What Would Pope Francis Do? Bringing the Good News to People in Need. Sean Salai, S.J.

whenever we give free reign to our self-centered longings. It feeds our disordered craving for possessions rather than loving relationships, affirming our selfish longing for instant gratification at the expense of God and others.

      If our longing for God leads us to the margins in places like Rio de Janeiro, then our longing for possessions often fuels a lasting ingratitude that closes our hearts to others. Francis argues in his encyclical Laudato Si’ (May 24, 2015) that this longing, writ large, drives the consumerism that destroys our planet’s natural resources and exploits the poor. But he also says we can break this cycle if we turn back to God.

       From Sin to Grace

      As he showed us in Rio, Pope Francis knows how fearful narcissism dominates our hearts in a consumer society, steering our longings away from Gospel joy. But he also recognizes that we can accept our selfishness as a positive challenge, using our own painful experiences of sin’s effects as a motivation to reject its hold over us. Rather than a burden, sin can be a challenge to redirect our longings to God, reopening our hearts to his grace.

      The first step from sin to grace, as Francis reminded us in Brazil, is admitting to ourselves we are sinners in need of God’s mercy. Once we unmask the selfishness we ignore in ourselves and condemn in others, Francis suggests we can then use our experience of sin as a useful kick in the pants.

      Francis himself demonstrated this healthy self-awareness one year during Lent, going to confession publicly in St. Peter’s Basilica.

      While leading a penance service there on March 28, 2014, the pope, along with sixty-one other priests, had moved toward confessional boxes and chairs near the walls to offer the sacrament for individual penitents. But as the papal master of ceremonies showed the Holy Father to the place he would use to hear confessions, Francis pointed to another confessional nearby, insisting that he himself would be the first to confess.

      As Francis knelt in front of the wooden confessional box, his white-clad back to the congregation, photographers and videographers captured the unusual moment. Although Francis goes to confession every two weeks, even the most recent popes have rarely been seen confessing their sins to a fellow priest in public.

      For his part, the priest to whom Francis confessed was a little nonplused by having the pope as a penitent. When the encounter was finished, he grasped the pope’s hands and kissed them in reverence.

      By living only for ourselves, many of us allow our sins to become habitual and thoughtless vices, abandoning humble self-awareness as we concentrate our longings on enhancing our own sense of wealth and prestige. But the example of Francis says we can begin to overcome these selfish longings if we learn how to expose them to the world — and to ourselves — for what they really are.

      St. Ignatius notes in the “Two Standards” meditation — these standards are the battle flag of Christ and the battle flag of Satan, between which all of us must choose — that after we gain riches and honors, the Evil One tempts us more easily to pride, the sin of thinking we are better than others because we have acquired more stuff and respect than they have. Rather than love people on society’s margins as Christ does — including not only the materially poor, but also, for example, the lonely or bullied or socially awkward — we learn to despise them as much as we implicitly despise ourselves. True empathy thus becomes impossible, at least until we rekindle our longing for God.

       From Pride to Humility

      In little ways, all of us practice the sin of pride in our lives, as when we pay more attention to our gadgets and possessions than to our relationships. Or when Catholic teachers “play the professor,” as Pope Francis put it on a visit to Ecuador in July 2015, talking down to young people to feel superior to them rather than striving to reach their hearts with Christ’s transformative love.

      For Pope Francis as for St. Ignatius, our downward spiral into pride begins with our desires for money and fame rather than for loving relationships — a disordered longing for idols that is always demonic, but often grabs our hearts because we do not recognize it as evil.

      While horror movies like The Exorcist depict Jesuits as demon fighters, the devil is more than a Hollywood villain or theological concept for Pope Francis. The devil’s chief activity in today’s global society, as Francis preached it to us at World Youth Day 2013, is to cultivate a self-despairing consumerism among Christians that redirects our hearts away from God and those who need his love.

      In the pope’s eyes, only a humble awareness of our fundamental human equality as sinners in need of God’s mercy can reverse this sinful movement of our longings away from God. Once we are hardened in the selfish and ungrateful conviction that we are entitled to more than others, we risk shutting our hearts to God’s love for good, destroying ourselves and our planet in the process.

      Rather than being struck by lightning in divine punishment for our sins, Francis notes that we find ourselves miserable and our relationships in chaos when we act selfishly, robbing us of Gospel joy. Our lives become empty and meaningless because we love nothing and no one other than ourselves. It is precisely in this experience of misery that God challenges us to turn our hearts back to his grace.

       The Grace of Love

      For Pope Francis, love is the opposite of selfishness, being rooted in our longing for God and in our experiences of his grace. Grace calls us out of sin, builds upon our longing for God, and finally bears fruit in the love we show our neighbors on the margins.

      So what, then, is grace?

      The Catechism defines grace as “favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us” (CCC 1996, emphasis in original) to move from selfishness to selflessness in our lifelong path to holiness. If sin directs our longings away from the God of the margins, inviting us to seek fulfillment only in ourselves, then grace moves us outward to love those who we recognize are as incomplete as we are.