Saturday, May 10, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
We have a pope!
The Church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria was at peace. She was being built up and walked in the fear of the Lord, and with the consolation of the Holy Spirit she grew in numbers.
This week, rewatching  The Shoes of the Fisherman and Conclave, along with Italian Roberto Rossellini’s The Story of Francis: God’s Jester, I realize how much I love the Catholic way of looking at and living in the world, especially that of St. Francis, the 13th century young man from Assisi who turned away from his shopkeeping childhood and helped re-align the Church with the ideals of humility and servanthood modeled by Jesus.
All but one of the actors in Rossellini’s film were Franciscan monks in 1950, and their playful but serious adoration of God and their leader led me into their world. “Simplicity is a very powerful weapon,” Rossellini wrote. “The innocent one will always defeat the evil one. Simplicity, innocence and delight emanates from Francis’ own spirit, the freedom he finds in poverty and in an absolute detachment from material things.” Even after the despair brought on by WWII, this Italian director and author looked for and found, “intact, the perfume of the most primitive Franciscanism.”
The two contemporary films about the papacy are political thrillers, as much as they are spiritually engaging. The music builds and so does the story. In real time this week the true story may have been much simpler. The conclave choose our new pope quickly. To read so soon after the conclave had begun, as did we all, of white smoke rising from the Sistine Chapel on just its second day, and then to discover the pope was not only American, but a native of Chicago who spent his life in south suburban Catholic parishes and schools … was more than enough. Waves of gratitude and joy swept through me. The Pope’s brother lives in New Lenox, for heaven’s sake, a city which advertises itself during every Cubs radio broadcast. (The new pope is a White sox fan, however.) Bishop Robert Barron talks about his neighbor, because Barron grew up in Western Springs, just a few minutes down the road. (Barron is a Cub fan, by the way.)
In Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha (translated Dorcas), who was completely occupied with good deeds and almsgiving. Tabitha she fell sick and died, so after washing her, they laid her out in a room upstairs.
The disciples in Joppa found Peter and said to him, “Please come to us without delay.”
So Peter got up and went with them. When he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs where all the widows came to him weeping and showing him the tunics and cloaks that Dorcas had made while she was with them.
Peter sent them all out and knelt down and prayed. Then he turned to her body and said, “Tabitha, rise up.” She opened her eyes, saw Peter, and sat up.Â
Peter gave her his hand and raised her up, and when he had called the holy ones and the widows,
he presented her alive.Â
Simon Peter had his good days and bad days, and this was a good one. Another good day was the moment when many of Jesus’ followers abandoned him, and Jesus looked at his twelve disciples, he looked Peter in the eyes.
Do you also want to leave? And Peter said, “Master to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe, we are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
Investigating one more of Peter’s good days, recorded in and around Matthew 16:18, I ran across an article that digs into both the Greek and Aramaic to understand what Jesus meant when he called Peter the “rock.”
Now we have our 267th pope, the second from the Americas, standing on the promises of God. After two decades of missionary life in South America, during which he became a naturalized citizen of Peru, his first public words as pope were in Spanish, Latin and Italian. Only later did he use any English.
Perhaps he chose the name Pope Leo XIV to follow in the footsteps of Leo XIII, who at the end of the 19th century turned up the heat on the rich industrial barons of the Gilded Age, who seemed to rule the world at everyone’s expense but themselves. “The last Pope Leo started the church on the road towards Catholic social teaching and social justice, and —in the 19th century, he was on the side of the working class. He was on the side of labor unions. He was on the side of the poor people of his time.”
Although our new Pope Leo has his own politics, as Raymond Arroyo said on Fox News, “Becoming the pope inevitably changes a man. So we can’t say now who he will be later.” One thing we can say, however, is that he will stand like Peter on the rock of Christ, and sing hallelujahs into heaven.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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