Pope 3, Pols nil

In case you’ve been in a state of catatonia for the past week, Pope Francis I has been visiting the US, starting with a couple of days in Washington, D.C. Right from the git-go, Francis took the Capital of the Free World on his own terms, leaving Joint Base Andrews in the stretch version of a Fiat:

So you knew this wasn’t going to be your father’s papal visitation.

But what I love about this Bishop of Rome is how he has continued to do his Francis Thing, failing completely to suck up to our congressmorons in the manner to which they have become accustomed. I mean, it’s not everyone who—while being undeniably Christian—can get the crypto-Christians squawking about like cooped hens under a coyote alert.

He totally ran them like a boss—just ignoring their hissy-fits and showing them how true leadership is done. (Okay, the guy does live and work at the Vatican, which, now that Stalin is dead, pretty much has a lock on major league intrigue. So he’s got that edge.)

Take for example his address yesterday to Congress, where he talked about things guaranteed to affront pols: calling on them to rise above polarization, to open our nation to refugees and immigrants, to protect human life (both pre- and post-birth), to act on climate change, and to build an economic environment where business service the common good.

Well, you can see why they’d be pissed off. He framed his remarks by referring to four great Americans: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. Every single one of those four people lived lives that should make the rich and entitled extremely uncomfortable.

Day, one of my all-time heroes, founded Catholic Worker, a group that refuses to take non-profit status because its followers believe that you should help others because it’s right, not because you get a tax deduction for it. Her entire life could be encapsulated in what she said in an interview: “If your brother is hungry, you feed him. You don’t meet him at the door and say, ‘Go be though filled,’ or ‘Wait for a few weeks, and you’ll get a welfare check.’ You sit him down and feed him. And so that’s how the soup kitchen started.”

Merton practiced a different kind of service, as a Cistercian monk. He was all about shutting up and thinking about the state of the world and of faith. In his autobiography he said, “I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God, and yet hating him; born to love him, living instead in fear of hopeless self-contradictory hungers.”

So, yeah—not very many of the men and women packed into the House in their $2000-per suits would like to spend any length of time thinking about Day or Merton, or the world they worked so steadfastly to build.

Just look at John Boehner’s face in this photo, if you doubt me.

(Pelosi only looks moderately pleasant because I think in her last round of "work" she had her facial muscles permanently set in a kind of rictus.) 

Following his address to Congress, Francis bagged the opportunity to break bread with the wheelers and the dealers, to share a meal at a D.C. soup kitchen. (This in itself is a huge change from the previous papal visit by Benedict XVI, which you’ll recall was marked by several slap-up dinners wherever he paused for longer than a few hours. Thank God.) I'm sure this sent all the security services into a tailspin, but I consider that to be a bit of a bonus.

(Also, if I were the pontiff, I'd feel safer eating with the masses than with a collection of self-appointed Defenders of the Faith who regularly spew both spittle and venom. Just sayin'.)

Okay, look—if you’re not Catholic, if you’re not tickled by watching pols get their feathers ruffled (although, I really don’t get who wouldn’t be tickled by this), if you don’t care about Italian cars or soup kitchens, or if you don't think Junípero Serra should have been beatified much less canonized, there’s still a huge reason for you to be grateful for the humanitarian service Pope Francis has given us for the past few days:

He’s knocked Donald Trump out of the headlines.