As the world mourns Pope Francis and considers his legacy, a lot of the discussion is about borders: his insistence on the dignity of migrants and refugees who cross political borders, his troubling of the traditional borders of who is in and out of the church and its hierarchy. But the border that I’m thinking about the most is the border between faith and the world, between devotion and daily living, between doctrine and everything else. Though he faced criticism for “getting involved in politics,” Francis was insistent that faith can and should touch everything of a believer’s existence.
Though we love to see him as a revolutionary, this wasn’t a novel proposition. The 125+ year history of Catholic Social Teaching has made the same point: our beliefs about God affect our beliefs about human dignity, and these beliefs about people must affect the ways we behave personally and politically. Francis’s major contribution to Catholic Social Teaching was Laudato Si’, his encyclical on care for our common home. But this document called for more than recycling and picking up litter: it called for individual conversion, a change of heart by which we would be formed into people whose entire lives resist the abstract forces that encourage ecological destruction.
We should reset our relationship with technology so that we don’t lost sight of the primacy of human and divine relationship in our lives. We should critique our obsession with speed and efficiency so that we don’t measure people and time solely by what they accomplish in the eyes of the world. We should make space in our lives in which God might reveal to us our identity as treasured and irreplaceable children, so that we don’t rush to define ourselves by the things we consume. When our faith infuses who we are, it touches everything else. Time will tell what Pope Francis’s legacy is, but I suspect it will include the gift he had for connecting faith in Jesus Christ to the specific challenges of the world today, and his recognition that the conversion required to heal our world comes from the heart and spills out everywhere.
