Linda Plitt Donaldson: Pope Francis Invites Us to Walk with Jesus
I attribute Pope Francis’s popularity to his authentic, credible, and persistent witness of Jesus’s life and ministry to the world. Loyola Press’s publication “Walking with Jesus: A Way Forward for the Church” provides a collection of speeches and homilies given by Pope Francis that reflect his view of the new evangelization of the Church as one that “requires a shared commitment to a pastoral plan that is . . . solidly focused on the essential, that is, on Jesus Christ” (p. 82).
Linda Plitt Donaldson
The Society of Jesus — or the Jesuit order, in which Pope Francis was initially formed as a priest — includes a number of transformative experiences that offer a spiritual and concrete experience of walking with Jesus that can inform, free, and embolden one’s efforts to help build God’s kingdom on earth. Among these are the Spiritual Exercises, which are offered in various formats to lay and religious women and men in a variety of formats (eight days, 30 days, eight months) with the help of a guide or spiritual director. In addition to participating in the spiritual exercises as part of his formation, Pope Francis has directed these exercises for other Jesuits and clergy desiring to grow closer to Jesus.
Walking with Jesus through the Spiritual Exercises is a potentially transformative experience that profoundly deepens a desire “to know Jesus intimately, to be able to love Him more intensely, and so to follow Him more closely” (Spiritual Exercises, no. 113). Through the exercises, one is contemplating Jesus’s birth, life, ministry, suffering and death, and resurrection. Contemplation, in this sense, means placing yourself in the story with Jesus. Using your imagination and senses (sight, smell, touch, taste), you walk with Jesus through His life. But you are not just walking with Jesus; you are talking with Jesus, and you are listening. In this process, you are developing a greater intimacy with Him and cultivating an ability to hear His voice in your heart, to discern God’s voice in your heart.
Cultivating this ability to hear God’s voice leads to an interior freedom to know and courageously respond to God’s call in your life. The role of a spiritual director is critical to this process because so many things get in the way of our ability to hear and respond to God’s desire for us. St. Ignatius referred to these as disordered attachments that push God from the center of our lives and become the source of our identity. Examples of disordered attachments include a desire for power, wealth, and status. When money, power, and position become the source of our identity, we forget that the truth of our identity is that we are God’s beloved. Prayer, a good spiritual director, and a supportive faith community can help us discern God’s call so we may respond generously and fearlessly to it.
Pope Francis is applying the gifts he has been given by grace that have been cultivated in his Jesuit training, and further refined through his life experience to his papacy. He is responding generously, authentically, and courageously to God’s call. He is walking with Jesus. If you walk with Jesus, expect Him to show you His wounds, to invite you to touch them, to have your heart broken by them. Pope Francis is showing the world the wounds of Christ — that is, the conditions of people who are poor, suffering, exploited, marginalized, and oppressed. He is standing with them. He is inviting us to join him, to walk with him and Jesus to “bring good news to the poor. . . . to proclaim liberty to captives . . . to let the oppressed go free” (Luke, 4:18). Are you ready to join him?
— Linda Plitt Donaldson is an associate professor in The Catholic University of America National Catholic School of Social Service.
