On Tenderness & Pope Francis
Earlier this month, I guided a retreat at the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth Retreat Center outside of Bardstown, Kentucky. I always ask everyone at the end to share an insight that came to them. One woman said the retreat reminded her of the importance in life of tenderness.
Tenderness. It was an interesting choice of words rather than, say, kindness or mercy. How is tenderness different? Kindness is often a reflex action. A person drops something and we reflexively reach down to help pick it up. We make space for the car alongside of us trying to cut into our lane. That is kindness. Mercy is a response to bigger needs. The homeless people we encounter, the ill, those suffering physical incapacities need our acts of mercy.
Tenderness, though, involves more intimacy. Tenderness is a practice we cultivate throughout a lifetime.
I have been thinking a great deal about tenderness watching the many retrospectives this week on the life of Pope Francis, who died April 21. We see him repeatedly reach out to embrace people in a crowd or kiss a child’s forehead. Who can forget the indelible image of him washing the feet of a Moslem woman in an Italian prison on Holy Thursday, leaning over at the end to kiss her foot?
Pope Francis was a model of tenderness. I had the privilege of meeting the pope during a private audience at the Vatican in September 2023, along with fellow oblates — lay associates of Benedictine monasteries. He was not yet using a wheelchair, but it was clear even then that it was painful for him to walk, and he leaned heavily on a cane.
I didn’t expect much more during this encounter than hearing him give a brief homily in the ornate, marble-lined room we were in, surrounded by wall and ceiling religious paintings. Instead, when the Pope sat down, he beckoned to each one of us to come up in turn and shake his hand. I will always remember the smile and nod he gave me. He had a beautiful, genuine smile. In fact, I burst into tears at that very moment, telling him how much I appreciated all he was doing for the church and our world.
The pope shook more than 200 hands that day. Nothing was hurried about the event. He patiently listened to those who took a little more time to speak with him. Only later did I learn that he did several of these audiences in the course of his day. It must have been extremely fatiguing, but he made us feel like we were the only ones that mattered that day.
As he headed for the door at the end of the audience, he turned unexpectedly and gave our group one last wave, a final smile.
These memories constitute one piece of Pope Francis’ legacy of tenderness. There is tenderness too in the many homilies he spoke and the documents he wrote.
Perhaps it was due to his Jesuit training that includes years steeped in the humanities and liberal arts, but Francis’ writings aren’t like the lugubrious, densely theological — hard to get through — pronouncements of his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. No, Pope Francis spoke plainly — and tenderly — like a wise elder, even when challenging what he called our “throwaway culture,” decrying the “backwardism” of certain clergy, and nudging all of us toward the practice of “personal encounter.”
He said people of faith aren’t meant to be “sourpusses,” but bearers of joy.
I went through some of his writings this past week and pulled out some of my favorite passages:
He famously said the church should be a “field hospital” caring for the wounded, even if it meant being “bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been on the streets.”
Regarding immigrants and refugees, a sore point right now in our society, he told the U.S. Congress in 2015, “We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories.”
He angered climate denyers when he wrote in his environmental encyclical, Laudato Sì, “The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” Doing nothing, he added, “can only precipitate catastrophes.”
He called war “the suicide of humanity” that kills the heart and kills love.
He weighed in even on the small moments of family life.
“No algorithm,” he said, “will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home.”
I will always remember him limping across an empty St. Peter’s Square in April of 2020 and the words he spoke during a Mass at which he prayed for an end to the pandemic:
“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time, important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.”
Words as true today as they were then.
In his address during the private audience, he urged those of us in attendance to transform “the very means of (our work in the world) into instruments of blessing.” There is no need, he said, “for Christians who point fingers, but for enthusiastic witnesses who radiate the gospel in life, through life.”
Pope Francis wasn’t perfect. No human being is. He called for a church that includes todos, todos, todos — everyone. Still, he missed a major opportunity to allow women to become deacons, despite initiating a study on the matter and the fact that women held similar roles in the early church.
He could have done more to curb the power of the Roman curia, expand lay oversight of church decisions and finances, and support survivors of clergy abuse. Still, he did a lot more than any one of us could.
May the Holy Spirit inspire the members of the upcoming papal conclave to find a worthy successor in the spirit of Pope Francis, one that will lead the church forward, not backward.
This week, can we seek to put into practice Pope Francis’ teachings? Can we imitate his model of tenderness, wherever we are, with whomever we meet?
