What Does It Mean to Lament the Poor Inside Panem?

Pope Francis praised Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton 

before a Congress stacked with millionaires.

Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton: These were the four Americans Pope Francis picked to talk about at his speech to Congress on Thursday. John Allen Jr. at Crux called them “the fantastic four”: Out of all the figures in history whom he admires, Francis “chose Americans, which was a way of saying that he realizes he doesn’t just have something to teach the United States—he, and the rest of the world, can learn from it as well.”

 The first two names are probably familiar to most Americans, but Day’s and Merton’s might not be. Both were Catholic converts who lived messy lives before turning to the Church, and even after: Day went through an abortion and several love affairs, while Merton fathered an illegitimate child and later had anapparently non-consummated affair with a nursing student after he had taken vows as a Trappist monk. In the eyes of the Church, these were sinners, but they were also advocates. In 1933, Day co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a non-violent organization dedicated to the homeless and working poor, and she edited a newspaper, theCatholic Worker, for roughly five decades. Merton, who lived a contemplative life in the Abbey of Gethsemani for the latter part of his life, wrote frequently about non-violence and civil rights in the mid-20th century.

The pope spoke about these two advocates for justice and those on the margins, and then he went to have lunch with the homeless—instead of dining with diplomats, he went to be with “the least of these.”

During Francis’s visit thus far, most of the attention has gone to the big-ticket speeches—to Congress, to the White House, to his Friday address to the United Nations. And Francis is a clever translator. When addressing these elite crowds, he has consistently spoken about those who are in extreme poverty and those who are suffering. Indeed, these speeches may have the greatest measurable effect: When Francis speaks before the United Nations, for example, he will be setting the stage for the upcoming climate-change conference in Paris.

 Still, the contrast between the neatly coiffured, impeccably clad members of Congress and the homeless men and women Francis later met was striking. Francis praised two Catholic heroes—at least one of whom is on the way to sainthood—who walked among the “least of these.” Though they may care about poverty, the elites of Washington, D.C., and New York City live in a rarified stratosphere, filled with catered breakfasts and stately furniture and monied peers. Francis often speaks of a culture of encounter: “Persons always live in relationship. We come from others, we belong to others, and our lives are enlarged by our encounter with others,” as he wrote in a co-authored encyclical,Lumen Fidei. The expectation of this speech was not that, though; it was a message directed to the powerful, in the hope that they might use their power for good.

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