Pope Francis Kissing the Disfigured Man

Amy Davidson writes at the New Yorker:

On Wednesday, Pope Francis went into St. Peter’s Square, where a crowd had gathered, and saw a pilgrim who has certainly been met in his life with averted gazes, and worse. His skin was covered with hundreds, maybe thousands, of bulbous tumors that contorted his features. Francis embraced him, touched his face, and prayed with him. There is a picture of him kissing the man’s head, where there is no unmarked skin and tumors push through his thin hair. (This is the result of a disease called neurofibromatosis.) The image was electrifying, in a way that mercy can be. But it took on more significance as a stage in what many people are hoping is Francis’s own pilgrimage.

Pope Francis seems very interested in rocking the boat; earlier this year, he stated that the Church was “obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.” And the Vatican is holding a global assembly next fall, for which they’ve released preparatory documents asking bishops to consider local laws and attitudes regarding same-sex marriage and take up the task of giving spiritual attention to people in “such unions.”

Davidson writes, “There are the seeds of something radical here. There is, for one thing, an attempt to get past pretense… But maybe the weight of the Church will defeat him. It won’t be enough to be an example and provocateur, or some humble mendicant.” She closes on a note about that photo:

The picture of his kiss of the disfigured man was called beautiful, because, if one is to be honest, many people who couldn’t look away from it might not have been willing to look at all if the Pontiff were Photoshopped out, and the man were there alone. It is one thing, though, to admire a Pope for living the way most people couldn’t. It is another to have a Pope who looks at the way most people do live, and embraces them.

[TNY]