Back in the 1990s when I was first teaching at a liberal arts college founded by the Ursuline sisters, I met a Norwegian-American pietist Lutheran of the older generation at a church potluck. He asked me what it was like teaching at a Catholic school. Since I’m descended from three generations of Norwegian pastors and church musicians and I know the old stories, I had a pretty good hunch where he was coming from.
“Welp,” I said. “It all works out. The Ursuline sisters don’t sell me indulgences, and I don’t leave heretical Post-It Notes on the chapel door.”
In fact, we were pretty ecumenical, founded by the Ursuline sisters as an “interdenominational” junior college and later merged into Benedictine University as a downstate branch campus. Our students tended to be cradle Catholics or evangelical Protestants who wanted a faith-based education (or else their parents did), but they weren’t interested in relitigating the theological controversies that led Martin Luther to post his Ninety-five Theses on Wittenberg’s Castle Church door in 1517.
And I’m hardly an orthodox confessional Lutheran, to use the term for someone who adheres to the Augsberg Confession of 1530. I grew up in the Episcopal Church (partly because my father was a PK, a preacher’s kid, who grew up in a different Lutheran synod than the nearby Lutheran churches where we lived in East Tennessee, and apparently they didn’t recognize the validity of his sacraments). At various times I’ve attended Unitarian, Methodist and Primitive Baptist services and/or hymn sings.
And I sang at Mass in the college chapel. (I cut a deal with the choir director: L learned to sight-read, and he got another bass who showed up consistently for rehearsals.) But most of my adult life I’ve been militantly “spiritual but not religious.” I joined a Lutheran church after my mother moved up north and cajoled me into joining a Lutheran church choir. But like my old college, I’m pretty ecumenical. A better word might be “spiritual mutt.”
Hence my wisecrack about posting heresy on the chapel door. I think it also explains why the death of Pope Francis hit me so hard.
As a lay faculty member I welcomed the 20th- and 21st-century ecumenical dialog that led to a 1999 joint Catholic-Lutheran accord resolving most, if not all, issues like justification or the real presence that caused armies to march and villages to be burned from 1522 to 1648. (I think the same issues were in play in the 1930s when my father was excluded from communion down South, but that’s another story for another day. I’m just not very big on doctrine.) The 1999 accord was later affirmed by representatives of the Vatican and Anglican, Methodist and Reformed (Calvinist) churches.
This ongoing dialog was celebrated Oct. 31, 2016 by the Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, at Lund Cathedral and a nearby sports arena in Sweden, when Francis celebrated joint services. with president Munib Younan and general secretary Martin Junge of the LWF. (The picture above1 shows them at the stadium in Malmö/) kicking off the yearlong 500th anniversary of the Reformation. A few months later, I sang in a choir with members of other local Lutheran churches and Catholic parishes fot a service of the Word led by the bishops of the Catholic dicese of Springfield and ELCA’s Central/Southern Illinois Synod.
For a wishy-washy mainline Protestant who was unchurched for years, it was a moment of discovery and affirmation. For too many reasons to go into here, I’ve never felt entirely comfortable in church. But I felt at home, for a moment, for a moment at this interfaith service. Also adopting the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, are the World Methodist Council, the Anglican Communion and the World Communion of Reformed Churches.
So Monday morning when I learned Francis had died, I expected to feel sorrow. But, quite unexpectdely, it felt personal too. Like I had lost my pastor.
Then, as the tributes came pouring in from around the world, I quickly discovered I wasn’t alone in that: The same feeling was widespread and worldwide. I think Gerard O’Connell, Vatican correspondent for the Jesuit magazine America. put his finger on it in a remarkably perceptive obit. It’s worth quoting at some length:
While ever conscious of his authority as pope, Francis considered himself first and foremost as “the world’s parish priest,” as he confided to me soon after his election when I visited him in his apartment at Santa Marta. He was always a pastor at heart and remained so to the end. He revealed this in myriad ways as pope by reaching out with tenderness and compassion to persons grieving or in great difficulty. He invited many to come to talk with him; he contacted others by phone or with a handwritten note. The world still knows little of Francis’ pastoral ministry from Santa Marta, and his accompaniment of countless people over these years. I experienced this in the way he accompanied my own family.
Francis’ homilies, he said, were “spiritual masterpieces” that “brought the Gospels to life.” Added O’Connell:
In accordance with the phrase often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, he believed in preaching the Gospel “by actions and, if necessary, by words.” Thus, for example, he embraced a man whose face was disfigured from neurofibromatosis in St. Peter’s Square in November 2013. Another iconic instance of this was his standing alone in a rain-drenched St. Peter’s Square on March 27, 2020, pleading with God to save humanity from Covid-19. [Links in the original.]
Preach the gospel by actions, and, if necessary, by words. That reminds me of something else. In 2022, after I learned non-Catholics could become lay associates of the Springfield Dominican Sisters, my wife and I took the spiritual formation classes and joined up. Dominicans are formally known as the Order of Preachers, and something you often hear in Dominican spaces (see HERE, for example, or HERE) is to preach the gospel from the pulpit of our lives. The Springfield congregation’s Dominican Associate Mission puts it like this:
We, Dominican Associates of Springfield, Illinois
are called to
embody the Dominican charism,
hear and proclaim God’s word, and
promote the dignity of all persons.We commit ourselves to lives rooted in
prayer, study, community and ministry.
Through our gifts of diversity,
we strive to participate in the mission
of the church
by putting into action our call
to preach the word with our lives.
