At the end of 2023, I had the privilege of meeting Pope Francis at his Vatican residence, along with seven educators from around the world. It was one of the highlights of my life, made even more special by the added honour of serving as the Pope’s translator during the gathering.

While waiting for Pope Francis to enter the room, I asked Jose Maria, an Argentinian who had worked closely with Francis for several decades, whether there was any special protocol to observe when meeting the Pope. I thought it a fair question from a very nervous translator!

I was completely surprised when Jose Maria laughed out loud and replied, ‘Wayne, this is Francis. His only protocol is the Gospel!’

Of course, what Jose Maria said was true. The humility and simplicity of Francis were matched only by his passion for education, justice, and the future of our planet.

He consistently prayed for a church ‘of’ and ‘for’ the poor: 

• A Church that promotes service and compassionate engagement with the world as indispensable to the way we worship the God of love who stands with and for the poor.
• A Church focused on bringing the Kingdom of God and its message of justice into the world, rather than on bringing people into its ranks;
• A Church less concerned with how the world might change it, and more concerned with how it might strive to change the world; and
• A Church that strives ceaselessly to tell the poor and the excluded that God loves them and that the Gospel is good news for them as well.

It was a very different context several years earlier, when a friend and I travelled to Sri Lanka to meet the theologian Fr Tissa Balasuriya. We arrived at the sprawling compound where Fr Tissa lived and were met by a tiny little man with scraggly, long white hair.

“So, you’ve come to talk theology!” Fr Tissa said when we first met. He promptly led us out of the room, down the stairs, across the compound, into the street, into a rickshaw, and before we fully realised what was happening, we had travelled 45 minutes to the outskirts of Colombo, to a slum area where he had built a school for the poor. He took us to an area on the unfinished roof of the school, right in the middle of the slum, sat us down, and said: “Now we can do theology!”

Fr Tissa didn’t need to say any more; his message was so clear. 

Pope Francis and Fr Tissa probably never met in person, but they spoke with a common heart. Their message is that we see and recognise the face of God most clearly in the poor; that we cannot reflect on the Reign of God, God’s vision for a just and inclusive world, without focusing on the plight of the poor and on what the Gospel’s message of ‘good news’ means for them. 

If our understanding of the Gospels does not eventually lead us into deeper compassion, greater justice and solidarity with those on the margins, we may have missed its heart. As Pope Francis reminded us, “The Gospel of the marginalised is where our credibility is discovered and revealed.”

St. Oscar Romero of El Salvador said the same thing using more blunt language:

… a church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a Gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, isn’t really the Gospel but rather, very nice, pious considerations that don’t bother anyone!

Along with these great heroes, may the Gospel of the poor and disenfranchised be our only protocol as well.

(To go more deeply into this topic, I refer readers to Part 1 of Book 2 in The Bowerbird Collection.)