Like many Catholics this past Easter Monday, I woke up with the sense of renewed hope and purpose that the season of the Resurrection brings. However, I was immediately thrown back to the grim solemnity of Lent when I turned on my phone and read of Pope Francis’ passing. His recent illness had warned us of this possibility, but I was not ready to let go of this pope.
As day slowly dawned, my social media feeds were inundated with expressions of profound grief and sorrowful disbelief lamenting our common loss. Friends and colleagues referred to him as “The Pope of Hope,” “The Pope of the Poor,” “The Off-the-Cuff Pope,” “The Smell-of-the-Sheep Pope,” “The Who-Am-I-to-Judge Pope,” “The AMDG Pope.” We exchanged favorite memories that marked his reimagined papacy and his role as a change agent. He lived at the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse instead of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican; he drove around in a Fiat instead of a luxury car; in 2013, he urged thousands of young people at World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro: “Hagan lío,” which roughly translates to “make a mess.” Pope Francis did things no other pope had done, and most of us loved him for it.
I had my own peculiar reasons for loving Pope Francis, reasons which became apparent to me on the day I met him: May 27, 2023. As the associate director of Fordham University’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, I worked with colleagues at Georgetown University, Loyola Chicago’s Hank Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage and the Italian Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica to plan a conference that would celebrate the Catholic imagination as evidenced in Catholic writers from around the world. The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination Conference took place in late May in Rome, where we welcomed 40 poets, fiction writers, artists and filmmakers to gather and to read and discuss our work in the heart of Roman Catholicism. The conference, in itself, would have been sufficient cause for celebration among us writers and artists—but then we learned the good news that, thanks to the intercession of Francis’ fellow Jesuit, Antonio Spadaro, S.J., the editor of Civiltá, the pope had written an address welcoming us to Rome and had invited us to a papal audience.
On the final day of the conference, we stood in front of our hotels and hostels in our heels and best suits, the unseasonable heat rising up from the ancient cobblestones even at 8 a.m., tried, and failed and, finally, succeeded in hailing cabs to the Vatican, survived the ride, and were led up seemingly innumerable sets of marble staircases to the magnificent chamber wherein the pope typically holds audiences. But we were anything but a typical audience. Rather than heads of state, influential religious leaders, groups of vowed religious men and women, the pope had agreed to meet with us—a bunch of scribblers.
A few among our ranks were famous: Catholic novelist Alice McDermott and legendary Catholic filmmaker Martin Scorsese, along with his extended family. (I confess some of us were almost as awed by the presence of Mr. Scorsese as we were by Francis—hence our habit of referring to the occasion as “The Day We Met the Two Popes.”) But most of us were ordinary poets and fiction writers whose work goes largely unnoticed in famous literary circles—the kinds of writers who labor away in contented obscurity, practicing our craft because it is our vocation without expectation of fame and remuneration. As it turns out, we seemed to be exactly the kind of audience Pope Francis liked best. Although the pope had been sick the day before, he had refused to cancel our audience, despite the advice of his counselors, and seemed not only happy on the day that he met with us, but positively ebullient. I wondered why this might be—and then the pope read us his address.
Address of the Holy Father
We were all profoundly moved by Pope Francis’ confession of his lifelong love of literature and his conviction of the essential role it plays in the formation of the mind, heart and soul:
I have loved many poets and writers in my life, among whom I think especially of Dante, Dostoevsky and others still. I must also thank my students of the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción of Santa Fe (Argentina), with whom I shared my reading when I was a young teacher of literature. The words of those authors helped me to understand myself, the world and my people, but also to understand more profoundly the human heart, my personal life of faith, and my pastoral work, even now in my present ministry.
The pope went on to delineate the important role of poetry and art in the lives of our fellow human beings and, in pastoral fashion, to encourage us in our work.
Francis is the most quotable of popes, and I could list many excerpts from that brief address that serve as springboards for the imagination, but I will provide just a brief selection for our consideration:
- Literature is like a thorn in the heart; it moves us to contemplation and sets us on a journey.
- Artists are those who with their eyes both see and dream. They see in greater depth, they prophesy, they show us a different way of seeing and understanding what is before our eyes.
- Art is an antidote to the mindset of calculation and standardization; it is a challenge to our imagination, our way of seeing and understanding reality. Today the church has need of your gifts, because she needs to protest, call out and shout.
- This, then, is your task as poets, storytellers, filmmakers and artists: to give life, flesh and verbal expression to all that humanity experiences, feels, dreams and endures, thus creating harmony and beauty. This “evangelical” task also helps us come to a deeper understanding of God, as the great poet of humanity.
