The Pope of Mercy and Nonviolence

It has been an eventful twelve years. I was in the office here at Giuseppe Conlon House, getting

ready to move out after seven years as a full time Catholic Worker, making plans to start a Passionist

house of hospitality in Birmingham, when I heard we had a new Pope. I heard he had chosen the

name Francis, and had asked everyone to pray for him, a sinner. I didn’t want to hope because as

football fans say, it’s the hope that kills you.

After Francis’ first Papal Exhortation was published, “Evangelii Gaudium” – “The Joy of the Gospel”, a

circular email from a well known US Catholic Worker proclaimed “Holy Cow - the week the Pope

talked like us Catholic Workers". Two examples of Francis sounding like a Catholic Worker in that

letter come to mind: he called for a ‘poor church for the poor’ and for a church that came ‘out of the

sacristy and got its hands dirty’. Looking around me at the time, I thought – maybe we’re not doing

too badly at those here. And he actively practised what he preached, by his personal outreach to the

most marginalised, and by, for example, moving out of the Vatican Palace and into rooms in the

Santa Marta guest house, among the many from the world church who come and go there.

Francis continued sounding like a Catholic Worker in his advocacy for hospitality for the poor, for

migrants and refugees, for the practice of mercy generally and the works of mercy in particular, for

active nonviolence and an increasingly strong rejection of war. He declared the mere possession as

well the threat of use of nuclear weapons to be a sin, as well as making the Vatican one of the first

states to sign and ratify the nuclear weapons ban treaty (officially known as the Treaty for the

Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW). That would have made Dorothy Day very happy,

although she might have felt a bit ambiguous when he mentioned her name among four

praiseworthy representatives of the American people – alongside Martin Luther King, Abraham

Lincoln and Thomas Merton – when addressing the US Congress in 2015.

Francis sounded like a Catholic Worker in day to day life too. He spoke off the cuff and made

mistakes and asked forgiveness as a sinner, in contrast to previously careful papal ways, perhaps

wanting to avoid the mystique of creeping infallibility. Asking forgiveness for our mistakes feels like a

regular part of CW life too: we are definitely not perfect, always trying hard to respond to immediate

situations and crises, and often making mistakes and asking for and needing forgiveness, and

struggling to give it too. Activists are strong minded and can be difficult people after all.

Possibly Francis’ most significant legacy will be his first Encyclical Letter, published in the run up to

the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. In “Laudato Si - On Care for Our Common Home”, he called us to

hear ‘the cry of the earth and cry of the poor’. His critique of the ‘technocratic paradigm’ echoed the

analysis of ‘the dominance of technique’ by Jacques Ellul, a Christian anarchist writer popular with

Catholic Workers. It sounded a lot like Peter Maurin’s call for a “Green Revolution”, but with longer

sentences.

More recently, Francis has tried to create a culture of mutual encounter, listening and dialogue in

the Catholic Church, in place of our own internal culture wars. Time will tell to what degree he

succeeded. Among the unfinished business many will list more progress on the abuse crisis and the

role of women in the church. We are praying the Holy Spirit leads us to a new universal pastor who

can find the way to continue and deepen what Francis started.

Jorge Bergoglio: Pope Francis I: Pray for us. May he rest in Peace and Rise in Glory.