The importance of human dignity was at the heart of Pope Francis’ first trip to the U.S., Greg Daly observes
Whether or not St Francis of Assisi ever said “preach always, when necessary use words” may be in doubt, but Pope Francis was scarcely on U.S. soil before he showed the wisdom of that fabled injunction.
The Pontiff arrived in Washington D.C. on the afternoon of last Tuesday, September 22, but it was only the next morning that he was formally received at the White House, where President Obama said how he had personally witnessed how “every single day, Catholic communities, priests, nuns, laity are feeding the hungry, healing the sick, sheltering the homeless, educating our children, and fortifying the faith that sustains so many,” adding “and what is true in America is true around the world”.
“And just as the Church has stood with those struggling to break the chains of poverty, the Church so often has given voice and hope to those seeking to break the chains of violence and oppression,” he continued, before praising the Pope as an individual, thanking him for reminding the world of the importance of mercy and for supporting the rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba, and then turning to the currently thorny question of religious freedom.
“You remind us that people are only truly free when they can practice their faith freely,” he said, claiming that religious liberty is cherished in the U.S., unlike other countries where religious people are persecuted for their faith. “Believers are prevented from gathering at their places of worship,” he said, adding, “the faithful are imprisoned, and churches are destroyed,” and insisting that the U.S. stands with Pope Francis in defence of religious freedom and interfaith dialogue, “knowing that people everywhere must be able to live out their faith free from fear and free from intimidation”.
The problem, to anyone listening carefully, was that in speaking so precisely of places of worship, the President appeared to be suggesting that religious freedom is simply a narrow matter of religious worship – as though being a Christian, for instance, is something that stops once one steps outside the church door.
Pope Francis, it seems, was listening very carefully.
After thanking the President, and saying how much he was looking forward to “these days of encounter and dialogue”, he flagged many of the key themes of his visit, pointing out that “American Catholics are committed to building a society which is truly tolerant and inclusive, to safeguarding the rights of individuals and communities, and to rejecting every form of unjust discrimination”.
As such, he said, they are “concerned that efforts to build a just and wisely ordered society respect their deepest concerns and the right to religious liberty”, recalling how the U.S. bishops have called on American Catholics, “precisely as good citizens”, to work to preserve and defend that freedom “from everything that would threaten or compromise it “.
Lest anyone miss the Pontiff’s point, before the day was out he would make an unscheduled visit to a community of the Little Sisters of the Poor. The order, which runs homes for the elderly, is currently entrenched in a legal battle over how the Affordable Care Act obliges them to provide insurance for employees’ contraception; the sisters believe that even arranging for others to provide this coverage would require complicity with contraception provision and would as such be contrary to Church teaching.
As Louisville’s Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, said at a press conference later that day, far from being a narrow matter of ceremonial worship, “freedom of religion requires us also to live out our faith.”
The importance of a truly understood religious liberty was a recurring theme of the visit, most explicitly three days later at a meeting with Hispanic and other immigrants in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park.
Describing religious freedom as “a fundamental right which shapes the way we interact socially and personally with our neighbours whose religious views differ from our own,” the Pope explained how “religious liberty, by its nature, transcends places of worship and the private sphere of individuals and families”.
Religious traditions serve society primarily by the message they proclaim, he said, noting how “they remind us of the transcendent dimension of human existence and our irreducible freedom in the face of every claim to absolute power”. In this he explicitly recalled the founding document of the U.S., that Declaration of Independence which recognised man as having intrinsic dignity and rights solely by virtue of his divine origins.
Challenging those who would suppress religious freedom or deny religion a voice in the public square, he asserted that when America’s people of faith seek to serve God “by building cities of brotherly love, by caring for our neighbours in need, by defending the dignity of God’s gift of life in all its stages, by defending the cause of the poor and the immigrant,” they “remind American democracy of the ideals for which it was founded, and that society is weakened whenever and wherever injustice prevails”.
Following a parade along Washington’s National Mall and Midday Prayer with his brother bishops, the Pope’s first full day in the U.S. culminated with the canonisation Mass of St Junípero Serra, an 18th-century Spanish Franciscan missionary who founded a chain of missions in California. The canonisation Mass in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception was the first canonisation to take place in the U.S., and was said in Spanish, the first European language to be spoken within the territory of what is now the U.S., a point often glossed over by those who lament the ‘Latinisation’ of the country.
Here the Pope turned to one of his evergreen themes, that self-enclosure is a far greater danger than any that are risked by facing and embracing the world. Recalling how the Church has trodden “the dust-laden paths of history”, he observed that “the holy and faithful People of God are not afraid of losing their way; they are afraid of becoming self-enclosed, frozen into élites, clinging to their own security”.
Christians must emulate Christ in sharing his message and his presence, he explained, pointing out that Jesus embraced life as he found it, “in faces of pain, hunger, sickness and sin, in faces of wounds, of thirst, of weariness, doubt and pity”.
“Go out,” he said, “to those who are burdened by pain and failure, who feel that their lives are empty, and proclaim the folly of a loving Father who wants to anoint them with the oil of hope, the oil of salvation. Go out to proclaim the good news that error, deceitful illusions and falsehoods do not have the last word in a person’s life. Go out with the ointment which soothes wounds and heals hearts.”
If the most explicitly political moment on Wednesday was an unscheduled visit to a community of religious sisters, Thursday could hardly have begun in a more political fashion with the Pontiff arriving at the Capitol and being the first Pope to address a joint session of Congress.
Beginning by describing himself – as could so many others – as “a son of this great continent, from which we have all received so much and toward which we share a common responsibility”, the Holy Father pointed out how we all have personal and social responsibilities.
