National Catholic Reporter| Editorial Staff | July 27, 2015
Editorial
In the growing corpus of Pope Francis pronouncements — in homilies and speeches and encyclicals — an eloquence adheres that might safely be characterized as singular in quality in the long history of papal literature. It is an eloquence eminently accessible, born of personal experience and shaped primarily by his love of the poor.
It is not a distant love or a romanticized notion out of which he speaks. He doesn’t make heroes of poor people or conjure some noble purpose out of poverty that will somehow be fully realized in the next life.
Quite the opposite. Transcendence is not reserved for some other reality. For Francis, the Christ we worship in the quiet of the sanctuary is the Christ of the streets. Francis is about real here-and-now situations in very plain language, and that language at times is disarmingly undiplomatic.