Vatican City, Mar 3, 2018 / 03:15 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When pilgrims in the Eternal City hope to get an up-close view of the pope, or even shake his hand, they are usually advised to arrive at the Vatican early, to sit next to the barrier and, most importantly, to find a baby.
Brian and Kelle Smith, whose youngest son Bobby recently made his debut on the Pope’s Instagram account, only needed the first two suggestions. They’d come prepared with the baby.
Like many pilgrims who visit Rome, on Wednesday morning they woke up early, gathered their six children and braved the rain and long security lines before making in into the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall for Pope Francis’ Feb. 28 general audience.
Almost as soon as he entered the hall, Francis saw the family and made a beeline to the kids, giving each of them a blessing and patting Bobby, 2, on the cheeks. The toddler, perched on the barrier, has his eyes fixed on the Pope’s pectoral cross.
Instead of continuing down the line, Francis paused when he saw Bobby pointing to his chest, and stepped closer, allowing the boy to trace his finger along the chain holding his pectoral cross.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”><a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/PopeFrancis?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#PopeFrancis</a> greets a young child at today’s audience who wants to get a better look at the Cross he wears. <a href=”https://t.co/vXH0u7UHqv”>pic.twitter.com/vXH0u7UHqv</a></p>— Mary Shovlain (@maryshovlain) <a href=”https://twitter.com/maryshovlain/status/968773182936289280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>February 28, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Video footage of the encounter shows the Pope flashing a big smile and giving Bobby a final pat on the cheek before moving down the line of pilgrims.
Clips of the interaction immediately went up on Twitter, and later that day a close-up of the Bobby touching Francis’ cross went up on the Pope’s Instagram account, Franciscus.
In a March 2 interview with CNA, Brian Smith, the boy’s father, said it was a special moment for the family, “and Pope Francis was great, he was engaging with [Bobby].”
Smith said his son had been waving at the Pope as he walked in, “and he’s got the curly blonde hair, so I guess he caught Pope Francis’ eye.”
Francis, he said, “was very warm, and he spent a lot of time with the kids, really engaging with my youngest son.”
Though the interaction only lasted about 20 seconds, Smith was moved by the amount of time Pope Francis spent with them. “He’s the Pope, he’s the leader of our Church, of a billion Catholics, and he came and spent that amount of time with us when thousands of people were there to see him.”
During the brief encounter both the Pope and Bobby were talking with each other, Francis spoke in Italian and Bobby in baby-babble. However, with the noise and the excitement of the moment, Smith said he couldn’t make out what either was trying to say.
“It all seemed to happen so fast,” he said, noting that Francis “came and touched all six of the kids’ heads and gave them all a blessing, which was great.”
The family left Rome Thursday night and returned to Germany, where Smith is stationed with the U.S. military. They didn’t know about the Pope’s Instagram post until the next day, when a friend sent them a link to the post on Facebook.
“It was a pretty neat photo, the photographer did a great job capturing it,” he said. “It was pretty meaningful.”
<blockquote class=”instagram-media” data-instgrm-captioned data-instgrm-permalink=”https://www.instagram.com/p/Bfvu1NMDWx-/” data-instgrm-version=”8″ style=” background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:658px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% – 2px); width:calc(100% – 2px);”><div style=”padding:8px;”> <div style=” background:#F8F8F8; line-height:0; margin-top:40px; padding:50.0% 0; text-align:center; width:100%;”> <div style=” background:url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACwAAAAsCAMAAAApWqozAAAABGdBTUEAALGPC/xhBQAAAAFzUkdCAK7OHOkAAAAMUExURczMzPf399fX1+bm5mzY9AMAAADiSURBVDjLvZXbEsMgCES5/P8/t9FuRVCRmU73JWlzosgSIIZURCjo/ad+EQJJB4Hv8BFt+IDpQoCx1wjOSBFhh2XssxEIYn3ulI/6MNReE07UIWJEv8UEOWDS88LY97kqyTliJKKtuYBbruAyVh5wOHiXmpi5we58Ek028czwyuQdLKPG1Bkb4NnM+VeAnfHqn1k4+GPT6uGQcvu2h2OVuIf/gWUFyy8OWEpdyZSa3aVCqpVoVvzZZ2VTnn2wU8qzVjDDetO90GSy9mVLqtgYSy231MxrY6I2gGqjrTY0L8fxCxfCBbhWrsYYAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); display:block; height:44px; margin:0 auto -44px; position:relative; top:-22px; width:44px;”></div></div> <p style=” margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;”> <a href=”https://www.instagram.com/p/Bfvu1NMDWx-/” style=” color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;” target=”_blank”>#GeneralAudience</a></p> <p style=” color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;”>A post shared by <a href=”https://www.instagram.com/franciscus/” style=” color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px;” target=”_blank”> Pope Francis</a> (@franciscus) on <time style=” font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;” datetime=”2018-02-28T15:42:59+00:00″>Feb 28, 2018 at 7:42am PST</time></p></div></blockquote> <script async defer src=”//www.instagram.com/embed.js”></script>
After living in Germany for two years, the family is set to return to the United States in six months, and had wanted to visit Rome one last time before going back.
“We basically just went to Rome to see the Pope,” Smith said, explaining that they had initially planned to attend the general audience in January while visiting a friend in Italy, but had to cancel the Rome portion of the trip because the Pope was in South America.
However, it wasn’t their first time meeting the Vicar of Christ. Though it was their first interaction with Pope Francis, Brian, Kelle and their three oldest children met Benedict XVI during his Mass for Pentecost in 2010.
“One thing about both of them is that popes love babies,” he said, recalling that as soon as Benedict entered St. Peter’s Basilica “he saw the children and he just ignored everybody else and came for the kids and blessed them.”
