Three feet was the closest I ever got to Pope Francis.
I shouldn’t have even been there.
I’d been in Italy for about three months at that point, a quarter of the way through a year-long grant with the U.S. Fulbright Commission to study at a state archive in Modena, located in the central part of the peninsula, in the long, flat plains of the Pianura Padana, the Po River valley, the Italian Midwest. I was staying outside the city proper in a neighborhood bisected by train tracks—the ones passenger trains took to travel south to Bologna, Florence, and Rome. On one side of the tracks was the industrial area, devoted to metal factories and parts development for the high-end Italian sports car manufacturers that call Modena home—Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, Pagani. On the other side of the tracks, industry immediately gave way to countryside; to fields and vines cultivated to produce grape must and, eventually, balsamic vinegar, Modena’s most famous culinary export. Next to the tracks, so close that its foundations rattled whenever a train rolled past, was a rundown and almost entirely abandoned Baroque church the size of a basilica. Neighboring the church was a monastery, occupied by the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, an obscure order started in late nineteenth-century France by Venerable Fr. Léon Dehon, whose cause for canonization was championed by Pope Francis. On the opposite side of the church was the monastery guest house, where the Dehonians hosted me and three engineering students attending university in town, a ministry they established to offer affordable and Christ-centered housing opportunities in the midst of COVID.
It’s an odd thing to go to sleep knowing your bed shares a wall with a basilica, to know that you’re so close to a place where people, for centuries, worshipped and prayed and were buried. The church was now rarely used (the monks couldn’t afford the upkeep and the Eucharist was kept in repose in a much smaller chapel in the monastery itself), but it was still something we contended with regularly. The laundry facilities, for instance, were kept on the monastery side; I viscerally remember how odd it felt every time carting my tub of dirty clothes through the church, stepping over tombs of Modenese noblemen and memorials to long-dead patrons of long-dimmed stainedglass windows to get to the washer and dryer. But it was, without a doubt, the most serene place I ever lived. In the springtime, I would wake up right before dawn for early morning Mass and see the sun rise over the mist of the dew-kissed fields, the air warm with the smell of soil and grass, the world called back from darkness by the very person whose transubstantiation I was witnessing right in front of me.
This was the seventh and last year of my graduate studies, an experience which had just about broken me. I had no idea what the future held and just enough self-knowledge to realize I’d spent so much time throwing myself into my work that I’d forgotten the things that actually mattered—the serious discernment of my state of life among them. My spiritual director at the time recommended I take the Spiritual Exercises, the intense discernment retreat composed by St. Ignatius, to offer thanksgiving to God for my time studying and to ask him for clarity in the direction of my life. Fortunately, the Institute of the Incarnate Word—who’d I encountered while working as an adjunct at the Mount—were hosting a week-long version of the Exercises in their seminary in Montefiascone, outside of Rome, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve of that year.
I went.
I once heard a priest tell me that no one comes out of the Spiritual Exercises without hearing something clear from God, and that was certainly true for me. But to cultivate the attention the Exercises require takes detachment from the world and especially interior silence, which means it’s a given that you can’t touch your phone. This was particularly painful for me as I was waiting on a very important email: months earlier, I’d been told that Pope Francis opened a limited number of tickets to the annual New Years’ Day papal Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica to international pilgrims. I’d applied extremely last minute to get a ticket and knew there was no way I’d get one, but the possibility lingered in the back of my mind with such force that I knew as soon as I opened my phone on the last day of the retreat that there would be no message; that all of it would simply have been a distraction keeping me from prayer. On the final day, the afternoon of December 31, I braced myself for disappointment, finally checked my email, and saw a message from the pilgrim’s office at the North American College in Rome, sent that morning. The Vatican had a very limited number of tickets left for the Mass the next day because a large group had dropped out at the last minute. Would I be interested in attending?
So, on the morning of January 1, 2022, in the early hours of the Feast of Mary, Mother of God, I found myself wearing my required FPP2 mask, crushed up against the side of a wooden barrier, being eyed suspiciously by Swiss guards with holstered pistols, as Pope Francis passed by me so closely that I could see the color of his eyes.
And he was so small.
It’s a trite observation, but it’s true: when you spend years of your life seeing someone on television, on the covers of magazines and journals, on movie theater screens and in YouTube videos, when you read his books and hear people debate, endlessly, the ins and outs of his thought, you forget that person is real. That he has, for instance, a height, a size relative to your own. And Pope Francis was significantly shorter than I was. He was a man, an old man. Even at that time, it was clear he was having trouble breathing and even walking. He was real. He was right in front of me. And he was tiny.
Two years later, I’d have a similar experience about a hundred feet below that spot. I was in Rome with my mother on a spring break pilgrimage, and we walked down deep into the subterranean area beneath the basilica, where Vatican archeologists worked in dark, humid conditions to unearth the neighborhood around the Circus Vaticanus which the first pope would’ve been marched through on his way to die. In one of the last rooms, a red light illuminates what the tour guide told us is a shin bone, venerated for almost 2000 years, which DNA testing and bone analysis has confirmed belonged to someone raised along the Sea of Galilee.
And it was just a shin.
St. Peter’s shin.
He too was a man. He had been alive, like me. He lived on this earth, this same earth, and touched the body of Christ.
He was real, just as Pope Francis was real.
So much of Pope Francis’s thought dealt with the problem of the local versus the universal. In Fratelli Tutti, he remarks:
Just as there can be no dialogue with “others” without a sense of our own identity, so there can be no openness between peoples except on the basis of love for one’s own land, one’s own people, one’s own cultural roots. I cannot truly encounter another unless I stand on firm foundations, for it is on the basis of these that I can accept the gift the other brings and in turn offer an authentic gift of my own. I can welcome others who are different, and value the unique contribution they have to make, only if I am firmly rooted in my own people and culture. Everyone loves and cares for his or her native land and village, just as they love and care for their home and are personally responsible for its upkeep. The common good likewise requires that we protect and love our native land.
To be committed to the common good around us means to see others, no matter where they are or where they’re from, with the same sort of love and the same sort of immanent reality that we see in our local land. To be members of the Catholic Church means that we are called to love the parish in Ghana or the basilica in Poland or the pilgrim in Spain or the beggar in Rome, in Mexico City, in Russia, in China, in Ukraine with the same love that we have for our home parish, with the same eyes that see that this person—because there is never truly a faceless group of people, but only persons, individually crafted beings made in the image and likeness of Christ for whom Christ would have made this beautiful world, that beautiful land in Modena, from nothing, and would have suffered and died on the cross for, over and over and over again, enduring his agony and death only for that person. This person has a height and a shin and a physical reality in front of you, just as Pope Francis and St. Peter did and just as Christ does, and that physical reality is good because God has made that person good, and we are called to love that person because that person bears and reflects in some special, irreplaceable, unrepeatable way, the face of Christ.
I may have been an arm’s length away from Pope Francis, but Pope Francis was, if nothing else, a man who didn’t want to keep the world at arm’s length. Neither was St. Peter. Neither was Christ. Neither should we.
