awkward — we learn to despise them as much as we implicitly despise ourselves. True empathy thus becomes impossible, at least until we rekindle our longing for God.
From Pride to Humility
In little ways, all of us practice the sin of pride in our lives, as when we pay more attention to our gadgets and possessions than to our relationships. Or when Catholic teachers “play the professor,” as Pope Francis put it on a visit to Ecuador in July 2015, talking down to young people to feel superior to them rather than striving to reach their hearts with Christ’s transformative love.
For Pope Francis as for St. Ignatius, our downward spiral into pride begins with our desires for money and fame rather than for loving relationships — a disordered longing for idols that is always demonic, but often grabs our hearts because we do not recognize it as evil.
While horror movies like The Exorcist depict Jesuits as demon fighters, the devil is more than a Hollywood villain or theological concept for Pope Francis. The devil’s chief activity in today’s global society, as Francis preached it to us at World Youth Day 2013, is to cultivate a self-despairing consumerism among Christians that redirects our hearts away from God and those who need his love.
In the pope’s eyes, only a humble awareness of our fundamental human equality as sinners in need of God’s mercy can reverse this sinful movement of our longings away from God. Once we are hardened in the selfish and ungrateful conviction that we are entitled to more than others, we risk shutting our hearts to God’s love for good, destroying ourselves and our planet in the process.
Rather than being struck by lightning in divine punishment for our sins, Francis notes that we find ourselves miserable and our relationships in chaos when we act selfishly, robbing us of Gospel joy. Our lives become empty and meaningless because we love nothing and no one other than ourselves. It is precisely in this experience of misery that God challenges us to turn our hearts back to his grace.
The Grace of Love
For Pope Francis, love is the opposite of selfishness, being rooted in our longing for God and in our experiences of his grace. Grace calls us out of sin, builds upon our longing for God, and finally bears fruit in the love we show our neighbors on the margins.
So what, then, is grace?
The Catechism defines grace as “favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us” (CCC 1996, emphasis in original) to move from selfishness to selflessness in our lifelong path to holiness. If sin directs our longings away from the God of the margins, inviting us to seek fulfillment only in ourselves, then grace moves us outward to love those who we recognize are as incomplete as we are.
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