For the past week, I’ve been hearing a bit of consternation, resignation, and alarm about Pope Francis and the recent synod on the family at the Vatican. Some of it stems from commentary, appointments, and news leaks. Some of it stems from past experience and concerns about the future.

If you have found yourself alarmed, angry, or resigned on the topic of Pope Francis, consider for a moment the love of God.

Last Saturday, Pope Francis gave a speech that has been received largely as an excoriation of conservatives who care about law. That’s a limited view.

If you think you are being called a Pharisee, please, do, by all means, consider the source (the Gospel), and examine your heart. (If you don’t think the caution applies to you, perhaps ever more so.) Don’t most of us have Pharisaic tendencies we could be freed of, with benefit both to ourselves and to people in our lives? Consider that it’s the reading of Pope Francis and the Gospel through our usual political lens and biases that keeps us from the depth of prayer he’s modeling and encouraging with some urgency. Consider that the Pharisaic impulse is a human condition. Consider, too, that even those who might not stay up nights thinking about the letter of canon law might be steadfasting following their own laws of bad religion. For whenever the light of faith in Jesus Christ and the fullness of life in the Trinity are not at the core of every breath we take, we might be opening the door to falsehood — the way of the Pharisees, and of Satan.

RELATED: The Divided Synod

Pope Francis, I can’t help from thinking, speaks and acts in light of full knowledge of our humanity and of the smoke of Satan in the Church. When he talks about the spirit of the law, he’s got the Holy Spirit on his mind and his heart and, I pray, as his guide.

He inhabits the world that Paul VI foresaw. And he likewise works to bear prophetic witness to where we must be, who we must be. Christians must encounter God’s mercy and invite others to the same. Not simply by extending invitations — though that we must do — but by living in such a way that people can’t help but to be drawn in to the love of Jesus Christ who suffered and died and secured victory over sin and death for mankind. In such a way that the soul is seduced by Divine Mercy, the deepest desire of the heart.

RELATED: Liberal Pharisees in the Catholic Church

Divine Mercy, of course, is something that Pope John Paul II introduced to us in a new way, canonizing Saint Faustina, the Polish sister to whom was revealed so many windows into the heart of Jesus Christ in the sacrament of Confession. Pope Benedict continued to support the devotion, calling mercy “the name of God himself,” and Pope Francis paid tribute to the witness of John Paul and John XXII by canonizing them both on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2014. Just months later, he beatified Pope Paul VI as well, calling him a “courageous Christian” and “tireless apostle.” Francis said of Paul VI that

before the advent of a secularized and hostile society, he could hold fast, with farsightedness and wisdom — and at times alone — to the helm of the barque of Peter, while never losing his joy and his trust in the Lord.
Paul VI truly “rendered to God what is God’s” by devoting his whole life to the “sacred, solemn and grave task of continuing in history and extending on earth the mission of Christ” [Homily for the Rite of Coronation, Insegnamenti I, 1963], loving the Church and leading her so that she might be “a loving mother of the whole human family and at the same time the minister of its salvation” [Ecclesiam Suam, 1964].

This is important to know and remember when reading Francis’s closing speech to the synod fathers last weekend. There, as he has done before and no doubt will do again, he cites his predecessors:

