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Introduction

Joy

We do well to keep in mind the early Christians and our many brothers and sisters throughout history who were filled with joy, unflagging courage and zeal in proclaiming the Gospel. (Evangelii Gaudium 263)

“What if the next pope is a Jesuit?”

With an impatient sigh, I turned from the projector screen to identify the fifteen-year-old student who had asked me this question.

It was March 2013. Blue skies and 72 degrees of Florida sunshine awaited us outside the windows of our darkened classroom in Tampa. I, the all-knowing Jesuit theology teacher, did not want to spend much time speculating about a “Jesuit pope” during our lesson on the upcoming papal conclave. I wanted a cup of coffee.

After all, I had four more sections of freshman boys to teach that day at Jesuit High School, and we hadn’t even gotten to the white smoke. At the rate we were going, our next pope might be elected before we learned how to count the votes.

Maybe that explains why, rather than giving a nuanced answer, I loaded my intellectual guns and aimed to stop the question in its tracks.

“That’s not going to happen,” I told the kid, using my most matter-of-fact teacher voice.

Bang. I felt pretty good about myself.

But the kid, one of my favorite students, quickly shot back: “Why not?”

I sighed again.

“It won’t happen because we Jesuits take a vow to avoid positions of honor in the Catholic Church whenever possible. We don’t become monsignors, and we don’t become bishops unless the pope insists. And there’s never been a Jesuit pope. St. Ignatius didn’t want us messing around with that stuff.”

As I gave this answer, I could hear in my head all of the wisecracks from the Jesuit rec room, reassuring me in my certainty. “Hell will freeze over before a Jesuit becomes pope.” We’ve all heard that sort of thing before.

If a Jesuit cardinal wasn’t seeking the papacy, but was following the Jesuit rule to avoid politicking, there was no reason for the other 114 cardinals to elect him. That was common sense. Right?

The Election

Yet my freshman theology student, who had a soft spot for underdogs, wasn’t going to let me off the hook about the slim possibility that a Jesuit might become pope.

He spoke up again.

“Who are the Jesuit cardinals? I just want to know.”

Softening to his curiosity, I clicked through the list of cardinals on my computer and pointed out an Asian Jesuit who was not attending the conclave due to illness. Then I pulled up the Vatican website’s biography of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., the only Jesuit cardinal who would actually be attending and voting for pope. He was archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

After glancing at Cardinal Bergoglio’s photo and briefly reading some of his biography out loud, I told the class I was reasonably certain — as a fellow Jesuit — that this guy would not get elected.

My hopeful student, of course, was not so sure. He asked: “But what if it happens? What if he gets elected anyway?”

I just shrugged.

In my four remaining classes that day, I repeated this whole ritual, showing my freshmen a photo of the Jesuit cardinal and denying he would be elected pope.

According to the Gospels, St. Peter denied Jesus three times on one occasion. In five different class periods, I had denied that the Holy Spirit would ever pick a Jesuit to succeed St. Peter.

By the end of the school day, I felt pretty satisfied. We had covered the basics of papal conclaves, and I had put the “Jesuit pope” silliness to rest. Or so I thought.

A few days later, on March 13, we were watching the white smoke on a live feed in class when God decided not to heed my prediction.

“Habemus papam!”

Twenty-five teenage boys turned to stare at me in shock as Cardinal Bergoglio walked to the edge of a balcony in St. Peter’s Square, dressed in white as the newly elected Pope Francis.

Television cameras from Tampa’s FOX and ABC news affiliates, invited to record our school’s on-the-spot reaction to the announcement of a new pope, captured our joyful surprise in the theology classrooms as students erupted in cheers. They also interviewed our students in the hallway after Francis appeared on the balcony.

Asked his thoughts about having a Latin American pope for the first time in history, one of my students, whose great-uncle was a cardinal in the Dominican Republic, told ABC Action News: “I guess he’s reppin’ for us.”

I was also interviewed by ABC, and I admitted that my own reaction was “utter disbelief.”

I, like nearly every other Jesuit in the world, had been wrong on this one. Pigs were flying on the winds of the Holy Spirit. Hell had frozen over and left me shivering, dressed in short sleeves.

To his credit, the new pope on the balcony looked just as surprised as we did. After waving shyly and saying a few words of greeting, he bowed his head and asked the crowd in St. Peter’s Square to pray for him. It was a profound moment of silence that our students shared with the rest of the world through the classroom projector screens.

As chapel bells rang out across campus, the school president soon announced our first Jesuit pope over the intercom for students and faculty who hadn’t been watching it live. In my classroom, the boys snapped photos of the new pope on screen with their iPhones and sent them to family members.

The next several hours became a blur.

By 10:00 that night, I was out with another Jesuit retrieving liturgical torches and framing a photo of Pope Francis for a solemn Eucharistic benediction in our chapel the next morning.

