In the encounter with people and their stories

Yesterday, Pope Francis wrote a message to the Pontifical Academy for Life. In it he made this remarkable statement:

“In the encounter with people and their stories, and in listening to scientific knowledge, we [the Church] realize that our parameters regarding anthropology and culture require profound revision.”

When I replace "we" with "I" in this statement, I hear my own experience played back to me.

In the encounter with people and their stories, and in listening to scientific knowledge, I realized that my parameters regarding anthropology and culture required profound revision.

I was formed as a young adult in a very narrow idea of Catholicism, one misshaped by American Evangelicalism as much as it was shaped by the Church's actual teachings.

Then, in encountering others and listening to their stories, God broke me out of the confines of my presumed certainty.

No longer was I afraid of how the lived experiences of clerical abuse survivors, LGBTQ persons, those with lifestyles very different from me, or those with political ideas I profoundly disagreed with may challenge my faith, because my faith was no longer in the security of certainty, but in a Person.

As Pope Benedict taught, I "do not possess the truth,” rather, “the truth possesses" me. My faith is not a house of cards that could fall at any time. I do not need to feel threatened by questions and developments. Rather, “the Christian can afford to be supremely confident, yes, fundamentally certain that he can venture freely into the open sea of the truth, without having to fear for his Christian identity.”

I do not need to fear learning from the lives and stories of others because “Christ, who is the truth, has taken us by the hand, and we know that his hand is holding us securely on the path of our quest for knowledge.”