The World’s Spiritual Director

Pope Francis died early Easter Monday, less than twelve hours after the last evening Masses had been offered in Roman parishes. On Easter Sunday evening, the assigned Gospel passage is from Luke 24, in which the disciples on the road to Emmaus meet the Risen Jesus. When the late Holy Father’s body is transferred to St. Peter’s Basilica on April 23, Emmaus will be read again at Masses offered there, the assigned passage for Easter Wednesday. 

All very fitting, for Emmaus was the biblical passage par excellence for the pontificate of Pope Francis. Men who were dejected, even despairing, having given up hope, were departing from the capital to return, perhaps, to some peripheral village of no significance. The Holy Father’s heart was not for the heroic, but for the broken. He looked for those who, along the pathways of life, were disappointed—with the worldly Romans to be sure, but also with the clerical authorities of the day, and even with Jesus, or at least who they thought Jesus should be.

No other passage was more often cited by those enthused by the approach of Pope Francis. Jesus was accompanying the disciples, walking alongside them, not in triumph, though freshly risen from the grave, but simply another passerby on the way. The three were, in the lexicon of Francis, “walking together.”

Jesus speaks harshly on that road to Emmaus: “Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe.” The admirers of Pope Francis usually left that part out, but the Holy Father himself did not. He relished speaking harshly, whether about abortion (“hiring an assassin”), the world of finance (“this economy kills”), the arms trade (“the profits that move the puppet strings of war”), or gender ideology—(the “ugliest danger” of our time).

Harsh accompaniment is not a familiar model of pastoral care. Catholics in the pews don’t get that from their parish priests or bishops, though in some circles it is fashionable to catalogue the sins of those not present. It’s delightfully harsh, but not actually accompaniment. 

Pope Francis was not really, at heart, a pastor. The pope is the universal pastor of the Church, but just as parish priests cannot meet all the demands of their charge, even more the pope must choose which aspects of the Petrine office to emphasize. Pontiffs may devote themselves to preaching, worship, teaching, legislating, theological reflection, philosophical engagement, diplomacy, financial administration, ecclesial governance, ecumenical relations, even public spectacle. The Holy Father had to do all of that from time to time. He did some of it well, some of it less so.

Pope Francis chose instead to be the world’s spiritual director. Therein lay a paradox at the heart of his papacy. The spiritual director does not preach to the congregation from the pulpit, let alone pontificate to the city and the world. He speaks privately, even intimately, with a soul in the confessional, at a retreat house, in a rectory sitting room, walking along the path. His presence is a comfort, but his words can be harsh, delivered within a bond of personal trust. A spiritual director may well say to a soul, “You are being foolish.”

Thus when Pope Francis writes an encyclical inveighing against air conditioning, there arises criticism about the impracticality of it all. How else to work in Dallas or Dubai or Delhi? But comfort seeking is a spiritual danger, and wastefulness can be a sin, so why not turn down the AC, or why cool unused rooms in empty buildings? It is not hard to imagine a spiritual director suggesting that. 

Spiritual directors are not policy advocates. Senator Robert Taft, a trade protectionist in the 1940s, proposed dealing with potential economic pain by suggesting that Americans “eat less.” That marked the end of his presidential ambitions. It was lousy economics and poor politics, but spiritual directors advise people to eat less all the time, fasting for penance and growth in virtue.

On several occasions, Pope Francis caused global consternation for castigating as selfish those who preferred pets to children. Some undoubtedly are, but there are simply too many different circumstances to make such a blanket statement without hurting many people unintentionally. It also invites tu quoque retorts when the celibate parish priest has a dog, or your predecessor was fond of cats. A spiritual director might easily instruct someone that treating pets like children in the annual Christmas letter lacks proper proportion. A private correction is not the same as a public condemnation.

The great controversies of the pontificate, Amoris Laetitia and Fiducia Supplicans, were written with the heart of a spiritual director. Pope Francis wanted to accompany couples in “irregular” situations with encouragement and compassion. Yet spiritual direction, which makes allowances and might be gradual in teaching the fullness of the truth, is rather different than magisterial teaching.

A pastor, especially the universal pastor, must maintain theological coherence and sacramental integrity as general principles. How those principles are applied in concrete, individual circumstances by spiritual directors can be difficult and messy. St. John Paul II, as a young priest, was renowned for telling his penitents, after thoroughly examining the question at hand: “You must choose.” That is suitable for the confessional, not for a papal document.