We found an image of Pope Francis’s first appearance on the Internet and had it blown up into portrait-sized prints at Kinko’s. Then we inserted this image into an old frame, laying it flat over a portrait of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Another copy of the print was soon hanging in my classroom, astounding my students that I had obtained one within hours of the papal election.

Two more television news crews, coming from our local NBC and CBS affiliates, descended in the morning to film our school’s solemn benediction of thanksgiving for the election of Pope Francis. Yellow and white papal bunting hung down from above the chapel doors for benediction, with 750 students and faculty erupting in applause, shouts, and whistles before incense from two thuribles filled the space.

Fr. Richard C. Hermes, S.J., the school president, inspired this ovation with a memorable line before the liturgy. Stepping up to the pulpit, he declared: “Well, I’m not yet fifty, and I’ve seen snow in New Orleans on Christmas day, I’ve ridden on a camel in the deserts of Egypt, and now I’ve seen a Jesuit elected pope!”

Meanwhile, Francis wasn’t holding back from setting the tone of his papacy. He had already signaled that he would be the pope of the marginalized, calling on Catholics by his words and deeds to go out to the peripheries of society as missionaries of God’s love.

The new pontiff delivered this message with an informal and simple personal style. He mingled with ordinary people as he pleased, confusing Vatican security teams. Personally austere, he wore an unadorned white cassock over his clerical black pants and black shoes, confounding papal fashionistas.

Francis also renounced the papal apartments in the Vatican’s apostolic palace, taking up residence in a small room at the Santa Marta guesthouse. Checking out of the room where he had stayed during the conclave, he paid his own bill with a credit card.

Asked later about this decision, he said he knew with one look that he couldn’t stay in the papal apartments by himself. He needed to live around people, because, as he said, it was good for his “physical health.”

International media jumped on every detail of the Argentinian pope’s first appearances, including the selection of St. Francis of Assisi — the saint of the poor — as his namesake. Not only was he the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, but he was also the first to take the name of St. Francis, the medieval playboy-turned-beggar who founded the religious order we know as the Franciscans.

News agencies throughout the world were soon airing a St. Francis-like photo of Cardinal Bergoglio riding the subway in Buenos Aires during his time as archbishop. In this photo he wears a simple black raincoat, closed around the neck, and he looks like everyone else on the train.

Pope Francis further endeared himself to world opinion by displaying a ready sense of humor in his first audience with journalists at the Vatican on March 16, 2013.

Noting that Pope Clement XIV had suppressed his Jesuit order in 1773, plunging the Society of Jesus into near-extinction until its universal restoration in 1814, Francis joked that he had considered taking the papal name “Clement XV.”

“That way you can take revenge on Clement XIV for suppressing the Society of Jesus,” Francis reported one cardinal telling him after the election.

But it wasn’t just Francis’s public persona that won people’s hearts. The world soon discovered that there was substance behind the popular style of this man who, not long before his election as pope, had submitted his age-mandated resignation as archbishop and started planning his retirement.

A Missionary Church

Through bold gestures, Francis soon began to share the weightier message of his papacy, challenging Catholics to greater depths of belief and practice.

Within three months of his election, the new pope finished and published an encyclical letter on faith (Lumen Fidei) started by his predecessor, Benedict XVI. He elevated third-world cardinals to positions of global leadership, launching efforts to reform the Vatican’s bureaucracy. To get feedback on these efforts, he created an advisory commission of cardinals, appointing one of them (Cardinal George Pell of Australia) as his point man to oversee a financial overhaul of the scandal-plagued Vatican Bank.

In a touching gesture of respect, Francis even met with his predecessor at Castel Gandolfo, where the retired Benedict XVI prayed with him and briefed the Jesuit on his new job. The first pope to resign the Petrine ministry since Gregory XII in 1415, Benedict soon moved to a monastery on the Vatican grounds and became a familiar face at official functions during Francis’s papacy.

But perhaps the fullest revelation of Francis’s vision for the Catholic Church came in November 2013, when he wrote the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) as a blueprint for Catholics on how to preach the Gospel in today’s world. In this document, Francis writes:

Each Christian and every community must discern the path that the Lord points out, but all of us are asked to obey his call to go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the “peripheries” in need of the light of the Gospel. (Evangelii Gaudium 20)

To be Catholic, then, is to be always on mission — a worldwide mission of evangelization to the peripheries or margins of our society, where people are most in need of Gospel joy.

Rather than be “sourpusses,” as the pope puts it elsewhere in the document, God invites us to be joyful in sharing his “good news” (the meaning of the word “gospel”) with others. And God asks us to work together with other Christians, responding to the call of our common baptism, in doing so.

