Message from Pope Francis: Read a Novel

The Late Pontiff’s Take on the Power of Literature for Secular and Religious Readers Alike

It wasn’t his final word, but it came near the end. Last summer, Pope Francis issued a letter urging people to read more literature.

Photo by Chris Benson on Unsplash

When Pope Francis penned his Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation, he meant it mainly for seminarians but then second-guessed himself. “Reading novels and poems,” he said, form “part of one’s path to personal maturity.” That’s true for all of us, regardless of vocation. Even regardless of faith.

The late pope’s letter represents a passionate appeal to treat literature as something more than an optional pastime, one easily replaced by social media, television, or movies. Francis, who once taught literature much earlier in his life, wanted us to see it as an essential ingredient of personal development and human flourishing.

As I read it, a few threads in his letter stand out.

Personal Engagement

Unlike television or movies, reading isn’t passive entertainment. It requires engagement, participation. “Readers in some sense rewrite a text,” said Francis,

enlarging its scope through their imagination, creating a whole world by bringing into play their skills, their memory, their dreams and their personal history, with all its drama and symbolism. In this way, what emerges is a text quite different from the one the author intended to write. A literary work is thus a living and ever-fruitful text, always capable of speaking in different ways and producing an original synthesis on the part of each of its readers.

This personal involvement in creating the meaning of a book naturally engages our reflection and discernment, our critical sense and moral faculties. And, by engaging them, reading also stretches and strengthens them, helping them to develop and expand, to become more responsive, not only more attuned and accurate but also more supple, more flexible.

As we push ourselves into the book, the book pushes itself into us. We are, said Francis, both the subject who reads and the object being read. “In reading a novel or a work of poetry, the reader actually experiences ‘being read’ by the words that he or she is reading,” he said. “Reading thus becomes the ‘path’ leading him [or her] to the truth of his [or her] own being.”

We don’t consume a book, we confront it, and it confronts us in turn. Television and movies can do some of this work, but not to the same extent or with the same effect.

Grounded in the Real

We are today tempted not only by cynicism and skepticism but by abstraction, by disembodiment. We can see this running rampant in our social discourse and personal spirituality where we live ever increasingly in the self-referential echo chambers of our own minds, filtering messages and inputs that force us to reckon with life beyond our cherished assumptions and sentiments.

Literature won’t have it. It yanks us back to what’s real, what’s embodied, what’s relational. Francis applied this point in an explicitly religious way, but it extends beyond the context of faith. “Our challenge is not so much atheism,” he said, “as the need to respond adequately to many people’s thirst for God, lest they try to satisfy it with alienating solutions or with a disembodied Jesus”—that is, a Christ missing the “flesh made of passions, emotions and feelings, words that challenge and console, hands that touch and heal, looks that liberate and encourage.”

That’s what literature both offers and offers to sensitize us to. “This is not the mystery of some abstract humanity,” said Francis, “but that of all men and women, with their hurts, desires, memories and hopes that are a concrete part of their lives.” Literature brings all that and more to life and heightens our awareness of it in ourselves and the world around us.

“When we read a story,” said Francis,

each of us can see before our eyes the weeping of an abandoned girl, an elderly woman pulling the covers over her sleeping grandson, the struggles of a shopkeeper trying to eke out a living, the shame of one who bears the brunt of constant criticism, the boy who takes refuge in dreams as his only escape from a wretched and violent life. As these stories awaken faint echoes of our own inner experiences, we become more sensitive to the experiences of others. We step out of ourselves to enter into their lives, we sympathize with their struggles and desires, we see things through their eyes and eventually we become companions on their journey. We are caught up in the lives of the fruit seller, the prostitute, the orphaned child, the bricklayer’s wife, the old crone who still believes she will someday find her prince charming. We can do this with empathy and at times with tenderness and understanding.

We can thus better become a solace for others, while we experience solace ourselves. “In reading,” said Francis, “we discover that our feelings are not simply our own, they are universal, and so even the most destitute person does not feel alone.”

Literature integrates the rational and emotional, the individual and the relational. As the participatory power of the novel does its work, we don’t merely observe. We consider and conceptualize, feel and hope, empathize and discover. The paradox of literature is this: As we lose ourselves in an imaginary world, we find ourselves more thoroughly in the real.

