We could feel the excitement in the air. When Francis stopped unexpectedly right in front of us that night, the screaming crowd around us surged forward with a groan, causing a screaming woman at the front to pass out from excitement. Paramedics loaded her onto a nearby ambulance.
The pope gave several public talks every bit as electrifying as his personal interactions, delivering the exhortations in a form of Spanish so clear that almost anyone could understand him just by listening to the tone of his words and watching his body language.
Go to the margins, Francis kept saying in Spanish, repeating it in his talks and in the closing Mass homily. See whom you find and hear what they have to say. Share the joy of your faith, using words if necessary.
Who was on the margins in Rio? What did they have to say to our group? And what could we possibly offer them in return?
Even as our South American pilgrimage was ending, our journey to God was only beginning.
Waking Up to Poverty
But back to Copacabana Beach, where we slept before the papal Mass. When I awoke on the beach that morning, shivering in my black Jesuit cassock and poncho in the winds of Brazil’s summery winter, something felt wrong. The sky above my head was still dark. I wasn’t supposed to be up yet.
Forcing myself into a sitting position, I suddenly realized the freezing tide of the ocean had washed over half of our group. Another Jesuit was shouting for everyone to wake up and move.
It turned out that our group — like hundreds of others along the shoreline — was sleeping too close to the water’s edge for high tide.
That tide washed away some personal items and all of our boxes of food, but it failed to sweep away any freshmen, despite jokes to that effect from a few upperclassmen. It was sometime after 3:00 a.m., and most of our fellow pilgrims remained fast asleep.
After taking stock of our losses, we moved to the roadside sidewalk at the edge of the beach to dry out and close our eyes for the last few hours of darkness before Pope Francis came for Mass.
Clark Bulleit, a football player who eventually became valedictorian of his class, later described this day as the happiest moment of his life. In his valedictory address at graduation in May 2015, Bulleit said:
So what does make me happy? Long walks on the beach and beautiful sunsets? No. Actually, the time in my life where I was most happy, I was sleeping on the sidewalk, dehydrated and malnourished during my trip to Brazil for World Youth Day. I was happy because, there, I was completely unconcerned with myself, and in full communion with my fellow people and God himself.
Pushed to the edge of his personal limits, Bulleit had somehow realized his longing for God in this moment, and he woke up on the sidewalk in a deep state of consolation.
Not all of us slumbered so peacefully. Despite all of my Jesuit mind tricks, I couldn’t go back to sleep again after we moved from the beach.
Huddled on the sidewalk, I surrendered myself instead to the various thoughts drifting through my mind. Trying to forget the pin pricks in my back caused by sleeping on the sand, I began meditating on the events of our trip.
At sunrise a few hours later, I suddenly recalled the question my student had asked me in March. “What if the next pope is a Jesuit?”
Yeah, right, I remembered thinking. What if pigs could fly? God sure does have a sense of humor.
The thought occurred to me that, had I seen Pope Francis riding the Buenos Aires subway during his time as archbishop, I might not have paid any attention to him. But now he was the Vicar of Christ, the successor of St. Peter, preparing to celebrate Mass with three million of us on a cold and windy beach that would soon be bathed in a warm sunlight.
Had I seen Jesus Christ on the subway in Rio that week, I’d like to think I might have recognized him. But I’m not so sure. As St. John the Evangelist knew, it’s hard to see the invisible God until we recognize him in our visible neighbors.
Even St. Thomas the Apostle struggled to recognize the risen Christ in the witness of his brothers and sisters.
As I thought about these things on the sidewalk, it occurred to me that common desires had kept our group together in Rio: our shared longings for food, shelter, medicine, transportation, and dry clothing. Like the residents of the slum Francis visited, we lived in constant need, isolated within a country that didn’t really see or understand us. While we didn’t suffer as deeply as the city’s poor, we felt closer to God’s people in our experiences of deprivation of things we normally took for granted — things such as hot showers, drinkable water, climate control, and readily available food. But it also struck me that there were deeper longings, hidden beneath the surface, uniting our hearts and minds on pilgrimage: God’s longing for us, our longing for God, and our longing to bring God’s love to others.
Although we had traveled to South America to see Pope Francis, we gradually realized it was Jesus Christ himself who awaited us there. On this journey to God, we immersed ourselves wholeheartedly in the experience, stirring the deepest desires of our hearts. And we started to see how God was responding.
As Pope Francis emphasizes, to long for God makes us long to share God’s love with others. This longing conjures up deep emotions in all of us, particularly surrounding our experiences of sin and grace.
Sin, the Obstacle That Distorts Our Longing
For Francis, who often talks about the reality of the devil, sin and grace are more than ideas in a book. In his view, deeply rooted in his Catholic and Jesuit traditions, sin and grace manifest themselves within us as attitudes of selfishness and love. While sin diverts our longings to self-centered goals, grace fuels the longing for God that empowers us to go to the margins as missionaries.
How do Catholics understand sin? Some of us look to definitions. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines sin as the “failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods” (CCC 1849). Sin “turns our hearts away” from God’s love (CCC 1850).
Building on these meanings, Pope Francis describes sin as the selfish act of hurting others on purpose. Sinful attachment turns us inward rather than outward, causing us to ignore people in need. He writes:
To go out of ourselves and to join others is healthy for us. To be self-enclosed is to taste the bitter poison of immanence, and humanity will be worse for every selfish choice we make. (Evangelii Gaudium 87)
Francis calls sin a “selfish choice” rooted in our shortsighted longings for false idols like money, sex, and power. Indeed, he has consistently rejected the false idols of secular materialism, noting that too many of us spend more time obsessing over our pets and cosmetics than caring for our fellow human beings. He adds: “The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits” (Evangelii Gaudium 57).
Here the pope evokes a key theme from his Ignatian spiritual tradition: the satanic temptations of riches, honors, and pride.
For the Jesuit founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the selfishness of sin is inextricably bound up with these three temptations to indulge our feelings of entitlement over others. Such feelings originate not in a healthy self-esteem, but in the assumption that we deserve more from life than we have received and more than others possess.
St. Ignatius notes, as does Pope Francis, that nothing is ever good enough for the selfish person, whose noble longings gradually become reoriented (disordered) toward secondary goods at the cost of our primary relationships. In a letter to a Portuguese Jesuit dated March 18, 1542, Ignatius declares that “the most abominable of sins” is ingratitude, or the habitual refusal to acknowledge the gifts God has given us.
Like the unfulfilled corporate executive, unloved by his parents and family,