While this message is hardly new to Catholicism, Pope Francis’s background gives it a distinctive flavor and urgency. As a Jesuit, Francis comes from a religious order that is always on mission, regardless of whether that mission occurs in one’s own backyard or on the other side of the globe. And a spirit of Christ-centered discernment shapes this missionary perspective on being Catholic: Francis asks us, as individuals and as communities, to pray before we act.

So then what does it mean for all believers to “go forth from our own comfort zone” as missionaries to the margins? Whom do we find there? And what must we do to bring Christ’s love to the margins as a missionary church?

Rather than give blanket answers to these questions, Francis invites Christians to discern where the Lord is leading us. To get answers, we must take our questions to God in prayer and listen for his voice, asking for the grace to know God’s will and to do it in our lives. We must see, judge, and act on the Lord’s call in the context of our shared baptismal mission.

Francis, emphasizing that divine love precedes and enables our response of human love, adds that going to the margins requires Christians to first be rooted in a deeply felt knowledge of Christ’s personal love for each of us:

An evangelizing community knows that the Lord has taken the initiative, he has loved us first (cf. 1 Jn 4:19), and therefore we can move forward, boldly take the initiative, go out to others, seek those who have fallen away, stand at the crossroads and welcome the outcast. (Evangelii Gaudium 24)

So the margins include those who have fallen away and are outcast. But we Christians, as individuals and as an evangelizing community, must get our own house in order before we can bring real healing to our world. Above all else, our work must be rooted in a joyful conviction of Christ’s love for us that is genuine and spontaneous rather than merely dutiful.

In other words, each of us is called to a deep personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

As bishop and as pope, Francis has been particularly close to evangelical Christians and to charismatic Catholics on this all-important framework for evangelization. Once we feel secure in our conviction of Christ’s love for us, the pope says we will find ourselves called to move outward — not further inward — to share that love with people on the margins in a way that makes a difference. We will respond to God’s freely offered love by loving others freely.

Accordingly, while the starting point is internal, we cannot remain centered on ourselves. Even monks pray for others more than for themselves. To inspire others with the good news, our personal experience of Christ’s love must yield fruit in concrete action, inspiring us to love others through our deeds more than through our words.

In a September 2013 interview with Jesuit journals from around the world, published in multiple languages, Francis expressed this idea by saying he longed for the Catholic Church to be a “field hospital” of God’s love and mercy to people in need. As for his own role in steering the barque of Peter, the pope described himself frankly as a sinner in need of God’s mercy, just like anyone else.

Not only in this interview, but throughout his papacy, Francis has called on believers to pray for the grace to get out of our pews and shake things up by making a joyful noise. Rather than wait for people to come to our parishes, we need to go outside and meet them where they are.

Our mission to the margins is not merely a job for ordained shepherds, whom Francis exhorted in an early homily to “smell like the sheep,” but for all of us. Francis reminds us that God calls all believers universally, in the waters of baptism, to be disciples who are priests, prophets, and kings — in other words, self-giving leaders who act boldly to build a better world.

Looking at chapter 5 of The Joy of the Gospel, I believe we may discern the essence of Francis’s message in six themes that evoke his vision for a church of missionaries sent to the margins:

• Longing. The longing for God is innate in everyone — this is what we were made for, to be in relationship with God.

• Closeness. We must be close to people’s lives: “enter fully into the fabric of society”; step away from “personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune”; lead “wonderfully complicated lives.”

• Dignity. Every person is worthy of our giving.

• Weariness. When we go to the margins, we must be honest about how it affects us, transforming our fatigue into an ever-deepening outreach that is energizing and compassionate.

• Tenderness. Francis uses this word a lot. He talks about how it characterizes his interactions with others, and about how it might characterize ours.

• Mary. The Mother of Evangelization remains an ever-present model of discipleship.

Throughout the next six chapters of this book, I will follow these themes in reflecting on what it means for us to leave our parishes and go out to the margins in imitation of Christ. Then I will conclude with a few thoughts on the implications of this message for courageous discipleship in the future.

With the visit of Pope Francis to the United States in September 2015 for the World Meeting of Families, many Americans have now had the chance to see the Holy Father in person. We’ve heard his voice and read his words on going out to the fringes of society as missionaries of Christ’s love, even when it means healing the brokenness of our own families in a world of fast-changing values.

Again and again, Pope Francis urges all Christians: Go be missionaries of Jesus Christ’s love to people on the margins.

I hope this book will introduce readers to this key message in the teaching and life of Francis in a deeper way, inspiring us to more profoundly embrace the call of Jesus in our lives.

Of course, answering that call will be challenging at times. Striving to follow it in our daily routines, we might find ourselves tempted to doubt that our good news will really change the world. We may feel too beaten down by life and too disillusioned by past experiences to believe in the reality of Gospel joy.

However, as I hope the stories in this book will show, nothing is impossible with God. Not even a Jesuit pope.