One caveat, though, especially for a retired academic — teaching from the pulpit of your life is not a license to pontificate or wax professorial. It’s more a matter of Christian witness, or, as I like to think of it, simply setting a good example, I think we all do it, at least in our better moments.
We see a public figure like Francis living his faith, and we think, hey, I’m not a pope, I’m just me, but maybe I could do that. Or, perhaps more to the point, hey, I ought to do that.
But can we really do that? I’d like to think Timothy Snyder, a historian with deep knowledge of Eastern Europe, showed how it’s done in a reminiscence about Francis’ pastoral ministry. They met in 2018 a Ukrainian Greek Catholic church in Rome at the beatification of Omelian Kovch, a Ukrainian priest who ministered to Jewish inmates in the Nazi concentration camps and himself died at Majdanek. It was a solemn occasion, and Snyder was nervous about meeting the pope:
I was moved by the golden beauty of the interior of St. Sophia, and overwhelmed by the occasion. Perhaps naturally, I was thinking of myself, of what I would say to the pope when he arrived. Our common language was Spanish, which I speak very poorly, and I was rehearsing in my mind what I wanted to say, which was to thank him for recent statements about ecology, and to describe the little book I wanted to give to him. As I understood over the course of the morning, everyone wants to give something to the pope. [Link in the original.]
Then came a moment that lifted Snyder out of himself.
Toward the front of the crowded church, Snyder noticed a group of “people with disabilities were led carefully to the first pew on the right,” across the aisle from where he sat with other honorees. I’d like to think what happened next illustrates how it lands when any of us preaches through actions, without words, from the pulpits of our lives. In Snyder’s telling:
Francis was led down the aisle, resplendent in white, very erect, walking slowly and greeting people along the way. Just before he reached the sanctuary, he halted suddenly and turned to his right, noticing that pew. Then, as the rest of us waited, he walked to its far end, and bent himself to speak. He greeted each person in turn, touching them. As the people with whom he was conversing could not rise, he had to lower himself. So, over and over, Francis knelt down to look someone in the eye and to hold both of their hands in his. This took about fifteen minutes. It was a moment to think about others, and in that sense, for me, a liberation, from my own anxiety and selfishness.
By all accounts, Snyder isn’t particularly religious in the sense of adhering to received doctrinal formulas. According to a 2023 profile in the Guardian, he was “raised in a Quaker family in south-western Ohio, and he retains a midwestern faith in the virtue of saying plainly what you mean.” His wife Marci Shore, who is Jewish, told the Guardian he has a strong “moral feeling,” which she calls a “save-the-world impulse.” Added Baird of the Guardian:
Shore told me that Snyder’s mother “has this very calming sense of moral clarity. It’s like, there are no perfect decisions in the world. There’s no space of innocence. Given the situation as it is, you make the choice and you go forward.” Snyder, she says, is much the same way.
Interviewed by the Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush on a Religion News Service podcast, Snyder spoke in terms that strike me as complex, and morally grounded, but entirely secular and pragmatic:
You can’t have freedom without a notion of what is good, and one thing that religion serves people is as a metaphysical source. Religion can offer notions of what is good – not the only ones, and certainly not ones that can’t be challenged by other religions or by people who are not religious. But religion can be a source of metaphysical commitment. It can lead you to caring about things like consistency or grace or mercy, and those things are necessary for freedom.
In any event, Snyder’s reaction to Francis’ interaction reminded me of what his wife said about the “save-the-world” impulse he got from his mother. Snyder continued:
Many words and much grandeur followed. But that moment is what I remember. None of us is perfect. Even Father Omelian Kovch was not perfect. Pope Francis was not perfect. The institution they represented has much to answer for. But imperfection can represent itself as service, in the acknowledgement that we can transcend ourselves when we see others first.
And that, I think, is what it must look like to preach from the pulpit of our lives. Snyder quotes Matthew 25 — “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” in the King James version — and adds:
When Francis made the rest of us wait so that he could greet the less fortunate, of course he was doing something symbolic. But such symbols matter, because in them we can glimpse something higher through something human, something that remains even as the memory of white garments and golden artifice fades.
I could say more, but I don’t think more words are necessary at this point.
Notes
1 The picture above shows, from left to right, Bishop Munib Younan of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL) and president of the Lutheran World Federation; Pope Francis; and Martin Junge, LWF general secretary, during celebration of 199th anniversary of Luther’s Reformation in Malmö, Sweden, Oct. 31, 2016. Photo: Magnus Aronson, LWF https://www.flickr.com/photos/lutheranworld/32532535120/in/album-72157678779580530/.
Links and Citations
Robert P. Baird, “Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times,” Guardian, March 30, 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/30/how-timothy-snyder-became-the-leading-interpreter-of-our-dark-times-putin-trump-ukraine
Ray Kirsten, “Timothy Snyder On Religion, Power, and Freedom,” Religion News Service, Dec 14, 2024 https://religionnews.com/2024/12/14/timothy-snyder-on-religion-power-and-freedom/
Gerard O’Connell, “Pope Francis, trailblazing Jesuit with a heart for the poor, dies at 88,” America, April 21, 2025 https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2025/04/21/pope-francis-dead-249946.
Timothy Snyder. “Humble Francis: A memory of transcendent humanity in Rome,” Thinking about …, Substack, April 21, 2015 https://snyder.substack.com/p/humble-francis.
[Uplinked May 2, 2025]
Ordinary Time 
Nice!
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