A Model Ministry
It is not every day that a Jewish kid gets to sit at the right hand of the Holy Father. Yesterday was my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do so. Together with Cantor Schwartz, who offered an incredibly powerful memorial prayer, it was an altogether humbling honour to represent the Jewish community at the multi-religious gathering with Pope Francis at the 9/11 Memorial.
It is an experience like no other to meet the pope, with whom I exchanged warm greetings of peace and fellowship on behalf of our community. He exuded a gentle warmth and kindness, and despite his whirlwind schedule, struck me as totally “in the moment” for the historic gathering. The pope’s visit to New York bears the potential to be a springboard to a much larger conversation. While I will fully admit to still being somewhat star-struck, I am unabashed in my belief that Pope Francis is perhaps the most exciting religious leader of our time.
First and foremost, in a relatively brief amount of time, Pope Francis has instituted a dramatic change in the tone and temperament of the church. What is interesting is that, to the best of my knowledge, there have been no dramatic doctrinal changes, but rather a refreshing new face of this church to the rest of the world. It was not so long ago that the Catholic conversation, at least from my outsider status, appeared to be driven by prohibitions regarding abortion and homosexuality, not to mention internal scandals. Think about just how great a distance the church has travelled from Pope Benedict’s warnings regarding “the dictatorship of relativism” to Pope Francis, whose response when asked about his views on gay priests was “who am I to judge?”
To the great credit of Pope Francis, he has shifted the conversation away from who is out to who is in; away from what behaviours will preclude you from the services of the church to how the services of the church must be better deployed to serve those at the periphery of society. It is not hard, not hard at all, to think of pockets of Jewish religious leadership who would do well to adopt Pope Francis’s posture. We would do well to remember that the divine pronouncements of today’s Torah reading, even those bearing a sting, are described as having been delivered “like dew.” I, for one, do not believe that respecting tradition and a demeanour of menschlichkeit are mutually exclusive propositions. Certainly in terms of our own community, I hope that it is this posture of inclusion, not exclusion, which guides all our efforts.
I encourage you to read Pope Francis’s words before Congress, before the UN, and at the 9/11 gathering. Because aside from the change of tone, what I find most refreshing about Pope Francis is the inability of the media or political establishment to fit him into any ideological box. He preaches on family values and environmentalism. He speaks to an ethic of personal responsibility and social welfare. He is tough on abortion and same-sex marriage, and he is also unflinching on immigration.
This pope isn’t really a conservative or liberal – his leanings don’t fit tidily into any chart – and I think that is great. The point is not whether you agree or disagree with him. The appeal is rather that the model of Pope Francis is a powerful counterargument to the polarized debates of our time. His model suggests that ideological consistency has nothing to do with political affiliation, but with a litmus test of a much higher integrity. One of the many ills afflicting us this political season is the fact that a candidate cannot be, for instance, a social liberal and a fiscal conservative or the other way around.
We don’t permit subtlety or complexity in our leaders, but because this pope isn’t running for office, he can be both subtle and complex. I think this is an important lesson for all religious leaders. God is neither conservative nor liberal, Republican nor Democrat, hawk nor dove. This pope gets that and it is a model well worth considering.
Although it is somewhat premature to do so, I believe we can identify a thread that connects Pope Francis’s calls for environmental stewardship, theological humility, global responsibility, economic justice, and more. In each case, it is the abiding belief that every human being is created in the infinite dignity of God’s image that demands that we care for our world and each other.
Theologically, no matter what our differences, in insisting on a rigid uniformity of belief, we diminish the dignity of another person’s right to their beliefs. As stewards of God’s creation, we are obligated to care for our “common home” in a manner that speaks not only to our present needs, but to those of the unborn generations to come. So, too, in our attention to the plight of the poor and the refugee, our obligations are founded not merely on the golden rule of “do unto others,” but also on an awareness, as Pope Francis said to Congress, that we, as a nation of immigrants, must be attentive to the present humanitarian crisis engulfing Europe.
This is a message that the Jewish community knows well. It is our awareness that we were once strangers in a strange land that calls us to care for the condition of the strangers in our own midst and era. As a Jewish community, we would do well to study the contours of Pope Francis’s vision to find points of common cause and collaboration.
We may agree or disagree with the stands Pope Francis has taken, but the very fact that he has insisted on speaking to the issues of the day is a model for us all. His words and actions remind us that the point of religion is not descriptive, to describe the world as it is; rather it is prescriptive, to describe the world as it ought to be. In his insistence that faith be an instrument of peace, not violence, in his insistence that the church be “a field hospital after battle,” healing wounds and warming hearts, in his insistence that religion speak forcefully to the issues of the day, Pope Francis has given all people of faith a model which we can aspire to emulate. And he has done so with a deep and abiding humility. His demeanour, and I was sitting next to him yesterday, is not overbearing. Whatever his rank may be, there is a humanity to the man, a humanity that strikes me as being deeply concerned with the condition not just of every human being, but of a common humanity. That, my friends, is something we can all take to heart.
Rabbi Elliot J. Cosgrove, Ph.D. is based in the US and is a leading voice in the Conservative Movement. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School where he wrote a dissertation on Rabbi Louis Jacobs, reflecting his passion for the intersection of Jewish scholarship and faith.
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