The Church’s first duty is not to hand down condemnations or anathemas, but to proclaim God’s mercy, to call to conversion, and to lead all men and women to salvation in the Lord [cf. John 12:44-50].
Blessed Paul VI expressed this eloquently: “We can imagine, then, that each of our sins, our attempts to turn our back on God, kindles in him a more intense flame of love, a desire to bring us back to himself and to his saving plan. . . . God, in Christ, shows himself to be infinitely good. . . . God is good. Not only in himself; God is — let us say it with tears — good for us. He loves us, he seeks us out, he thinks of us, he knows us, he touches our hearts us and he waits for us. He will be — so to say — delighted on the day when we return and say: ‘Lord, in your goodness, forgive me.’ Thus our repentance becomes God’s joy.”
Saint John Paul II also stated that “the Church lives an authentic life when she professes and proclaims mercy . . . and when she brings people close to the sources of the Savior’s mercy, of which she is the trustee and dispenser.”
Benedict XVI, too, said: “Mercy is indeed the central nucleus of the Gospel message; it is the very name of God. . . . May all that the Church says and does manifest the mercy God feels for mankind. When the Church has to recall an unrecognized truth, or a betrayed good, she always does so impelled by merciful love, so that men may have life and have it abundantly (cf. John 10:10).”
In light of all this, and thanks to this time of grace which the Church has experienced in discussing the family, we feel mutually enriched. Many of us have felt the working of the Holy Spirit who is the real protagonist and guide of the Synod. For all of us, the word “family” does have the same sound as it did before the Synod, so much so that the word itself already contains the richness of the family’s vocation and the significance of the labors of the Synod.

There he is Peter, calling us to sainthood. That is, to the universal call to holiness.

When he talks about the Spirit, he means it. Not the spirit in some kind of “whatever you say it is” kind of way. As a student of Ignatius Loyola, he looks to the saint’s Spiritual Exercises and to a rigorous commitment to becoming familiar, in one’s own heart and life, with the work of the Holy Spirit in the world. The goal is to see good and evil for what they are and to reject all the lies of the latter.

#share#He echoed the same message Friday morning when in his morning homily he explained that we “can feel pity for a dog that is dying” but that God’s compassion is different: It means “empathizing with another person’s problem, empathizing with that person’s situation.”

Jesus, he continued,

healed people as a sign, as a sign of God’s compassion, to save that person, to bring back the lost sheep to the fold, the money that went missing from the woman’s purse. God has compassion. God loves us like a Father. He does this for each one of us. And when God forgives, he forgives like a Father and not like an official in the law court who reads out the verdict saying: “Acquitted for lack of evidence.” He forgives us from within his heart. He forgives because he loved that person.

When Pope Francis says some of these things about mercy and compassion and solidarity with the suffering, and about even weeping for another, he reminds me of saints such as Gemma Galgani. Gemma desired to bear the burdens of souls. She did so because she had tasted the tremendous love of Christ for God’s people and wanted every person on earth to know what she knew. We can be clever and creative. We can pay for ads during the World Series. But people will convert to the radical ways of Christ’s self-sacrificial life, death, and resurrection — to a life according to the Gospel — when they see it illuminate the darkness and save lives and hearts: when they see it in you, in their neighbor, in the stranger who does for them something good that they never earned.

Whatever your politics, whatever your hopes and dreams, the pope may be helping to open a door, by God’s grace, somewhere in your life.

It is not breaking news to anyone that not every Christian lives as Christ commands: trusting the Holy Spirit, of our free will. I know I don’t. But watching Pope Francis, I want to surrender completely to God’s will. And I see how this prayerful obedience – of the kind that Pope Benedict XVI, too, seem to be modeling has he resigned — won’t always make sense to everyone. It will be panned and dismissed, or applauded for seemingly all the wrong reasons. At the same time, whatever your politics, whatever your state in life, whatever your hopes and dreams, the pope may be helping to open a door, by God’s grace, somewhere in your life, to the life of the Trinity. Truly and robustly, faithfully and completely, that is the life the Christian is called to.

#related#The family is in crisis. (That’s also something Pope Francis has stated quite clearly and repeatedly.) No talking points or restating of catechism alone is going to rebuild it. True conversion will rebuild; we must surrender to the truth of Church teaching, trusting the Holy Spirit as our guide.

Pope Francis reminds us that “the Church’s first duty is not to hand down condemnations or anathemas, but to proclaim God’s mercy, to call to conversion, and to lead all men and women to salvation in the Lord” (cf. John 12:44-50). Those are not code words for: Throw out God’s laws and teachings. Rather, the pope is saying we must show a “secularized and hostile society” he mentioned the Good News. And for Pete’s sake, in Christ’s Church!