Pope Francis doesn’t look afraid. He smiles, looks calm and always appears to be genuinely enjoying himself. His benevolent expression is the same when he talks to American legislators in crisp dark suits, or homeless people eating lunch under a tent a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol.
At church on Sunday, the Father giving the homily mentioned that he had viewed the list of people or groups that had been invited to the White House to meet the Pope. The list included an LGBT group, nuns with sketchy doctrinal views, and others Father described as not very “Pope-compliant.”
“The Pope is going to meet with SINNERS,” the priest boomed.
It turned out that the point of his homily is that we are all sinners… blah…blah…blah… but for a moment, I wondered if he thought Pope Francis should be afraid of being in the same room with such a dicey cross-section of human badness.
I knew for certain he wasn’t afraid of anyone when he heaped public praise on the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day, that commie, pinko, subversive radical who protested wars, fought for social justice and had the nerve to say, “If your brother is hungry, you feed him. You don’t meet him at the door and say, ‘Go be thou filled,’ or ‘Wait for a few weeks, and you’ll get a welfare check.’”
Dorothy Day raised all kinds of figurative hell by caring about poor people, and for protesting fascism, racism, anti-semitism, nuclear weapons, and every war in her lifetime.
With such a long rap sheet, I wonder if the rigid, ultra-conservative members of Congress shook in their shiny dress shoes when the Pope mentioned Dorothy Day’s name in the same sentence as Abraham Lincoln.
If the President was disappointed that the Pope chose not to have lunch with him at the White House, I hope he knows that wasn’t a snub. It’s just that the Pope considers homeless people as important as a President.
If Pope Francis ever worries about what people think of his crazy, untraditional Catholic behavior, I doubt he loses any sleep over it, because Pope Francis is fearless.
Thank God.
photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/27340278@N03/8723682004″>General Audience with Pope Francis</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>