Pope Francis’s Gift and Challenge to Jesuit Education

On Monday, July 8, 2013, barely four months into his papacy, Pope Francis held Mass on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. The altar at which he presided over the Eucharist that day was constructed from a small fishing boat, a symbol of the vessels that had carried refugees from the continent of Africa whose desperate journeys to flee poverty and violence in their home countries had too often ended in mass drownings.

Aware that the whole world was watching, Francis did not mince words in his homily. “Vehicles of hope,” he said of the boats, “had become vehicles of death.” He felt compelled to come to Lampedusa “to pray and offer a sign of my closeness” to those nameless migrants and to the many residents of the island who served the needs of those who made it to their shores. Yet he also came “to challenge our consciences lest this tragedy be repeated.”

This two-fold message—first, the importance of drawing near and offering consolation to suffering people, and second, the urgency of stirring the world’s conscience, of condemning what he called the “globalization of indifference”—would become the keynote of Pope Francis’s leadership for the next 12 years.   

I was especially moved by his lament at Lampedusa that “no one in our world feels responsible,” that “we have lost a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters.” The “culture of comfort” that so many in the developed world take for granted “makes us insensitive to the cries of other people, makes us live in soap bubbles which, however lovely, are insubstantial; they offer a fleeting and empty illusion which results in indifference to others.” Including himself among the guilty, Francis said, now becoming quite animated, “We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!”

As a professor at a Jesuit university, Pope Francis’s words and symbolic actions have never ceased to challenge me and my colleagues with hard questions. To what extent does the culture of a university—even a Catholic one—risk becoming like a room full of soap bubbles, each in our various disciplines drifting through purified air, far removed from the vulnerability and messiness of day to day life for so many people? In another provocative image, Francis described his vision of the church as a “field hospital after battle.” What would it mean to take such images seriously as models for the public role and mission of a Jesuit Catholic university? How to educate our students so that they aspire not to live in soap bubbles but to break free of them? 

To open ourselves to one another across all manner of cultural, religious, economic, and political differences; to move toward those who experience the world differently, and not run away or hold “them” at a safe distance; to strive to build in every part of the university curriculum what Francis called “a culture of encounter,” requiring our students to get out and beyond the classroom in their learning. Such aspirations have nothing to do with political correctness or the so-called liberal agenda. For people of faith, as Pope Francis taught us, it is to seek nothing less than our greater joy and flourishing in the encounter with Christ in others. In the words of St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, it is to seek and to find God “in all things.”

This brings me to a second lesson we might take from Pope Francis that I believe is essential for a Jesuit Catholic education, which is the habit of deep listening, and listening implies the practice of silence. As St. Ignatius counseled his Jesuit companions, “Be slow to speak, and speak only after having first listened quietly, so that you may understand the meaning, leanings, and desires of those who do speak. Thus, you will better know when to speak and when to be silent.”

In his own inimitable way, Pope Francis modeled a listening church, a style of leadership quick to encourage, eager to uplift, and slow to judge – and never to judge without first seeking to understand the person before me. By contrast, he decried what he called the “culture of the adjective,” our tendency to attach labels to people or whole communities so as to dismiss and demonize them. He challenged us to set aside ideologies and to see the person first as a child of God, to draw near in dialogue and friendship, so that we might “name people with their real name, as the Lord names them, before categorizing them or defining ‘their situation.’”

When I teach on difficult topics such as race relations in the United States and movements for racial justice, my first goal with students is to create the conditions for the possibility of deep listening on all sides, so that we might be able to hear “the meaning, leanings, and desires of those who speak.” This implies an atmosphere of mutual trust, and a willingness both to speak and to listen, to remain open, to withhold judgment, to be comfortable with silence. Needless to say, building a genuine culture of encounter takes time, patience, humility, and not a little grace when someone says the “wrong” thing—knowing that next time it will probably be me.

Today we inhabit a culture without mercy on all sides of the political spectrum that seems incapable of taking the time for genuine learning, for sharing wisdom across diverse experiences and cultural perspectives—not a bad description, by the way, of a healthy democracy. From left to right, politicians and pundits, influencers and, yes, academics, too often rely on a set of predetermined talking points to do the work for us, categorically, quickly, neatly, without the fuss of taking the time to listen and dialogue with the person across the table, much less to ask what God might be trying to teach us through another community’s perspective.

Looking back to his years as a parish priest among the poor in Argentina, Francis himself had to learn how to meet people where they are, to listen and offer counsel from a place of empathy and understanding of a person’s whole situation and social context. This has nothing to do with being “woke,” of course, and everything to do with love, the compassion of the Good Samaritan. It is by no means easy, but who would suggest that following Jesus is easy? Pope Francis certainly never did. And yet, the Gospel was clearly the source of his great joy. Why not ours, too?

For me and my colleagues in Jesuit higher education, this is the gift and the challenge of Pope Francis. “No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us through the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community.” In word and deed, he taught us that wherever the web of relationships is straining to the breaking point, we must break free of our soap bubbles in order to draw near, to listen deeply, and engage reality anew. God speaks from within the heart of the people.