You Must Be a Pontiff – Colleen Simon

“You must be a pontiff!” WHAT? What did he say?

For over half an hour I had been listening to this Mexican Catholic Bishop talk and the poor translator trying to keep up with him and share his words with those of us who didn’t know Spanish. After a long day of travelling and adjusting to the intense heat of Arizona, I have to admit that I was not fully “present” during most of his talk. But when he said ‘pontiff’ and she used the same word in her translation…I wasn’t the only one who sat up and started paying better attention.

You see, for Roman Catholics and I suspect most of the rest of the world, pontiff has only one meaning when we hear it – Pope. So how could he be telling a room full of mostly lay people that they were to be a pontiff?  But this Bishop kept on. He said it again, and then he said we must all be pontiffs! By this point even the translator was looking at him with some confusion because for her there was no other translation for pontiff other than pope – so she continued to say the word just as he had said it. The Bishop was getting louder and more strident now that he had our full and complete attention. But I detected the beginning of a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. He began to explain the origin of pontiff. Pons from the Latin for bridge, and facare, meaning to create or to build.

“Ahhh,” I thought.  “We are to be bridge builders!”  Now this conference I was attending was about faith and migration/immigration, and being a bridge builder out here in the dry Sonora desert had an interesting meaning. But as I thought about this during the conference and for days afterwards I found myself thinking what it would mean if we thought of ourselves and acted like we were pontiffs?! I have to admit that I kept saying to myself with more than a little bit of wicked glee, “I am a pontiff!” Why is it that when we say words in another language, they are so much more alluring?

After all – what is it that God calls us all into? Is it not relationship? Is bridge-building not the same thing? But in the context of migration and immigration issues it is still a particularly controversial subject here in the United States. And in the bridge building business – each individual gets to choose who or what they are going to connect to.  And I think when we are given this choice, we can get ourselves in trouble with too narrow a definition of whom God calls us to be in relationship with. After all, isn’t there a bridge in Alaska to nowhere?

If we chose to only build bridges with those that we know and love, well isn’t that a little bit like the line from scripture, “46For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? 47And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same?^” Matthew 5:46-47

So on Sundays we gather together to remember who we are and whose we are. We sing “All are welcome!” and, charged with this certain knowledge, we go forth to love and serve God and one another.  No one is excluded. So I ask you – how will you be God’s pontiff today? Will you let go and let God choose whom you will connect to and where you will build a new relationship? What ‘recompense’ will you receive this day from the bridges you build? And perhaps an even better question:  how will others be gifted today because of God’s love through you?

You are a pontiff –Amen.

Colleen Simon is the Pastoral Associate for Social Ministry at St. Francis Xavier in Kansas City, Missouri—the city’s Jesuit parish.  She oversees several justice programs, parish education around Catholic Social Teaching, and a food pantry feeding hundreds of hungry neighbors.  Colleen spent most of her life in Richmond, Virginia, before moving to Kansas City in 2010 to live in a green house near Troost Avenue.  She lives there with three dogs, three cats, and one Lutheran pastor, to whom she is legally married, at least in Iowa.