"First, I kissed his hand, while he caressed my head and wounds with his other hand.”
"Then he pulled me toward him, hugging me tight and kissing my face. My head was against his chest, and his arms were wrapped around me. He held me so tightly, cuddling me, and he didn't let go. I tried to speak, to say something, but I wasn't able to: I was too choked up. It lasted just a little more than a minute, but, for me, it seemed like forever.”
It was November 6, 2013, just a few months into his papacy, when Pope Francis spotted Vinicio Riva among the faithful in St. Peter’s Square during His Holiness’s general audience. Walking over to Riva, Francis embraced him—the first physical contact he had had with someone other than family and medical staff since he showed the first signs of neurofibromatosis—a skin disorder which results in painful, itchy, disfiguring (though benign) tumors. The tumors covered his body, but most notably his face, making him difficult to look at. According to the Italian magazine, “Panorama” (from where the above quotes have been taken), what surprised Riva the most was how the Pope never hesitated before hugging him.
Pope Francis’s passing brings with it a host of obituaries and reflections by writers more eloquent than I. Others will comment on his impact on the Church and on civil society, as well as speculate on his place in history. All of that is good and necessary. But this reflection is personal to me: the Pope had a huge impact on the way I see what it means to be a Christian and…well…I want to put in my two cents.
The memories I have of Pope Francis’s pontificate begin and end with the event on St. Peter’s Square (how beautiful that he said goodbye to us there on Easter Sunday!). Like Christ, whose vicar he was, Francis made it an essential part of his papacy to reach out, with compassion, to those often rejected by others. For Jesus, they were lepers, sinners, and the physically disabled; for Francis, they were the divorced, people with same-sex attractions, and immigrants.
While I sometimes wish he would have been clearer about Church teaching in his “off-the-cuff” discussions with reporters, what was clear in his remarks throughout his pontificate was that Francis wanted people to know they were loved: by Jesus, but also by him, as an individual and as the representative head of the Church on earth.
In so doing, he reminded the rest of us that we need to be loving—to all people, regardless of how they look or smell, or whatever we might assume their moral status to be. His embrace of a disfigured man seemed to me to be symbolic of that.
Francis famously likened the Church to a field hospital. In an “America” magazine article, he was quoted as saying:
I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.... And you have to start from the ground up.
That “ground” was letting people know they are loved. Loving people doesn’t mean ignoring sin, or pretending things that are wrong somehow aren’t, or excusing evil. It means calling people—common folk to world leaders—to reform. But it also means letting them know that they matter simply because they exist. It means reflecting and sharing God’s mercy for those who need it. It means making it clear that while we may “hate the sin,” we still “love the sinner.”
No exceptions.
Francis, especially toward the end of his life, began to physically resemble his predecessor, Pope St John XXIII. But he resembled him in other, more significant, ways as well. “Good Pope John” as the former pontiff was affectionately known, was also a man without pretension. Visiting the Regina Coeli prison in Rome early in his papacy, John off-handedly remarked that the last time he had been there was to visit his incarcerated cousin. Pope Francis famously took public transportation when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires and, on the day after being elected pope, still paid out of pocket, his hotel accommodations. But more importantly, with John’s convoking the Second Vatican Council and Francis the Synod on Synodality, the two sought to bring the Church out of its ghetto and involve all the members of Christ’s Mystical Body into its mission of bringing Christ—and His love—into the world.
All the while displaying the joy that comes from knowing that love is real and accessible and that, because we are armed with that knowledge, there should be no “dour Christians.”
Both lived and modeled (as have the other popes over the past century), St. Paul’s exhortation to
Put on…holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another…And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection (Col. 3:12-14).
Francis was the third of the great triumvirate of popes that have led the Church in the last 45 years: Pope St. John Paul II, the philosopher; Pope Benedict XVI, the theologian; and Pope Francis, the pastor. Francis, never changing the essential teachings of the Church (despite stories coming from ill-informed reporters), took the work of his predecessors and “put on love,” moved the field hospital of the Church closer to the spiritually wounded and abandoned, went out among his “sheep,” ministering to them and taking on their “smell”—as he had exhorted his brother priests to do. In doing so, he showed us all what God’s love looks like.
And that each person mattered: people like Vinicio Riva.
Vinicio Riva passed away last January, knowing that he was loved—largely because a man lived out his Christian faith by sharing a simple, loving embrace. An embrace, I suspect, Riva returned Monday to his friend:
Good Pope Francis.
A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H.
