Hey everybody,
The Roman Pontiff is so back.
He’s back from France, I mean.
Pope Leo just spent the weekend on a Franco-pilgrimage that’s making headlines around the world.
It was a pilgrimage of human dignity.
During his few days in France, Leo met with abuse victims. He told the world that life means more than avoiding suffering, and that euthanasia is not compassion. He welcomed altar servers with Down syndrome. He walked among ordinary people, many of them sick and suffering, in a candlelight vigil procession at Lourdes. He embraced people with disabilities.
To borrow a phrase from the late Irish journalist Peter Dunne, Leo in France comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. He came to both tell and show the people of France that they are more than the secular materialism of their culture (and ours) says they are, and that life can be more than the pursuit of comfort.
Will it bear fruit in France? That’s harder to say. The eldest daughter of the Church, as France is known, might be especially rocky soil these days. But no one can say that Leo didn’t try — that he didn’t give witness to the solidarity and compassion of those who live at the foot
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