I’m from north of the border (though actually rather south of the 49^th parallel), but my neighbo(u)rs in the US are celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day this weekend—and I’d like to get in on the fun. If I were to pick somebody else’s national holiday that I appreciate the most, it would be this one. I don’t exactly know how Pope Francis feels about MLK Day. But there’s a reasonable chance he feels not too differently from me.

The Holy Father has repeatedly drawn attention to Martin Luther King as an activist and as a theologian. This starts during his apostolic journey to the District of Columbia, New York City, and Philadelphia in 2015, then continues in speech and writing after that, both addressed to the Church at large and to more particular recipients.

Papal trip to the United States

The first comment of Pope Francis invoking Martin Luther King Jr. was delivered during the welcoming ceremony at the White House. The exact use is a bit surprising. But you have to remember that this was in late September 2015:

Our common home has been part of this group of the excluded which cries out to heaven and which today powerfully strikes our homes, our cities and our societies. To use a telling phrase of the Reverend Martin Luther King, we can say that we have defaulted on a promissory note and now is the time to honor it.

In other words, just four months after having released Laudato Si’, and while visiting a region which Laudate Deum 72 identifies as having excessively high per capita emissions, Pope Francis rallies the social vision of one of the USA’s most famous sons to his cause. There is a debt to pay. It is time to shake off the bad choices of the past and to make good on that debt. This is what Martin Luther King thought about social dynamics in his day. It is not wrong to observe that we do the same thing with certain social issues in our own.

The next day (September 24, 2015), Pope Francis made an address to the joint session of Congress. In this address, the civil rights activist and preacher features in a highlighted group of “three sons and a daughter of this land,” “four individuals” who give us “four dreams.” President Abraham Lincoln is invoked for “liberty”; Dorothy Day, for “social justice and the rights of persons”; Thomas Merton, for “the capacity for dialogue and openness to God”; and Martin Luther King, for “liberty in plurality and non-exclusion.” In the speech, King’s name appears a total of four times. The section that focuses most closely on him runs as follows:

I think of the march which Martin Luther King led from Selma to Montgomery fifty years ago as part of the campaign to fulfill his “dream” of full civil and political rights for African Americans. That dream continues to inspire us all. I am happy that America continues to be, for many, a land of “dreams.” Dreams which lead to action, to participation, to commitment. Dreams which awaken what is deepest and truest in the life of a people.

The Holy Father continues describing contributions to and the promotion of “a culture which enables people to ‘dream’ of full rights for all their brothers and sisters.” In contrast to what as said at the welcome ceremony at the White House, here MLK is on full display for his own immediate vision and the direction of his own activism and action. While the Reverend’s principles of social fraternity reach, as Pope Francis knows, farther that he himself saw in his own time, the principles also apply exactly to the situation that he saw and addressed. And that situation remains with us today in new permutations. MLK’s is a dream for today.

A more recent address

Pope Francis does not stop there with MLK’s speech given during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. He has also referenced the same great oration of Martin Luther King at an audience with participants in the Meeting for Education in Peace and Care. In this audience, he is reflecting on the theme of peace. He draws upon “two witnesses.” The first is Pope Saint John XIII, who wrote Pacem in Terris. The second is MLK. Pope Francis says:

A few months after the publication of that Encyclical [of John XIII, Pacem in Terris], another prophet of our time, Martin Luther King, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1964, delivered the historic speech in which he said: “I have a dream.” In an American context strongly marked by racial discrimination, he had made everyone dream with the idea of a world of justice, freedom and equality. He said: “I have a dream: that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

And you, boys, girls: what is your dream for the world of today and tomorrow? I encourage you to dream big, like John XXIII and Martin Luther King.

From this papal address, we can perhaps better understand the dual usage of MLK that the Holy Father invoked in Washington, DC. First, the reverend preacher means exactly what he says for his time. Second, he dreams big. People of today—especially young people—are encouraged by Pope Francis to dream big. If those dreams involve social fraternity, the theme of Fratelli Tutti, that remains close to the letter of the social vision of MLK. If those dreams pertain to the present environmental and climate crisis, as we can be sure many of them will, we know that this is also a matter of “the Church’s social teaching” (LS 15), and that is why indirect inspiration from a great social “witness” is all but inevitable. It is why Pope Francis invokes him at the White House and in this later address. Both direct and indirect inspiration are on the table, as far as the Pope is concerned.

Encyclical letter and apostolic exhortation

Not only has MLK made his way into speeches and addresses of Pope Francis, he also features prominently in two of the Holy Father’s more formal teaching documents: Fratelli Tutti and Amoris Laetitia.

