Francis in America: A message that shakes everyone's ground

By Jason Berry

WASHINGTON --A smiling Pope Francis emerged from the Vatican Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue on Wednesday morning and went directly to the crowds gathered behind barriers, shaking hands like a candidate on the trail with a visible air of calm.
 
Francis is only the fourth pope to visit the US since Paul VI in 1965, but the impact of his global popularity has brought a heightened anticipation in Washington, a city of deep polarization in politics, and an almost palpable yearning for a spiritual figure who speaks the dream of a common language.

Pope Francis greets and blesses seminarians, novices and religious guests before the canonization Mass for Junipero Serra at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. (Jim Bourg/Getty Images)
 
As the Popemobile drove slowly along Washington streets after Francis's meeting with President Obama, the vehicle paused periodically for him to kiss babies and bless people on the sidewalks.
 
On Thursday morning he will make a historic address to the US Congress, departing in the afternoon for events in New York on Friday -- including an address to the United Nations General Assembly, a procession through Central Park and Mass at Madison Square Garden -- then Philadelphia through the weekend.
 
The themes Francis has made a centerpiece of his papacy --  radical mercy, embracing the poor and migrant peoples, confronting climate change -- shaped the agenda of the trip in which he will visit poor people and prisoners, while giving the addresses to Congress and the UN.
 
If a single phrase marks the first Jesuit pope's cast of mind, it comes from the ecology encyclical, Laudato Si -- "everything is connected."
 
"He sees poor people, immigrants and threats to the earth as all of the same fabric," Mario Marazziti, an Italian parliamentarian and church activist, said in Rome recently.
 
"Francis has brought a style and manner of operation to the world stage that projects an image of healing," said a Western diplomat in Rome, speaking on background. "The church is pushing not just for assistance to refugees, but the integration of migrants into states that welcome them."
 
Pushing out a welcome mat for migrants is sure to throw into a defensive posture Republican presidential candidates who rail against Mexicans crossing the border.
 
"The message of mercy shakes everyone's ground," Maritza Sánchez, director of the Catholic aid organization Caritas, told me in Havana several days ago.
 
"Pope Francis is bringing the clear message of mercy," she said. "We're lacking mercy in our environment, in our sense of social responsibility. It is a great challenge to find a balance. Pope Francis does that in a fatherly style, a sweet way of speaking but with hard words."
 
If sweetness of the pope's persona and style have softened hearts across the globe, the hardness of his words cut across ideological divides.
 
To a Republican-majority Congress marked by its opposition to abortion, his words on the connective tissue of life from the June ecology encyclical are sure to echo in his speech tomorrow. 

"When we fail to acknowledge as a part of reality the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, the person with disabilities," wrote Francis, "it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected."
 
The cry of people, cheering five rows deep on the streets for this morning's papal parade, after Francis's meeting with President Obama was a rare spectacle for Washington, a city unaccustomed to displays of popular affection.
 
He is all but certain to ask Congress to dismantle the decades-long Cuban trade embargo, an issue that previous popes have advocated since John XXIII.
 
Mercy is a leitmotif in the book-length ecology encyclical, Laudato Si that has drawn scorn from Rush Limbaugh and George Will, among others who see a pope hostile to capitalism.
 
"Business is a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving our world," Francis writes midway through the encyclical. He calls it a "fruitful source of prosperity ... especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good."
 
The common good is a phrase echoed from papal documents back to the 19th century, given new resonance by a pope who has become a rare figure of unity on the global stage, reaching out with messages of forgiveness, as when he washed the feet of a teenage Muslim girl in a prison in Rome, an image that went viral and seemed to define his image in the eyes of countless young people, many of them nonbelievers.
 
As Republican and Democrats scramble to embrace the parts of Francis's agenda comfortable with their political base, Francis is trying to build support for a UN consensus on sustainable development and reduction of greenhouse gases.
 
Backroom political issues like that are unlikely to get overriding coverage this week as the television networks are caught up in the celebration of a rare, unifying figure who scatters seeds of goodwill.
 
Yet to those who are part of his operating base in room, Francis has show a style shaped by his decades as a Jesuit.
 
"At first we were dumbstruck when he became pope -- because no one from the order had ever been a pope," Father Bernd Hagenkord, a German Jesuit and Vatican Radio director, told GroundTruth in Rome recently.

Jesuits do not typically seek higher positions as bishops or cardinals, but some do rise in the church hierarchy. As Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina became Pope Francis, he faced a curious, if wary, Jesuit community in Rome.
   
In the pope's first major interview, Jesuit editor Father Antonio Spadaro asked Francis to explain himself. After a long pause, the pope said, "I am a sinner."

Spadaro has become one of the pope's closest advisors helped prepare for Francis's recent trip to Cuba. 
     
"The Jesuits are running the church," chuckles veteran Vatican commentator Robert Mickens. "Not everybody is happy with that. But Francis has a brain trust working for him."

"Being a sinner is Jesuit realism -- that's who we are," Father Hagenkord continued. "That really connected for us."

Hagenkord sees key media moments of this papacy -- going to the island of Lampedusa to meet with migrants who survived the treacherous Mediterranean crossing, washing the Muslim girl's feet, embracing disabled people at audiences -- as examples of a personality whose spontaneity is so natural that cameras flock it as moths to a flame.
  
"He dislikes being controlled. He went to Lampedusa after watching news of the drownings because he wanted to meet refugees as a pastor. He washed the girl's feet because he wanted to. He's not so comfortable in front of a parliament. He shows us what we can do. He wants to change the mindset, that you don't see the beggar, you see the human being."

After his White House meeting on Wednesday, Pope Francis addressed the bishops.

"I shall never tire of encouraging you to dialogue fearlessly," he said. "The world is so torn and divided. Our mission as bishops is to solidify unity."
     
Speaking of mercy, Francis said, "In healing every rift, may your life shine forth like a city built upon a hill."