Pope Francis and Accompanying Each Other Along the Path to Truth

Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a week-long series of essays at Public Discourse reflecting on Pope Francis’s pontificate, his legacy, and the Catholic Church’s future.

Witnessing the tireless dedication of Pope Francis over the last twelve years to those most in need—the poor, the sick, the rejected, those suffering in body and spirit—was an extraordinary gift to me. After his passing, I found myself thinking: How often today does God bless his people with a shepherd, particularly one with significant health challenges, who devotes such intense energy and affection to all that seek his attention?

I have no idea how Catholic prelates can prepare for the task of governing such a large organization in our complex and tumultuous world. Buenos Aires is not an easy place to be bishop: when asked why he never visited his homeland after his election, Pope Francis would joke, “I spent 76 years in Argentina. That’s enough, isn’t it?” But it was his home, and when he became Bishop of Rome, he came to a very different place, both in the culture of its people and in the particular issues that the Church faced there. What a profound cross it must have been for him to be suddenly, and unexpectedly, catapulted from being a subway-riding bishop on the verge of retirement, to steering the universal Church through the perilous waters of sex scandals and the Vatican’s grave financial difficulties. 

Even apart from the perennial challenges of governance, contemporary popes face the perennial task of confronting the needs of the wounded modern world—“smelling of the sheep,” as Francis would say—without becoming of the world. I especially appreciated the pope’s focus on fighting clericalism and raising up the laity and their contributions to the Church. On one hand, clergy need to learn how to leave in the laity’s hands the political and other temporal responsibilities that are the latter’s proper domain; on the other hand, the laity should often be called to assist the clergy in matters of the latter’s own proper responsibilities of Church government. Harmonizing these apparently dueling needs is no easy task; it is especially difficult when coupled with the challenge in any large organization—like the Church—of finding and training the right people to assume positions of leadership.

Pope Francis also devoted much of his pontificate to the challenge of implementing a culture of love in support of the truth in contemporary culture—a culture that does not grasp what authentic love is, because we treat love as a commodity. Many people—young people especially—are eager for caritas in veritate, and the pope sought to teach it to them through many of the themes of his pontificate: accompanying others, recognizing the concrete circumstances that we fallen human beings can find ourselves in, and always being witnesses to God’s infinite mercy. 

Learning to Find Friends in Unexpected Places

The occasion of the pope’s passing gives us a chance to reflect on the lessons he has left us on how to give witness to truth and love in the modern world. What is the path forward—for the Church and for all people of goodwill? Following the pope’s example, we should ask how God is calling ordinary men and women to engage with the world today—a world in which people, particularly young people brought up amid a culture of chaos and confusion, are calling out for meaning and purpose. The question is especially urgent for those of us, like myself, who grew up in very different circumstances, often with more support than what many young people today have. I was blessed to be raised by a hard-working father who revered his wife, and a loving and deeply God-fearing mother, who both generously gave themselves to me and my six siblings. Not everything was great: I was raised in a small, poor town in Mexico’s Sonoran desert—now the cradle of the Caborca drug cartel. But on the whole, I had a very happy childhood. My young adult years were similarly fortunate. I earned advanced degrees, moved to the United States where I enjoyed enormous opportunities, and, thanks to the intervention of a friend and one of my brothers, I was rescued from going down the wrong path. I found a better way to which God was calling me, in Opus Dei. 

The spirit of Opus Dei, a part of the Catholic Church, encompasses many ideals, one of which is the commitment to finding God in the parts of life where he might at first seem most distant. Pope Francis himself expressed this ideal very well in an audience of his I attended in November 2014:

When the Lord invites us to become saints, he doesn’t call us to something heavy, sad . . . quite the contrary! It’s an invitation to share in his joy, to live and to offer with joy every moment of our life, by making it become at the same time a gift of love for the people around us. If we understand this, everything changes and takes on new meaning, a beautiful meaning, a meaning that begins with little everyday things. For example: a lady goes to the market to buy groceries and finds a neighbour there, so they begin to talk and then they come to gossiping and this lady says: “No, no, no I won’t speak badly about anyone.” This is a step towards sainthood, it helps you become more holy. Then, at home, your son wants to talk a little about his ideas: [you think,] “Oh, I am so tired, I worked so hard today. . . .”—“But,” [you tell yourself,] “you sit down and listen to your son, who needs it!” . . . [T]his is a step towards sainthood. . . .  These are little things, but many little steps to sanctity. Every step towards sainthood makes us better people, free from selfishness and being closed within ourselves, and opens us to our brothers and sisters and to their needs.