“So my older three kids don’t have an excuse,” he joked, “because they’ve been blessed by two popes.”
Smith said that while he is excited to return to his home in Texas for a few years, he has enjoyed living in Europe, where, despite a general decline in the practice of the Christian faith, “there’s still so many great sites…Pretty much all of modern Europe is based on 1,000 years of the Church being here. So it’s great.”
Highlights of their time in Europe have included visits to Fatima, Orvieto and Lourdes, where Smith participated in the annual military pilgrimage to the shrine, as well as many other places where saints are buried.
However, Smith said perhaps the biggest highlight was having his son Bobby – who is named after Jesuit St. Robert Bellarmine – baptized by a Jesuit priest he knows during Mass celebrated at the saint’s tomb in Rome.
“This has been a great posting for us,” he said, “because you hear about things but America is not really a Catholic country, so it’s great to be able to see all of these pilgrimage places, it’s a great blessing.”
[…]
Reading literature and poetry can enhance our Wisdom Bank.
About reading literature, Charles Darwin himself actually had something to say about his own desiccated narrowness and what has become Darwin-ISM:
“This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of MACHINE for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.
“…A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered. . . . The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be INJURIOUS TO THE INTELLECT, and more probably to THE MORAL CHARACTER, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. . . . My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; and therefore I COULD NEVER HAVE SUCCEEDED WITH METAPHYSICS or mathematics.”
(Charles Darwin, edited by Sir Francis Darwin, “Charles Darwin’s Autobiography,” 1887/New York: Henry Schuman 1950, CAPS added).
What might this reflective Charles Darwin have to say about now upending human sexual morality and personal “moral character,” on the basis of some newly-mutated “sociological-scientific foundation” infecting some poorly-read clericalist “intellects” in high synodal places?
The dominant culture is in free-fall and the leader of the Catholic Church has time to suggest that seminarians read literature. (You can’t make this stuff up.)
The human brain needs time to rest and be rejuvenated. A tired and overworked brain can’t think straight and is prone to errors, and the soul and spirt suffer from a constant interaction with bleak and often terrifying reality. We can’t spend all of our waking moments in battle–even our military organizations maintain recreational facilities for the soldiers, sailors, and pilots. We need physical exercise, and it doesn’t have to be Olympic-level workouts–just a slow short walk or some gardening outdoors will do for many of us. And we need relief from over-stimulation by the latest alarming news and from too much study of deep topics, including religious topics. I personally enjoy reading children’s literature–not just the classics, but charming series like the Laura Ingalls Wilder saga, the old mysteries (Nancy Drew, Dana Girls, etc.), and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I am also currently attempting to read everything that Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) wrote–and discovered his amazing novel about Joan of Arc! I’ve even written a series (mystery) of six skating novels for children and teens, but they remain unpublished by established publishers (and to any publishers reading this, they are filled with Catholic heroes and heroines!) Even the Lord Jesus took time away from his work on earth to relax!
I’ve encountered no public figure in my lifetime who ever impressed me more as being devoid of personal wisdom than Pope Francis. His rhetoric is a continuing monolithic expression of faith in inevitable progress if we all engage in some sort of never defined “listening” process to a never defined purpose. Repeated use of the name of Our Lord as linguistic prop to legitimize a generality does not complete an answer.
In theory, a religious man recognizes personal sin as the origin of all the evil in the world, its power to do harm occurs when large scale popular concessions are made to mythologies that promise exoneration from personal accountability. Humanity pursues accommodating dishonest falsehoods as passionately as honest truth, and honest minds understand this. A jealous and dishonest mind becomes spiteful towards those who have warned us that indiscriminate immodesty in ideas does not promote closeness to the single author of all truth, the creator of everything, instead casting this as a cynical, “rigid” denial of progress, but a progress never defined. Only a minority of honest writers have understood the tragedies of our vanities that call a lie a truth, and call what is true, too far. Many others have contributed to human brutality.
Yes. Woe to those of Isaiah 5:20…as it would be better for them to have millstones of Luke 17:2.
Reading Pope Francis’ letter to seminarians (linked in the first line of the article to the letter itself in the Vatican website) urging them to embrace and love literature is a breath of fresh air. For those of us who cherish the rich tapestry of Catholic literature, it is a welcome affirmation and a profound break from his magisterial, theological, spiritual, and moral discourses in his variety of official teachings and declarations. Pope Francis underscores the value of literature not just as an academic exercise but as a means of spiritual and moral enrichment. Pope Francis’ letter is a celebration of the enduring power of literature to nurture the soul and enhance one’s spiritual journey. For seminarians and all who seek to deepen their faith, delving deeply into the world of words and wisdom is an invitation to explore the rich intersections between faith, morality, and human experience. This guidance from the Pope is not just about reading; it is about engaging with literature as a means of growing closer to God and understanding the divine narrative that shapes our lives.
This papal view reminds me of the great Catholic literary figures whose works have long bridged the realms of faith, morality, and human experience. Dante’s epic journey through Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory is more than a grand narrative; it is a reflection on the human soul’s quest for divine truth. Similarly, J.R.R. Tolkien’s richly imagined world of Middle-earth is infused with themes of sacrifice, redemption, and the enduring struggle between good and evil, all grounded in a deep sense of Christian morality. Shakespeare, who is now more and more correctly identified as Catholic by literary critics, offers a treasure trove of insights into the human condition and the moral struggles that define our lives. His exploration of themes such as power, betrayal, and redemption echoes the moral lessons found in the scriptures and Church teachings. The viral tagging of Trump and the MAGA cult as “weird” reminds me of the three witches called the “weird sisters” in the Bard’s Macbeth.