Two Practicalities

How does literature accomplish this remarkable magic? Beyond what we’ve addressed so far, Francis suggests at least two practical ways literature casts its spell.

The first is by forcing us to listen. Citing his fellow Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges, Francis said literature comes down to a fundamental fact, “listening to another person’s voice.” When reading, we pause, put our own interests to the side, and become receptive to another person’s ideas, flights, fears, temptations, and more. Borges told his students that they may not understand much of what they’re reading when they start, but the main thing was simply to listen.

Francis emphasized the importance of this insight. “We must never forget how dangerous it is to stop listening to the voice of other people when they challenge us!” he said. “We immediately fall into self-isolation; we enter into a kind of ‘spiritual deafness.’”

Of course, listening can be tedious and difficult, especially when some of it goes over our head. We’re too self-interested to readily subject ourselves to that. But that points to the second practicality: There’s benefit in the discomfort.

“The difficulty or tedium that we feel in reading certain texts is not necessarily bad or useless,” said Francis. Whatever anxiety and irritation a novel might surface, whatever boredom or unease a poem might expose, we have to go back to the notion that reading is participatory, that meaning is participatory; we’re responsible for our own feelings, and there’s a very good chance the book is exposing something lacking in us. Extending the earlier point: We’re free to critique the novel, but sometimes the novel critiques us.

Books that Offend?

Sometimes literature doesn’t simply annoy, it offends. Degradation and depravity are often essential ingredients in the drama, and authors themselves might be compromised in one way or another. Francis would urge us not to bail or cancel.

Depravity does not erase our humanity. On the contrary, it often heightens the yearning and fallibility that literature so effectively reveals. It shines a singular light on our ends and means, exposing motives, challenging our assumptions, confronting us with realities we might otherwise miss or avoid. In some cases, the purity of the author’s heart might actually—can I say this?—stand as an impediment to understanding. What matters for the exercise of reading is not the author’s sanctity but what truths they unearth from the human psyche and their ramifications in the cause-and-effect world of narrative. And we can’t afford to forget Francis’s earlier point: Reading is not passive; it’s active. Whatever the author intended, we have agency in what we take from it.

Francis anchored his consideration in a short treatise by St. Basil the Great, but it’s easy enough to make secular application:

Basil of Caesarea, one of the Eastern Church Fathers, in his Discourse to the Young . . . extolled the richness of classical literature produced by hoi éxothen (“those outside”), as he called the pagan authors. He saw this both in terms of its argumentation, that is, its lógoi (discourses), useful for theology and exegesis, and its ethical content, namely the práxeis (acts, conduct) helpful for the ascetic and moral life. Basil concluded this work by urging young Christians to consider the classics as an ephódion (“viaticum”) for their education and training, a means of “profit for the soul” (IV, 8–9).

Scandalous literature does not necessarily corrupt. For the discerning, it can be an invitation to moral clarity; what’s more, it can train and heighten our moral sensitivity. The offensive can teach us forbearance, amplify our awareness of human frailty, and even cultivate empathy for the struggles of others. To state the obvious, some readers might be advised to steer clear of some literature, but it’s a more complicated question that the mere presence of disturbing material. Mileage may—and does—vary.

But what opens us to this deeper encounter, rather than simply rejecting or superficially consuming what we find?

Conditions for Growth

Francis hinted at the answer: openness, leisure, and a readiness to slow down and listen. Those might feel hard to come by, but take it as another way in which reading stretches and strengthens us. To be read and critiqued by a novel or a poem requires patience and humility, an acceptance that revelation may come in unfamiliar, even uncomfortable, packages.

As stated in his letter, Francis saw writers and priests as similar vocations. In their own unique way, both serve as moral teachers and partner in a shared task: articulating the otherwise inexpressible. Both engage our deep-seated longing for meaning and detail the otherwise ineffable human feelings of existential pain, hope, and our ache for beauty.

In Francis’s vision, when we read we don’t escape the world. Instead, we jump into its turbulence steadied by a greater sense of reality, a widened perspective, and hopefully more compassion. Whatever else it might do, reading makes us more human.

So, as we take note of his parting, here’s one observance he would hope we would all make on his behalf: part the covers of a book.

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