I am deeply saddened by the passing of Pope Francis, but I am even more grateful for his life and his witness. There have been times in my adult life where I’ve found it challenging to publicly identify as Catholic; between horrifying scandals and less than welcoming positions on certain social issues, the Church has not always made it easy to feel a sense of belonging. But from the moment Jorge Mario Bergoglio took the name Francis and announced himself by bowing to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square and asking for their prayers, it was clear that Francis wanted the Catholic Church to be welcoming.
Early in his papacy, Pope Francis declared that the Church should be a “field hospital” — one that goes out to meet people where they are, and addresses their most urgent needs:
“The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds…. And you have to start from the ground up.”
Throughout his time as pope, he lived this out in both his words and his actions.
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In the past 24 hours, we’ve seen countless testimonies to the significance of Pope Francis’ life and ministry. People both within the Church and outside of it have been lauding his advocacy for environmental stewardship, his support for the LGBTQ community, his work for peace, and his commitment to caring for migrants, the poor, and the sick.
If Pope Francis had chosen any single one of these causes to emphasize during his pontificate it would have been a cause for celebration. That he chose them all seems nothing less than the work of the Holy Spirit.
Amidst all of these profound and important ministries, one aspect of Pope Francis’ thought that spoke directly to me on a personal level was his celebration of the role of the imagination in human flourishing. In his younger days, he was a teacher of literature, and he clearly loved poems and stories. He sprinkled references to beloved poems, essays, novels, and music throughout his autobiography, Hope, and in many of his other letters and speeches as well.
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In May of 2023, I had the great good fortune to be present at a gathering of Catholic artists from across the globe who had come to Rome for a conference on the Catholic Imagination. Pope Francis addressed our group, telling us that he viewed art as “an antidote to the mindset of calculation and standardization; it is a challenge to our imagination, our way of seeing and understanding reality.” He challenged those gathered: “You are…the voice of the ‘restlessness’ of the human spirit. …Keep helping us to open wide our imagination so that it can transcend our narrow perspectives and be open to the holy mystery of God.”
In 2024 he reiterated many of these ideas in his letter On the Role of Literature in Formation, where he wrote that reading literature “has to do, in one way or another, with our deepest desires in this life, for on a profound level literature engages our concrete existence, with its innate tensions, desires and meaningful experiences.” He claimed that all Christians should read, regularly and widely, in order to expand our imaginations and therefore have fuller, richer lives.
Throughout his life Pope Francis extolled a “culture of encounter,” and he clearly believed that reading could be a form of encounter as well. He wrote, “In our reading, we are enriched by what we receive from the author and this allows us in turn to grow inwardly, so that each new work we read will renew and expand our worldview.”
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In these addresses, Pope Francis reminds us that if we fail to fully develop our imaginations then we are neglecting an essential aspect of what it means to be human. But he also challenges us to take what we read and live it out in the world beyond the page. As he wrote in his autobiography, “Life isn’t handed to us like an opera libretto: It is an adventure into which we must throw ourselves. Failures cannot hold us back if we have fire in our hearts. We must allow ourselves to encounter life and God.”
Pope Francis’ pontificate was a powerful example of the joy and the grace that comes from seeking out these encounters. May we all take inspiration from him.