In the social encyclical, Martin Luther King Jr. takes his place in the acknowledgment of debts that ends the document: “I felt inspired particularly by Saint Francis of Assisi, but also by others of our brothers and sisters who are not Catholics: Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi and many more” (FT 286). The company he keeps in this letter is not surprising in the least. King, Tutu, and Gandhi are a not-uncommon trio. But that they are all mentioned in a papal encyclical is certainly arresting of our attention. These non-Catholics are held up as models of the overall inspiration and movement of the Holy Father’s thought throughout the magisterial document. We should pay them more attention, even though they teach from a place that is separated from the Catholic Church in some ways and may contrast with the fullness of that teaching on a point here or there. On the question of social fraternity, these three are a great inspiration. Perhaps we should reread all of Fratelli Tutti to appreciate just how much it bears an imprint of MLK.

The lengthier treatment of Martin Luther King comes, however, in the post-synodal apostolic exhortation on love in the family, Amoris Laetitia. Pope Francis quotes 280 words straight from a sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on November 17, 1957:

The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls “the image of God” you begin to love him in spite of [everything]. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off… Another way that you love your enemy is this: when the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it… When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system… Hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and so on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that’s the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil… Somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut it off and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love. (AL 118)

Before this passage, MLK is introduced as someone “who met every kind of trial and tribulation with fraternal love.” A variant on this introduction occurs when Pope Francis shares a shorter version of this quotation with the World Meeting of Popular Movements on November 5, 2016; the author is identified as someone who “constantly opted for fraternal love, even amid the worst persecutions and indignities.”

Amoris Laetitia in effect uses Martin Luther King Jr. as an advocate of seeing Christ in our neighbours, no matter what good or evil they are doing. He explicitly says that we must “see God’s image there.” This is a favourite theme of Pope Francis. I’ve counted at least 21 instances of the theme in the Holy Father’s encyclical letters and apostolic exhortations. It’s virtually a defining theme of this pontificate. Yet, here, in a document on love in the family, Pope Francis defers to MLK on the subject. Of course, that has great merit. If anyone can be set as an authority on using creative love to triumph over evil and still assert one’s own dignity, and that of the oppressor, it would be MLK.

In fact, we might also find a Luther King inspiration lurking behind these challenging words of Fratelli Tutti:

We are called to love everyone, without exception; at the same time, loving an oppressor does not mean allowing him to keep oppressing us, or letting him think that what he does is acceptable. On the contrary, true love for an oppressor means seeking ways to make him cease his oppression; it means stripping him of a power that he does not know how to use, and that diminishes his own humanity and that of others. Forgiveness does not entail allowing oppressors to keep trampling on their own dignity and that of others, or letting criminals continue their wrongdoing. Those who suffer injustice have to defend strenuously their own rights and those of their family, precisely because they must preserve the dignity they have received as a loving gift from God. (FT 241)

There are numerous other potential sources, of course. The Gospel is one of them. Everything here is evangelical in its fullness. Yet what Pope Francis does in Amoris Laetitia is complement these thoughts. We forgive. Yet we don’t let the oppressor continue. In synthesis, we must respond with creative love. There has to be somebody who will choose, instead of hitting off another round of oppression and violence, to “inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love” (AL 118). In many ways, Amoris Laetitia and Fratelli Tutti are playing off one another to make a more energetic, more fully evangelical concert.

To Bernice King

Finally, to close this short summary of and reflection on the place of MLK in the teaching of Pope Francis, I would draw attention to a letter to Bernice King, MLK’s daughter, herself a lawyer and minister, on the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day three years ago. It speaks volumes that the Pope would send this letter and acknowledge his debt to her father in his official teaching as head of the Catholic Church. There is ecumenism. It betokens humility. A profound desire to join in the commemoration of this day, MLK Day, seeps through at the end, and we might with some chutzpah perhaps appropriate the Pope’s final blessing to ourselves. Pope Francis writes:

I send cordial greetings and good wishes to all taking part in the Beloved Community Commemorative Service on 18 January 2021, honoring the life and achievements of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

In today’s world, which increasingly faces the challenges of social injustice, division and conflict that hinder the realization of the common good, Dr King’s dream of harmony and equality for all people, attained through nonviolent and peaceful means, remains ever timely. “Each one of us is called to be an artisan of peace, by uniting and not dividing, by extinguishing hatred and not holding on to it, by opening paths of dialogue” (Fratelli Tutti, 284). In this way we will be able to see ourselves, not as “others”, but as neighbors, in the truth of our shared dignity as children of Almighty God. Only by striving daily to put this vision into practice can we work together to create a community built upon justice and fraternal love.

Upon all present at this Commemorative Service, I gladly invoke the divine blessings of wisdom and peace.