The theory of art that Pope Francis articulated in his address was simple, heartfelt and very much in keeping with the social gospel that he preached. He called upon artists to do what they do best—to “make good trouble,” to afflict the comfortable and wake people up from spiritual complacency, to open up our fellow human beings’ eyes to the experiences of “the other,” particularly those who may be different from us, and to enable readers to see God in one another and in the creation. This latter charge was particularly significant to Pope Francis. It was quite surprising to many of us to hear him—the head of the church—articulate his desire to see artistic representations of Christ that do not conform to centuries-old tradition:
We need the genius of new language, powerful stories and images, writers, poets and artists capable of proclaiming to the world the message of the Gospel, of allowing us to see Jesus.
To domesticate the face of Christ, in the sense of trying to define it and enclose it within our preconceptions, is to destroy his image. Yet the Lord always surprises us: Christ is always greater; he is always a mystery that in some way escapes us whenever we try to fit him into a frame and hang him on a wall.
The pope’s call for an “undomesticated Jesus” acknowledged the power of the unusual—some might say shocking—depictions of Christ in literature and film. I thought of novelist Shusaku Endo’s depiction of the suffering and at times contemptible Kichijiro in his great novel Silence; of filmmaker Robert Bresson’s depiction of the abused and long-suffering donkey in “Au Hasard, Balthazar”; and of Scorsese’s depiction in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, of the vulnerable Jesus who is tempted by a vision of life as a husband and father as he is dying on the cross. All of these images of Christ defy safe, traditional depictions of Jesus, enjoining us to encounter the mystery of the Incarnation, the unexpected ways in which God permeates creation and makes himself manifest to us. As the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote, “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” and it is the artist’s role to perceive and represent the presence of God in all things.
Pope Francis trusted the imagination and regarded it as a gift from God. Instead of being suspicious and fearful of its power, he urged artists to follow the promptings of the imagination, to allow it to take them where it will, even when it leads them to dark places. To fail to do so would constitute a rejection of what Francis called the “superabundant” nature of the imagination and of the divine. The experience of art is akin to the experience of God, “always superabundant, like a continuously overflowing basin.” Neither can be contained.
The Ignatian imagination
This trust is very much in keeping with St. Ignatius Loyola’s theory of the imagination. When St. Ignatius created the Spiritual Exercises, the method of prayer he designed to help his fellow Jesuits and other followers of Jesus cultivate a deep and personal relationship with Christ, he encouraged them to use their imaginations to place themselves in scenes from the life of Jesus. Many of those scenes depict moments of joy and consolation—the nativity, the raising of Lazarus, the Resurrection. However, many are also harrowing scenes of sorrow and desolation, as embodied in Christ’s arrest, torture and death on the cross. St. Ignatius was not only a saint, he was a poetic genius—for this is exactly how poets and artists create our work. We immerse ourselves in events of the past, conjure the world of the strange and unfamiliar, imagine ourselves into the lives of people and places outside of ourselves and our own limited experience, in an effort to explore and try to understand the human condition. There is no limit to where the imagination can and should take us.
In order to see the truth of this, we need only consider Francis’ favorite writers—chief among them the poet Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy spends just as much time exploring the dark and dreadful regions of the Inferno as it does the healing spaces of the Purgatorio and the perfection of the Paradiso. Dante’s pilgrim makes the archetypal journey from a state of sin and spiritual despondency through the painful process of purgation, leading to forgiveness and redemption. Dante doesn’t turn his face away from the darkness, nor can any artist who is true to the experience of the human. In fact, the most (in)famous episodes in Dante’s poem are his fearful depictions of the sinners in Inferno, who are trapped and warped by their love of their own sins. We are fascinated by them because there is something of them in each of us. In revealing their darkness to us, Dante reveals our own.
Pope Francis’ address to us that day was but one of several significant documents in which he expressed his devotion to art and literature and the important role it plays for not just Catholics, but all human beings. Among these are his letter celebrating the 700th anniversary of Dante’s Divine Comedy and his recent letter on the role of literature in moral formation.
In these accessible essays, Francis expressed in greater depth many of the ideas featured in his address. I have read them and appreciate them. But hearing Pope Francis read this address to us, with his disarming charm and his signature humor, and witnessing his generosity afterward in greeting each of us personally, giving us the gift of a brief conversation with him along with a rosary, transcended any experience I might have with a written text.
The pope’s Missa
When I finally approached Pope Francis, I took his outstretched hand and told him how much I have treasured his gifts to the church and the world, and he responded, as he does to all of the pilgrims who seek him out, “Pray for me, and I will pray for you.” I then handed him two of my poetry books, one of which is titled “Saint Sinatra.” The cover features Frank’s mugshot superimposed over Fra Angelico’s “The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs.” The pope laughed heartily. For whose gifts are more superabundant than Fra Angelico’s and Sinatra’s?
Leaving that magnificent room within the walls of that magnificent palace that is the Vatican, I felt as if we all had shared a rare moment of closeness and communion, with one another as artists who usually work in solitude, and with this sick, elderly pope who had opened up his doors and his heart to us. We shared a glimpse of our common humanity, and then we walked out into the hot streets of Rome and went home.
