When I awoke this morning, my first
thought was that Pope Francis has a Twitter account and I need to check it out.
In general, the dreams I can recall are detailed and vivid, but if I dreamed of
the Pope in sleep to prompt the thought, it was one of those innumerable dreams
I can’t remember in the least. My mother would tell me it’s God’s way of
speaking to one of His lost sons. Whatever the reason, I sprang off the couch,
charged the phone, thumbed the blue app with the white bird, and searched out
the pontiff’s page.
What really inspired my thinking
of Pope Francis at 0643h (on a Sunday) is probably twofold. An NPR feature I
heard the other day recounted the story of a woman who received three phone
calls from an unknown number over the course of a few days. When the phone rang
the third time, the woman answered and the voice on the other end said, “Hello,
this is Pope Francis.” He reached out to her after a letter she wrote to him
detailing recent tribulations. They talked for several minutes; he promised to
pray for her, her family, and her recently deceased brother. The story stayed
with me because I’d been listening on my way to work and had been touched by the
contrast between his seeming kindness and patience, and the lack thereof
displayed by a majority of people in the building to which I had been currently
driving.
The second occurrence involves
the most recent issue of GQ; my roommate is a subscriber. Flipping thru
what felt like the endless pages of the magazine’s Men of the Year issue yesterday,
I stumbled upon an “article” entitled, “The 25 LEAST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE of 2013.”
Oddly capitalized title aside, what’s miraculous is I actually made it to the “article,” which starts on page 216; bored and cynical don’t
begin to describe my feelings toward this magazine. I could mention the lack of
voice and/or heart and/or thought in the writing that sporadically pops up amid
the more-than-generous helpings of advertisements. I could cite portions of endless
pomposity that bombard you from start to finish. I could even hone in on the
magazine’s own cool cynicism (which, I suppose, would here make me a hypocrite)
– that shines like rays of sunlight thru the open-curtained window and into the
pulsating eyes of a hangover sufferer – that presents itself in the banal brevity of the thoughtless
sentences attempting to pass themselves off as hip and unarguable. But I won’t.
What I will mention, briefly, is
#5 on this list, compiled, assuredly without effort, by Drew Magary (GQ correspondent).
No, Pope Francis did not make the cut. But Miley Cyrus, Paula Deen, Justin
Beiber, Aaron Hernandez, and 21 other set-em-up-knock-em-down targets did.
Putting Miss Cyrus (#6) on the list displays Magary’s lack of ingenuity with
regard to interpreting the actions of others, as well as GQ’s go-with-what’s-popular-to-stay-popular
approach. More disturbing though is the choice of Aaron Hernandez.
Sure, he’s arguably the easiest and most deserving target, but the simple fact that he’s on the
list, coupled with GQ’s presumed penchant for staying with what’s most current,
implies that he won’t make the list next year (assuming this is one of those annual
things [Drew Magary can dream can’t he?]), and given his (Hernandez’s)
reprehensible deeds – well, that’s just plain sad. It’s one thing to poke fun
at the topicality of a person’s artistic output; it’s something entirely
different to poke that same fun when lives have been lost.
Anyway, #5 is Pope Benedict XVI. And
in his defense of why the former Pope deserves mention on his little list,
Magary opens with, “The newest pope [sic] is sooooooo much better than Benedict, isn’t he? Who knew a pope [sic]
could be, like, nice?” And, in reading, I had to agree. I don’t like everything
for which Pope Francis stands; after all, he is the leader of a famously
intolerant, unflinching, and (more often than not) reprehensible religious juggernaut.
On the other hand, it’s hard to deny his likability and, more importantly, his
sincerity and conviction when compared to Benedict XVI and John Paul II (post
priest sex scandal).
Pope Francis has 3.2 million
followers on Twitter, and like any Twitter phenomenon, Pope
Francis follows a very select number of people: eight. Closer inspection of his
page, however, reveals Pope Francis follows only the multi-lingual versions of
himself, so, in essence, Pope Francis follows exactly no one (not even God, who
also has multiple Twitter handles).
In case you’re wondering, I did
some math. Between his nine Twitter handles, Pope Francis has roughly 10.4
million followers. Small potatoes when considering Twitter’s top ten, which
starts with Katy Perry (47.8 million) and ends with Justin Timberlake (28.6 million).
Even smaller potatoes when considering an estimated 1.2 billion Catholics
existed in the world in 2011. Still, if all nine of Pope Francis’s Twitter
handles were accounted for collectively – and arguably they should be since
they're all exactly the same aside from the language in which the tweets roll
out – he would rank in the top 70 of Twitter accounts with the most followers, right between
Charlie Sheen and singer-songwriter Alejandro Sanz, respectively.
After brewing some coffee, I read
Pope Francis’s most-recent tweet – “The Sacraments are Jesus Christ’s presence
in us. So it is important for us to go to confession and receive Holy
Communion.” – and something about it confused me. Initially, I attributed my
confusion to the Jesus Christ information. Maybe I expected the usual: Tidbits from his daily life rather than
advertisements for God’s unending love. Then I remembered what it is that the
Pope is hired to do, which is to spread the word of God and uphold the
teachings of Vatican II Catholicism.
And so I looked elsewhere for a
source of my confusion, landing on the fortune cookie-esque style with which
his tweets are delivered. With this reasoning in mind, I felt closer to the
source of my confusion, and as I read another tweet – “The Kingdom of Heaven is
for those who place their trust in the love of God, not in material
possessions.” – it dawned on me: The tweets are legible. There are no #s. No RTs or @s. No contractions or purposefully
misspelled words meant to save those all-important 140
characters. What you end up with are simple, pure sentences. Not unlike those
which are found in a book or escaped from a person’s mouth every so often.
Learning it’s possible to read a
person’s tweets, in a world where the lot of them are harder to decipher than Ulysses or most ee cummings poems,
brought on a sensation of freedom within me. In a flurry of excited
mindlessness, I added myself to the legion of followers of the pontiff in English
(and Latin, just for fun) with no regard to my non-religious proclivities. And
as a result of my hasty decision, I suddenly found myself in contemplation over
who Twitter thought I would also be interested in following: Joan Rivers and/or
The White House.
Differences in opinion aside, the fact remains that Pope
Francis is a decent and well-respected man. He’s a person to which you can look
up. To which you can aspire. Like Gandhi or the Dalai Lama, except that Pope
Francis is more relatable. He’s frugal and finds meaning and purpose in his
frugality. He prays for the sick and dying, and calls people up when they’re
feeling low. He’s only interested in an uncomplicated and holy life. And I can’t
fault the guy for that because it’s what most of us complain about not having,
ad nauseam, to anyone with stamina enough to listen.