Eventually I came to see that one area of secular life where people needed more help finding God’s truth was, paradoxically, in academia—in institutions of higher education ostensibly devoted to truth. I made my way to Princeton, New Jersey, where eventually I helped start the Witherspoon Institute and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE). I saw these as means to help students and professors rediscover higher education’s vocation to truth-seeking—and perhaps, from knowing the truth, to eventually find its Author. 

But first I had to discover another truth that Pope Francis recalled frequently throughout his papacy: that even those who seemed far from God, at least outwardly, could teach me a thing or two. One such person was my good friend, Princeton Professor Robert “Bob” Hollander. I got to know Bob through our common interest in tennis, which we regularly played together. I learned much from him during our after-game conversations about many things unrelated to religion. Bob eventually told me he was atheist, which for a young, zealous Christian like me was unacceptable. At first I asked myself, “Do I want to spend so much of my time with a heathen?” But I resisted my initial impulse to quit our friendship, and years later I came to realize what a good decision that was. Bob eventually had a profound, positive impact on me, because he helped me understand friendship better, thereby bringing me closer to the truth and to God. More practically, he gave me invaluable counsel at crucial moments, without which Witherspoon and FEHE might never have come to be.

Not many years after I came to the Princeton area and befriended Bob, I read an article that discussed Princeton University’s desire to expand its humanities offerings. I saw this as an opportunity for me to start contributing directly to higher education, by finding money to support Princeton’s effort. I was an engineer by training, not a humanist, so I could contribute little in the way of academic expertise; but I did have a lot of experience raising money for nonprofit work, from my time in Opus Dei. I went to Bob with an idea and a proposal: What if I could obtain a grant to support a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton’s Humanities Council? Would Princeton be interested? Bob’s response was immediate: We can make this happen. 

And it did happen, but by a path that I would not have expected. Bob helped organize a lunch with Alexander Nehamas and Carol Rigolot—respectively the Chair and Executive Director of Princeton’s Humanities Council—along with Bob, and myself, to talk about the possible grant. I felt myself surrounded by people who were, in Pope Francis’s words, “on the margins” of God’s Kingdom—people who were quite secular and perhaps even in personal disagreement with Christian teachings. At the time Opus Dei was known for being “ultraconservative,” and therefore I felt the need to mention the fact that I was in Opus Dei to them, in case they feared it might cause controversy. 

But my fear turned out to be unfounded. Nehamas and Rigolot welcomed the proposal for the fellowship, which was filled first by the late Michael Sugrue in the 1997–98 academic year. Nehamas found Sugrue to be “an exceptional teacher-scholar,” and he and others expressed sincere gratitude to me for helping bring him to Princeton. The experience was such a success that the Humanities Council eventually developed the fellowship into Princeton’s Society of Fellows, which today offers some of the most prestigious and sought-after opportunities in the academy. By taking this risk, Bob and I helped spur a renewal of humanities teaching at Princeton.

I later asked Bob why people who did not share my fundamental beliefs about truth would have gone along with my idea. He thought they simply didn’t care what I believed. He quipped after one of our tennis matches, “Luis, you are not a threat around here because you are Mexican, you are an engineer, and you didn’t go to Princeton.” I laughed hard. All the same, I think that particular experience revealed something that Pope Francis had been trying to remind us of: that the desire for truth is in everyone, and that if we present our interest in truth joyfully, even those who disagree with us might still recognize us as friends.

The things I learned from this experience planted the seeds in my mind for bigger projects. Five years later, in 2003, Robert P. George and I launched the Witherspoon Institute. Our idea was to sponsor teaching and research that we thought was urgently needed in academia but did not yet fit into its priorities. A particular area of concern to us was research on the importance of the traditional structure of the family to the well-being of children and all of society. Perhaps the most famous such project that we sponsored was the 2012 New Family Structures Study of Mark Regnerus. Through the use of good-faith and reason-based empirical methods, Regnerus did an enormous service to our understanding of the family, despite suffering a great deal of ideologically motivated backlash, thanks to Witherspoon’s support. And despite criticism, the research still stands today. Over time more and more people are coming to recognize its truth.