“Legislative activity is always based on care for the people,” he told the gathered politicians, “to this you have been invited, called and convened by those who elected you.”
The subsequent address would prove to be a wide-ranging and challenging exploration of what that duty of care entails, starting with an image he has previously used when speaking out against abortion: “you are asked to protect, by means of the law, the image and likeness fashioned by God on every human face”.
The issue of abortion would be raised again in the speech, explicitly when noting how the so-called ‘Golden Rule’ “reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development”, but also implicitly through reference to Dorothy Day, a glowing example of redemption and healing who had an abortion but went on to become a devout leader of the Christian Worker movement, now honoured by the Church with the title of ‘Servant of God’.
The Pope’s agenda, though, was far from limited to the issue of abortion. On the contrary, his address challenged both political left and political right, outlining what the realities of a consistent ethic of life – a “seamless garment” as Chicago’s late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin famously put it – would entail.
His description of politics as “an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good: that of a community which sacrifices particular interests in order to share, in justice and peace, its goods, its interests, its social life” should have been underlined by a section recalling the Declaration of Independence, but the Pontiff accidentally skipped over that part of the speech. It was subsequently stated that that section, stressing how we all endowed by God “with certain unalienable rights” was very much part of the speech’s authoritative text. “If politics must truly be at the service of the human person,” Pope Francis had written, “it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance”.
Calling on those gathered to “help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves,” the Pontiff supported his brother bishops in the U.S. by calling for the abolition of the death penalty, adding that “a just and necessary punishment must never exclude the dimension of hope and the goal of rehabilitation”.
Going further, he condemned the arms industry and the greed that drives people to sell “deadly weapons […] to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society”, and stressed the needs to fight poverty and hunger, to see desperate immigrants not as faceless masses but as individuals who must be met in “a way which is always humane, just and fraternal”, and to care for the world in which we live.
Holding up as role models alongside Dorothy Day – whose autobiography The Long Loneliness has since shot to the top of Amazon’s ‘political leader biography’ chart – the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Revd Martin Luther King Jr, and Abraham Lincoln, Pope Francis stressed how even allowing for “the complexities of history and the reality of human weakness”, these four were able through hard work and self-sacrifice to help build a better future.
In hailing Lincoln as a “guardian of liberty” who fought so that “this nation, under God, [might] have a new birth of freedom”, Pope Francis pointed out that “building a future of freedom requires love of the common good and cooperation in a spirit of subsidiarity and solidarity”. Given his unscheduled visit to the Religious Sisters of the Poor, this seemed to invite an obvious question: does the common good gain or lose when people of faith are forced to choose between their living out their principles and fulfilling their missions?
After lunch with homeless people in St Patrick’s Parish, the Pope flew to New York for evening prayer at St Patrick’s Cathedral, and the next morning the flag of the Holy See flew at the United Nations buildings for the first time as Pope Francis finally gave his long awaited General Assembly address.
Predictably centring his speech on our need to care for the world in which we live, the Pontiff reiterated the Church’s appreciation, previously expressed by Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, for the United Nations and the hope which she places in its activities, but cautioned against cheap ‘virtue-signalling’.
“Solemn commitments,” he said, “are not enough, even though they are a necessary step toward solutions,” because justice requires determination – “a constant and perpetual will” – and concrete steps are necessary.
Stressing that it is not enough to assuage our consciences by merely talking about our opposition to such horrors as human trafficking, the marketing of human organs and tissues, the sexual exploitation of boys and girls, slave labour, prostitution, and terrorism, he said “we need to ensure that our institutions are truly effective in the struggle against all these scourges.”
The U.N. address was followed by a multi-faith ceremony at New York’s Ground Zero Memorial, where the Pontiff anticipated his Philadelphia speech on religious freedom when he prayed for peace and said, “Together we are called to say ‘no’ to every attempt to impose uniformity and ‘yes’ to a diversity accepted and reconciled.”
After meeting with immigrant families at a Harlem school, he finished the day by celebrating Mass before 20,000 New Yorkers at Madison Square Garden that evening, and the next day flew to Philadelphia for the eighth World Meeting of Families.
Celebrating Mass for the city’s religious in the Cathedral of Ss Peter and Paul, he emphasised in his homily how we’re all called to specific missions by God, observing “one of the great challenges facing the Church in this generation is to foster in all the faithful a sense of personal responsibility for the Church’s mission, and to enable them to fulfill that responsibility as missionary disciples, as a leaven of the Gospel in our world”.
The final day of the historic trip saw Francis meeting survivors of sexual abuse; after listening to each survivor’s story and praying with them, he thanked them for their courage and hailed them as “true heralds of hope and ministers of mercy”. Describing himself as still “overwhelmed with shame that men entrusted with the tender care of children violated these little ones and caused grievous harm” he pledged the vigilance of the Church to protect children and ensure accountability, and said he was “profoundly sorry”.
Following a visit to Philadelphia’s Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility where he spoke individually with 75 inmates and their families, the Pope celebrated Mass with up to a million people along Benjamin Franklin Parkway, calling on those gathered to love each other and to celebrate their families, taking care especially of children and grandparents as custodians of the hope and memory needed to move into the future.
Finally it was time to depart and at 7:30pm local time the Pope gave his final address, thanking all those who had made him welcome, shared their witnesses, and prepared for the visit. Reminding those gathered that “we know with certainty that evil never has the last word, and that, in God’s merciful plan, love and peace triumph over all,” he ended his speech with “God bless America,” and turned, exhausted, to board the plane dubbed ‘Shepherd One’ and return to Rome.