop to kiss the forehead of a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy and vision and hearing problems, which moved his mother, and many onlookers, to tears. After mass in New York City, he blessed a teenager with spina bifida in a wheelchair. Less publicly, Francis met with a group of children with disabilities at the Vatican embassy in D.C., doling out hugs and cheer.
Francis seems to seek out the marginalized — those at the beginning and end of life, prisoners, the homeless, people with mental illnesses, disabilities or disfigurements and others who are often excluded socially, economically or geographically. He often meets them before and after mass.
Francis — whose namesake, Saint Francis of Assisi, believed that the way to love the poor and sick was to become one of them — sees the Catholic Church in the modern world as a field hospital for wounded souls. He laments the commodification of human life; he decries the “throwaway culture” in which those who are no longer valued are treated as expendable.
In response, Francis has called all people of goodwill to help create a culture of encounter in which we enter into spiritual and physical solidarity with those who are excluded.
Francis’ encounters with “the least of these” usually includes physical touch — often an embrace — a few words or a blessing and, perhaps most important, eye-to-eye contact. Francis’ eyes, always focused, convey not pity but rather affection, gentleness, respect and healing.
On second thought, winning the Pope Francis Challenge doesn’t require keeping your eyes dry, but rather searching for and reflecting on the meaning behind the emotions that these images evoke. An emotional response is a sign that even the most cynical and hard-hearted among us can still be moved by genuine acts of love.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
