Tender Love

A goodbye to Pope Francis

In 2008, while running a start-up in Las Vegas, something happened to me that I cannot describe. Certain things are too sacred to share or even attempt to put into words, especially in a world that treats words and experiences with such flippancy and irreverence. (John Henry Newman once said that a man cannot tell the story of his conversion between dessert and tea at a dinner party; if he were alive today, he might say that he shouldn’t attempt to tell it in a two-minute Q&A on a podcast.) We do violence to reality when we try. But I will share what I think is prudent to share.

Pope Francis was a man of gestures. The image of him kissing a sick boy’s feet—pictured above, while he was still the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires—will always be my favorite image of him: I cannot imagine a more tender act. The boy’s frail legs and feet, and certainly his heart, were rattled that day by the force of this man’s tender love.

I was already a Catholic seminarian when he became Pope. When his…