thought occurred to me that, had I seen Pope Francis riding the Buenos Aires subway during his time as archbishop, I might not have paid any attention to him. But now he was the Vicar of Christ, the successor of St. Peter, preparing to celebrate Mass with three million of us on a cold and windy beach that would soon be bathed in a warm sunlight.
Had I seen Jesus Christ on the subway in Rio that week, I’d like to think I might have recognized him. But I’m not so sure. As St. John the Evangelist knew, it’s hard to see the invisible God until we recognize him in our visible neighbors.
Even St. Thomas the Apostle struggled to recognize the risen Christ in the witness of his brothers and sisters.
As I thought about these things on the sidewalk, it occurred to me that common desires had kept our group together in Rio: our shared longings for food, shelter, medicine, transportation, and dry clothing. Like the residents of the slum Francis visited, we lived in constant need, isolated within a country that didn’t really see or understand us. While we didn’t suffer as deeply as the city’s poor, we felt closer to God’s people in our experiences of deprivation of things we normally took for granted — things such as hot showers, drinkable water, climate control, and readily available food. But it also struck me that there were deeper longings, hidden beneath the surface, uniting our hearts and minds on pilgrimage: God’s longing for us, our longing for God, and our longing to bring God’s love to others.
Although we had traveled to South America to see Pope Francis, we gradually realized it was Jesus Christ himself who awaited us there. On this journey to God, we immersed ourselves wholeheartedly in the experience, stirring the deepest desires of our hearts. And we started to see how God was responding.
As Pope Francis emphasizes, to long for God makes us long to share God’s love with others. This longing conjures up deep emotions in all of us, particularly surrounding our experiences of sin and grace.
Sin, the Obstacle That Distorts Our Longing
For Francis, who often talks about the reality of the devil, sin and grace are more than ideas in a book. In his view, deeply rooted in his Catholic and Jesuit traditions, sin and grace manifest themselves within us as attitudes of selfishness and love. While sin diverts our longings to self-centered goals, grace fuels the longing for God that empowers us to go to the margins as missionaries.
How do Catholics understand sin? Some of us look to definitions. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines sin as the “failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods” (CCC 1849). Sin “turns our hearts away” from God’s love (CCC 1850).
Building on these meanings, Pope Francis describes sin as the selfish act of hurting others on purpose. Sinful attachment turns us inward rather than outward, causing us to ignore people in need. He writes:
To go out of ourselves and to join others is healthy for us. To be self-enclosed is to taste the bitter poison of immanence, and humanity will be worse for every selfish choice we make. (Evangelii Gaudium 87)
Francis calls sin a “selfish choice” rooted in our shortsighted longings for false idols like money, sex, and power. Indeed, he has consistently rejected the false idols of secular materialism, noting that too many of us spend more time obsessing over our pets and cosmetics than caring for our fellow human beings. He adds: “The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits” (Evangelii Gaudium 57).
Here the pope evokes a key theme from his Ignatian spiritual tradition: the satanic temptations of riches, honors, and pride.
For the Jesuit founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the selfishness of sin is inextricably bound up with these three temptations to indulge our feelings of entitlement over others. Such feelings originate not in a healthy self-esteem, but in the assumption that we deserve more from life than we have received and more than others possess.
St. Ignatius notes, as does Pope Francis, that nothing is ever good enough for the selfish person, whose noble longings gradually become reoriented (disordered) toward secondary goods at the cost of our primary relationships. In a letter to a Portuguese Jesuit dated March 18, 1542, Ignatius declares that “the most abominable of sins” is ingratitude, or the habitual refusal to acknowledge the gifts God has given us.
Like the unfulfilled corporate executive, unloved by his parents and family, who always needs to buy “just one more” house or car. Or the eighteen-year-old American athlete who squanders a multimillion dollar professional sports contract after being drafted out of high school. They earned their money, the world tells us, so why can’t they enjoy it?
Ingratitude thrives whenever we give free reign to our self-centered longings. It feeds our disordered craving for possessions rather than loving relationships, affirming our selfish longing for instant gratification at the expense of God and others.
If our longing for God leads us to the margins in places like Rio de Janeiro, then our longing for possessions often fuels a lasting ingratitude that closes our hearts to others. Francis argues in his encyclical Laudato Si’ (May 24, 2015) that this longing, writ large, drives the consumerism that destroys our planet’s natural resources and exploits the poor. But he also says we can break this cycle if we turn back to God.
From Sin to Grace
As he showed us in Rio, Pope Francis knows how fearful narcissism dominates our hearts in a consumer society, steering our longings away from Gospel joy. But he also recognizes that we can accept our selfishness as a positive challenge, using our own painful experiences of sin’s effects as a motivation to reject its hold over us. Rather than a burden, sin can be a challenge to redirect our longings to God, reopening our hearts to his grace.
The first step from sin to grace, as Francis reminded us in Brazil, is admitting to ourselves we are sinners in need of God’s mercy. Once we unmask the selfishness we ignore in ourselves and condemn in others, Francis suggests we can then use our experience of sin as a useful kick in the pants.
Francis himself demonstrated this healthy self-awareness one year during Lent, going to confession publicly in St. Peter’s Basilica.
While leading a penance service there on March 28, 2014, the pope, along with sixty-one other priests, had moved toward confessional boxes and chairs near the walls to offer the sacrament for individual penitents. But as the papal master of ceremonies showed the Holy Father to the place he would use to hear confessions, Francis pointed to another confessional nearby, insisting that he himself would be the first to confess.
As Francis knelt in front of the wooden confessional box, his white-clad back to the congregation, photographers and videographers captured the unusual moment. Although Francis goes to confession every two weeks, even the most recent popes have rarely been seen confessing their sins to a fellow priest in public.
For his part, the priest to whom Francis confessed was a little nonplused by having the pope as a penitent. When the encounter was finished, he grasped the pope’s hands and kissed them in reverence.
By living only for ourselves, many of us allow our sins to become habitual and thoughtless vices, abandoning humble self-awareness as we concentrate our longings on enhancing our own sense of wealth and prestige. But the example of Francis says we can begin to overcome these selfish longings if we learn how to expose them to the world — and to ourselves — for what they really are.
St. Ignatius notes in the “Two Standards” meditation — these standards are the battle flag of Christ and the battle flag of Satan, between which all of us must choose — that after we gain riches and
