Reading Francis

The Bible readings for the Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time (October 26, 2025) seems tailor-made for Pope Leo XIV’s newly released apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te. The first reading from Sirach dwells on God hearing the cry of the oppressed, the wail of the orphan and widow, the prayer of the lowly.* The Psalm response is “The Lord hears the cry of the poor,” and the last verse begins “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted; and those who are crushed in spirit he saves.” The Gospel, from Luke 18, is the parable of the Pharisee who thinks he’s all that and the tax collector, the outcast who walks away redeemed. If you are Catholic, and you go to Mass Sunday, you should ask the priest for your money back if you don’t hear anything about Pope Leo’s call for Christians to live in radical solidarity with the poor. (Let me know how that goes!)

Maybe it’s because I’ve been posting daily quotes from Dilexi te about finding Christ in the poor (it’ll be 25 days worth when we’re done), or maybe it’s because I’ve already written a little about the document, but my attention goes elsewhere in this Sunday’s Gospel.

Before Jesus tells the story, Luke targets the story’s audience in verse 9: 

“Jesus addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else.” 

Does that sound like anyone you know? It sure does to me. 

Someone who can’t understand how anyone could possibly disagree with them. Someone who gets exasperated whenever another person suggests they should be curious about the perspective of someone who is so clearly wrong (from their eyes), rather than dumping scorn on them. Someone who “can’t even” with those people.

Yeah, it sounds a lot like me.

Back in late January, I posted the long version of the serenity prayer, which I had not previously known was the work of my favorite 20th century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. I don’t pay much attention to the web analytics of ReadingFrancis.com, but whenever I peek, I’m surprised to see that this prayer continues to find eyeballs, even though versions are all over the interwebs. I’m sure people go looking for the part that virtually everyone knows, but hopefully they stick around for the second two-thirds of the prayer. They go like this:

Living one day at a time,

enjoying one moment at a time.

Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace.

Taking, as he did, the sinful world as it is,

not as I would have it.

Trusting that he will make all things right

if I surrender to His will;

that I may be reasonably happy in this life,

and supremely happy with Him forever.

“Taking, as he [Jesus] did, the sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.”

I do not mean to imply that there is no place for activism to change the world; Niebuhr certainly didn’t believe that. But he was insistent that, even as we worked for justice, we maintain the humility to recognize our own brokenness, which carries with it the near certainty that whatever solutions we might proffer for the ills of the world will have flaws, blindspots, biases and unforeseen consequences that may counteract many if not all of their benefits. His brand of political theology was a “Christian realism” that balanced the yearning for justice with the humility that comes with the recognition of our limits. Do what you can, but be mindful that it will never be enough to make things totally right.

The previous Sunday’s Gospel was the Lucan passage that preceded this parable of the persistent widow, and several of the homilies I heard dwelt on the importance of prayer in a culture that sometimes belittles it. I take this week’s Gospel, and the serenity prayer, as a messy sign of hope. 

Prayer matters. It may not get you the emperor penguin that your heart desires,** but it will train you to trust in the One who shares everything but our brokenness to know better than we do which way is forward. The tax collector walks away justified, not because he’s an outcast, but because his status as an outcast gives him no choice but to depend on God’s mercy instead of his own credentials. 

Someday, I will learn to do the same.

*My Protestant friends will have to trust me on this, since their Bibles leave out Sirach, but there’s a big difference in wording between the passage read in mass and the verses you find in a (Catholic) Bible that I would love to someday have explained to me. Their message is the same, but the folks who put it into the Mass took some linguistic liberties.

**Let’s just say our daughter had ambitious hopes for Christmas presents as a wee child.