In 2013, Robby George and I founded the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE) to help students pursue truth through authentic friendship and robust intellectual life. Among the numerous related projects in which I have been involved, none gives me greater satisfaction than the Stanford Civics Initiative (SCI), which I helped Josiah (“Josh”) Ober to found and develop. Although in the end my contribution to the project was minor, I’ve been blessed by the deep and lasting friendship I developed with Josh as a result—a friendship as unexpected as that which I made with Bob.

I would have been able to do none of these things had I not, as Pope Francis exhorted us, taken the chance to befriend a man like Bob, even though on the surface we might have seemed unsuited for one another. Bob gave me practical guidance without which my ideals would not have become a reality. But more importantly, he reminded me that even people who seem far from God still bear the dignity of being made in God’s image. Even though they may not recognize God—or at least appear not to do so—they are still made for him, and for truth, which they are always seeking in one way or another. I think that the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus articulated this point quite well:

For paradise we long. For perfection we were made . . . This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives . . . This longing makes our love and friendship possible, and so very unsatisfactory. The hunger is for . . . nothing less than perfect communion with the . . . one in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together . . . we must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled.

The desire for truth can become a powerful bond of friendship—“intellectual friendship” as we say at Witherspoon and FEHE—as my friendship with Bob showed me. The experience also taught me to expand my heart, to understand better the mystery of what it means to be a person. Without this man, an atheist, I would have been a lesser human being. And, of course, Bob benefited from my friendship in turn: not just by the friendship itself, but from participating in the good it did for higher education—whether directly, in the Society of Fellows, or indirectly in the projects to which the Society gave rise: Witherspoon and FEHE. And then there were the occasional discussions about religion that we would have after tennis. I still maintain the hope that, when he died, the memory of those conversations helped him, in some mysterious way, to go to God. 

Building Blocks for Civic Engagement in a Secular World

Pope Francis, it seems to me, was trying throughout his pontificate to urge Christians to find their “Bob” who might be out there—someone who, despite appearing to be far from God, is still searching for truth and friendship, has much truth to impart in turn, and has much good to do in the world that he might not do without our help. Bob taught me a great deal, but two things seem especially worth noting, since they were also close to the pope’s heart. They are what I call building blocks for civic engagement in our secular world. 

The first is that which the Church proclaimed in Dignitatis Humanae and reaffirmed under Pope Francis. That every human person, even if he is an atheist like Bob, has an ineradicable dignity, because he is a being 

“endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility.” At the same time every person is “impelled by nature” to seek truth, and we should strive not to let appearances distract us from this deeper reality. And yet, “[t]he truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.” Therefore man cannot fulfill his “moral obligation to seek truth” unless he be free, “[enjoying] immunity from external coercion as well as psychological freedom.” 

In other words, the best context for bringing others to truth is precisely through the kind of intellectual friendship that Bob and I had. 

The second truth is something I learned through my work with Witherspoon and FEHE (which were inspired by what Bob and I achieved at Princeton University): namely, how vital the man-woman traditional family structure is for society. I also realized how important intellectual friendship was for defending the family. On one hand, the best way to make the case for the family is by appealing to truths that all people can understand—in this case, the truths of social science—and we must be confident that people will respond to truth. At the same time, that truth has to be presented well, by being framed in love. We need to be patient with those who disagree on fundamental truths about marriage and family, and we must strive to express ourselves in ways that will win them over. We need to show them that we care about these truths not to impose ourselves on others, but to serve others out of love. We must show our interlocutors that we love and respect them because they, like all people, are God’s children, just as I tried to draw Bob to God above all by being his friend.

Truth and charity should go hand in hand. One cannot love others unless that love is grounded in truth, just as love cannot make a family unless it be grounded in the truths of human nature. At the same time, the deeper one understands the truth, the more one loves it and other people—who are made for truth—and the more easily one can express truth winsomely, because of one’s confidence in its truth. 

It is not enough to have the truth and to be able to argue logically for it, although all that is necessary. As Pope Francis reminded us, it is also vitally important to teach truth by the example of one’s love for others—by “accompanying” them along the difficult journey of life, as the pope liked to say. If we are to move forward toward a more just society, we must learn to accompany one another along the difficult, often surprising, and deeply rewarding path toward truth.

For his willingness to answer God’s call and the call of the Church, and for his faithful service until the end, I am grateful to Pope Francis.

Image by Gabriel Sozzi and sourced from Wikimedia Commons.