I remember the day ten years ago. It was a Wednesday. I saw the news flash that a new pope had been elected. I quickly found a television to turn on to watch the presentation of the latest successor to Peter. I didn’t know anything about Jorge Mario Bergoglio but I was excited to know that we shared a name. Then the biggest surprise:  he chose the name Francis. I knew at that time that the Holy Spirit wished to renew the Church in the Spirit of “the little poor one” Saint Francis of Assisi and promote peace throughout the world.

la iglesia en español:  I had completed by 25^th anniversary sabbatical the previous year and had as a goal for the second half of my priesthood, God willing, to include ministry to Spanish-speaking Catholics. The election of an Argentinian confirmed that I should devote more time to community and collaboration with the second largest linguistic group in the world, those who speak Spanish. After one more year in Maries and Osage Counties, I was assigned to Our Lady of the Lake in Lake Ozark. By the end of seven years, I was celebrating Mass in Spanish every Sunday, proud that I could say with my Spanish speaking brothers and sisters, that Francis is “our” pope! The teaching authority of Pope Francis and his pastoral concerns have been a rich source of blessing for me as a priest.  I’ll mention a few of the writings that have guided my own pastoral and theological focus.

Canon lawyers at the service of the People of God: At a very practical level, one of the early documents was MITIS IUDEX DOMINUS IESUS, which reformed the canon laws pertaining to cases of nullity of marriage. This apostolic letter addressed the judicial process in which the Church came to declarations of nullity. The document addressed issues that had come up in the Synod on the Family of October 2014. For me it was a great example of the affirmation of the central doctrine of marriage: the unity and indissolubility of the sacrament, while at the same time making the judicial process more accessible to the faithful. This made an immediate impact for me. By that time in my priesthood, I was encountering more and more immigrants who needed assistance with marriage cases. Previously, the annulment process needed to take place in the jurisdiction where the marriage originally took place. I had been working with a woman from Africa whose husband had abandoned her shortly after their arrival in the United States. Prior to this letter, it would have been very difficult if not impossible to be her advocate for a canonical process that would have had to take place in Mozambique, where the marriage took place.
 
The face of the Father’s mercy:  The Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy was a time of particular grace. Pope Francis was once again following in the footsteps of his most recent predecessors. Saint Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council with these words:  “Now the Bride of Christ wishes to use the medicine of mercy rather than taking up arms of severity… The Catholic Church, as she holds high the torch of Catholic truth at this Ecumenical Council, wants to show herself a loving mother to all; patient, kind, moved by compassion and goodness toward her separated children.” Pope Saint John Paul II had also placed the mercy of God as a primary focus in many ways, especially in inviting the Church to have constant recourse to the Divine Mercy of God in our teaching, our liturgies, and in our devotions. It was during the Jubilee of Mercy that my former pastorate, Our Lady of the Lake, chartered a Social Concerns Commission. We kept the corporal and spiritual works of mercy always in mind as we reviewed our pastoral, catechetical, and liturgical practices. When Bishop McKnight called all parishes to be centers of mercy and charity in the most recent Diocesan Pastoral Plan, I experienced such a sense of relief and excitement. Mercy would light the way forward through all the pastoral challenges we would face.

Integral Ecology:  One of the graces of devotion to a saint such as Francis of Assisi is that so many in so many different circumstances find in him a champion. Saint Francis is the saint for the poor. Saint Francis is the saint of friendship. Saint Francis is the saint for peace. Saint Francis is the saint of humility. Saint Francis is the saint of fraternity. But when Pope Francis used St. Francis of Assisi’s hymn of the creatures for the title of the first encyclical of his own composition—Lumen Fidei was written by Pope Benedict XVI but finished by Pope Francis—I was quite surprised. Laudato Si’,  on the care for our common home, was an encyclical on a major relationship which had not once in my theological studies been mentioned in the classroom. We are in the season of Lent. The Lenten penitential practices are meant to allow God’s grace to repair the damage sin does to the three central relationships:  God, self, and others. Laudato Si´ demands that we consider one more relationship that sin has harmed, our relationship to creation itself, the environment we and all living creatures share. Modern popes have certainly decried the destruction that human greed and selfishness inflict on the world around us. Pope Francis’ encyclical literally puts the examination of humanity’s relationship with the world and all its creatures as proper to the Church’s teaching. The Holy Father reminds us to look to St. Francis to learn how to fall in love again with God as we marvel at His creation.
 
The Joy of the Gospel:  I share with people all the time a discovery I made shortly after I became a pastor of a parish and began to work regularly with the pastoral leadership model that had been put into place in the Diocese of Jefferson City around 1990. In 2005, I was reviewing the parish council bylaws of a certain parish and came across the organizational chart that had been devised for parish governance. Pastoral activities were divided up among four major commissions with all the activities in the purview of each commission: education, worship, social concerns, and administration.  Nowhere in the diagram did the word “evangelization” appear. It was at that moment I understood what the focus of my pastoral efforts would be:  evangelization. Every activity of word, sacrament, and charity had to be evaluated in terms of the core mission of the Church:  to preach the good news.

From Maintenance to Mission:  While Pope Francis’ exhortation Evangelii Gaudium was primarily a response to the 2012 Synod on Evangelization, it was also an expression of Pope Francis’ priorities for the Church. There are three settings in which evangelization is carried out. First it is in the ordinary pastoral activity of the members of the Church “to help believers to grow spiritually so that they can respond to God’s love ever more fully in their lives.” The second area is among those whose lives do not reflect “the demands of Baptism.” The third area, actually the primary focus of the Church’s mission, is among “those who do not know Jesus Christ or who have always rejected him.” Evangelii Gaudium was a sobering call to me to recover the joy of the preaching the Gospel by not letting the necessary attention to maintaining what is keep me from working toward what should be to make evangelization the main goal of pastoral life. These words hit me like a lightning bolt:  “I dream of a ‘missionary option,’ that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation.” Reading this exhortation was like finally recalling one of those prophetic dreams that we have, but forget so soon as the demands of the day quickly and completely fill up our attention.

The Incarnation and Family Life:   While I was living in Rome shortly before Christmas of 1985, I went to the Vatican Museums with a priest friend of mine. I had seen many of the great picture galleries many times, but that particular Christmas I had a particular goal. I was going to count all the paintings of the Madonna and Child. Taking notes about each painting, looking for common postures, gestures, or thematic elements, I experienced a master course on the Theology of the Incarnation. When I read the 2016 post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia for the first time, I felt much the same way. The central truth of our faith is that God is with us. The Word became flesh in a human family. The portrait of family, marriage, love, and parenthood in Amoris Laetitia is just as complex and rich as those paintings in the Vatican Museum. But it is no less a wonderful teaching on the Incarnation: what God has created the family to be, how God blesses us through the family, how sin makes it so difficult at times to recognize God dwelling among us. The exhortation invites us to remember that it is the vocation of life in a family where all of us begin our journey back to God.

In two weeks I will share part two of my reflections on the pontificate of Pope Francis, especially in terms of the reform of governance that has been happening through these past ten years.