October 19: The Pope of Tears and Joy

Paragraph 10 bears repeated reading. Aside from the defining statements straight out of Aparecida, we also hear Pope Francis’ characteristic voice: “an evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral!”

It is the voice of a pastor, familiar to his parishioners, thick with humor.

We hear it again in the sentence that comes in the wake of the funereal quip. “Let us recover and deepen our enthusiasm, that ‘delightful and comforting joy of evangelizing, even when it is in tears that we must sow… And may the world of our time, which is searching, sometimes with anguish, sometimes with hope, be enabled to receive the good news not from evangelizers who are dejected, discouraged, impatient or anxious, but from ministers of the Gospel whose lives glow with fervour, who have first received the joy of Christ.’”

But this simple exhortation is in fact a quote, from the man Pope Francis beatified today. The passage about the delightful and comforting joy of evangelizing, about lives glowing with fervour, is from Blessed Paul VI. The second surprise: The passage is not from Gaudete in Domino (Joy in the Lord) but from Evangelii Nuntiandi (Evangelization Today)—the very thing Pope Francis called (in June last year) “the greatest pastoral document that has ever been written to this day.”

With Paul VI, we remember: Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy.