To start the new year, I’d like to go back about a month, to an address of Pope Francis to the 2^nd International Congress of Brotherhood and Popular Piety. It seems a good way to start off, recapitulating some of the constant emphases of the Holy Father which I draw attention to.

This is a little speech about beauty. In fact, the word beauty is frequently italicized in the written text, as if we are urged not to miss the leitmotiv. Now, beauty is, for the pope, connected to contemplation. He has an insistent theme that what we contemplate is beauty. Echoing the Parable of the Great Banquet (cf. Mt 22:9–10; Lk 14:23), Pope Francis remarks that we are to go out into the streets—but he adds to this the motivation of Christ’s beauty:

Above all, it is the beauty of Christ that summons us, calls us to be brothers and sisters and urges us to take Christ out into the streets, to bring him to the people, so that everyone can contemplate his beauty.

Now, the pope does go on to specify that “the text I have proposed for your meditation… does not speak of devotion, public liturgies or contemplative prayer.” But he dos have in mind contemplation—contemplation of Christ in our neighbour, contemplation of Christ by our neighbour. And so his proposed text “speaks of the social work of the Church, of the lay commitment to the transformation of the world, of the need to bring God’s tenderness closer to people who suffer in body and soul.” In this way we can realize “[a] return journey, from the people we have met in the street, to whom we have shown the beauty of Jesus, of his Church, of this ‘crazy’ love, to return to God.”

There is another beauty, too, that Pope Francis remarks: that of the Church, or, as he says, “a People walking towards God.” Beauty like this isn’t static; the “beauty of this diversity is also a school, it is a path”—it’s a way, a journey. Still, we’re not empty-handed. In this procession, there is a lot of carrying going on: “carrying the water, the baskets of incense… carry[ing] the cross.” But not just that. We also carry Jesus:

It is in that intimate moment that we ask Jesus to give you the strength to join us in this pilgrimage, of procession and of life, together we will continue to carry Christ, taking him out into the streets so that he may enter into all hearts.

The beauty of Christ compels us to carry him to others, into the streets, and our act of carrying him out is also beautiful in its diversity of paths of the Church. Indeed, these different beauties are all connected

because “carrying” Christ in procession, carrying the cross that the Lord proposes to us every day, or carrying on our shoulders the brother we encounter prostrate on the road, as the Good Shepherd would do, is the same love, the same hidden charity that we find in the tabernacle[.]

This address of the Holy Father is tightly knit. Like in the pope’s recent letter on the renewal of the study of Church history, beauty is identified with the margins. Like his motu proprio reorganizing the Diocese of Rome, it focuses on different meanings of beauty to contemplate, all centred around the person of Christ; it speaks of movement and peripheries and an additional beauty on top of the physical and sacramental—the beauty in others, the beauty of going out to others, the beauty of all this brought together in Christ.

As we start the walk of this Jubilee Year, may our ideas of its beauty be along the lines that Pope Francis has laid out at least three times in the last few months: the beauty of Christ, which urges us to go out, and to join, and to be with, and to heal, and to walk beside, and to draw in.