“We have been called to form consciences, not replace them,” Pope Francis wrote in Amoris Laetitia. Magisterial formation of consciences requires clear principles. Yet in Amoris and Fiducia, the principles were so confused as to produce conflicting interpretations. In spiritual direction, that can be tolerated, as different souls can be given different advice in apparently similar situations. As a magisterial exercise, it is disastrous, as the Vatican learned when the African bishops, en masse, rejected the same-sex blessings envisioned in Fiducia. 

Outside of formal teaching, the rhetoric of Pope Francis was that of a spiritual director. Last September, when meeting Catholic youth in Singapore, he suggested that when speaking to their non-Christian friends, they ought to affirm what is good in the beliefs of others. In such spiritual conversations, it could be imagined that saying that “all religions are a path to God” is fitting. For the supreme teacher of the Catholic Church to say so is a problem.

That young men often go to sartorial excess, sometimes sloppy, sometimes fussy, is not unexpected. There are fads on campus and fads in the seminary. A spiritual director should tell a young (or old) priest, forcefully if necessary, when he has become a caricature or, even worse, when he has earned the dominical rebuke against broadening phylacteries (Matt. 23:5). Papal ridicule addressed to categories of people is less likely to convert hearts as it is to stir up resentment—and sales at the clerical haberdashers and ecclesiastical milliners. The distance felt by many young clergy from Pope Francis—despite their otherwise ultramontanist dispositions—was due, in part, to their consciences being examined for them. That is the private work of a spiritual director, not the public work of a superior. 

That Pope Francis thought and acted like a spiritual director, even when he was the universal pastor, can be partially attributed to his Jesuit formation. Jesuit superiors know more about their subordinates than a regular bishop would. In general, the Church insists on separating the “internal forum” (confession and spiritual direction) from the “external forum” (governance). Bishops ought not hear the confessions of their priests—and if they do for some unusual reason, cannot use what they learn in their governance. Seminary rectors may not ask the spiritual directors of the seminarians for their opinion. St. Ignatius blurred those lines, permitting Jesuits, in certain circumstances, to “manifest their conscience” to their superiors. A Jesuit superior—and the young Francis was a provincial superior—thus can offer his subordinates not only governance but spiritual guidance.

Pope Francis thus knew the difference between internal and external fora, and between spiritual direction and governance. His default setting, though, was that of a spiritual director, never more evident than when he lambasted his Roman collaborators in 2014 for their “curial diseases,” providing a fifteen-point list of their collective spiritual failings. Had he been preaching at a private retreat, it might have been apt. As the official Christmas greeting to the Roman Curia, it did not enhance collegial morale or cohesiveness. And it likely frustrated his governance reforms.

The examples could be multiplied, with the Holy Father diagnosing from a distance bad motives in those he disfavored—liturgical traditionalists, doctors of the law, scholarly theologians—while reading favorably the hearts of the poor, the pious grandmothers, his brother Jesuits. Spiritual directors often must try to read hearts. Bishops have a different role.

The disciples on the road to Emmaus had a conversion—literally, as they turned around and ran back to Jerusalem. That conversion arose from private rebuke and individual instruction, adapted to the situation but not the norm for pastoral governance. 

In his first months in office, in one of the more beautiful addresses of his pontificate, Pope Francis offered to the Brazilian bishops the “icon of Emmaus as a key for interpreting the present and the future.” In a lyrical passage which began by quoting Cardinal John Henry Newman—whom Francis would later canonize—the Holy Father asks what the Church can offer to those who have walked away:

We need a Church unafraid of going forth into their night. We need a Church capable of meeting them on their way. We need a Church capable of entering into their conversation . . . 

There are also those who recognize the ideal of man and of life as proposed by the Church, but they do not have the audacity to embrace it. They think that this ideal is too lofty for them, that it is beyond their abilities, and that the goal the Church sets is unattainable . . . 

We need a Church capable of walking at people’s side, of doing more than simply listening to them; a Church which accompanies them on their journey; a Church able to make sense of the “night” contained in the flight of so many of our brothers and sisters from Jerusalem; a Church which realizes that the reasons why people leave also contain reasons why they can eventually return.

That is not the work of magisterial teaching, of producing a better catechism. It is the work of spiritual accompaniment, of spiritual direction. It is the work, as Newman put it, of heart speaking to heart. It is indispensable work. It is the work that countless Jesuits do each day. It is not primarily the work of a bishop, much less the bishop of Rome.

When the cardinals gather in conclave to elect the Holy Father’s successor, they may opt for a teacher or reformer or diplomat or manager, or simply a wise holy man. They will not be choosing a new spiritual director for the city and the world.

Franco Origlia via Getty Images.