Remembering Pope Francis: Father Francis and the Female Feet
As we remember Pope Francis, the challenge is that we do so without prejudice, seeking those moments in which he showed us things we had overlooked or completely forgotten, in which he instructed us in word and deed. Two works of mercy summon every Catholic as we pray and prepare for his interment, and in the case of American Catholics they are inexorably linked.
Corporally, we are called to stand watch with respect and hope as we bury the dead, and spiritually, we are called to forgive offenses willingly, especially if offense was taken not so much because of real offense but more so due to brittle expectations and/or unwillingness to be creative in seeking to gather the fruits of the divine assistance which Catholics believe is always given to those to whom the ministry of Peter is entrusted: “you are Peter . . .” (Matt 16:18).
In what follows I offer a memory that helps me think back to the beginning of his pontificate, and to a remarkable act of love that, at the time, seemed to some a violation of law, but was actually a refreshing of liturgical symbolism by a prudential variation from it.
I am referring, of course, to the foot washing ritual on Holy Thursday, which Francis annually celebrated by going to prisons and washing the feet of prisoners, including women, most recently on March 28, 2024 at Rebibbia Women’s Prison in Rome. We learned the names of many Italian prisons over the last twelve years: Civitavecchia, Velletri, Regina Coeli, Paliano. But the first visit was to Casal del Marmo, where he would return in 2023.
Not much has been written about his most recent visit, but much was written about his first. During Easter Week of 2013, a Google search for “pope foot washing” brought up numerous headlines, including USA Today and ABC News, which both ran this headline: “Pope’s Foot-Wash a Final Straw for Traditionalists.”
The gist: On Holy Thursday in the Mandatum Rite—the Washing of the Feet—Pope Francis chose to wash the feet of two girls, a Serbian Muslim and an Italian Catholic, along with ten boys, all twelve of whom are inmates at the Casal del Marmo, a juvenile prison in Rome. This was unsettling to many Catholics (not just “traditionalists”) who pay close attention to the Church’s liturgical rubrics, which called for twelve men (viri) to represent the twelve Apostles in the celebration of the Holy Thursday Liturgy. In 2016, Pope Francis modified the rubric to officially allow women to be selected for the foot-washing at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, thereafter quieting the controversy.
The concerned responses of many Catholics generally went like this:
We have a clear guideline for this ritual, which calls for twelve males. This has the status of ecclesiastical law. The Church has laws, and those laws have to be followed. The Church is full of scofflaws who have ignored this rubric for a long time, usually for reasons related to feminism, a desire for women’s ordination (after all, Holy Thursday is the birthday of the Catholic priesthood, and the twelve foot wash-ees represent the Twelve Apostles, the first Catholic priests). The pope’s good intention in washing the feet of these two girls might have very negative effects by those who are lusting for liturgical license.
In the words of Professor Ed Peters of Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, who showed great respect for the pope in his disagreement with his decision:
What I find distressing is the inability to recognize (or refusal to acknowledge) that this action also had other effects, effects that might not be so benign. I have argued that among those effects was the sowing of new confusion about the binding character of liturgical laws in general, about the influence of a pope on good order in the community, and so on. Now, to be sure, there are sound answers to these questions, but they are not easily offered in the middle of the Triduum and splashed across secular news stories and blogs. This whole matter should have been handled differently from the start.
The outcry prompted a defense by the Vatican, which was reported on the Washington Post website. The explanation noted the context—the Pope was washing the feet of prisoners:
The Vatican’s chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope’s decision was “absolutely licit” for a rite that is not a church sacrament. Francis also took into account “the real situation, the community where one celebrates,” Lombardi added. The Casal del Marmo prison where Francis celebrated houses both young men and women, “and it would have been strange if girls had been excluded,” Lombardi said.
Many did not find this explanation convincing. Some reading this essay may still deem it a stretch. I certainly do not contend that washing the feet of women before changing the rubric was necessarily the best route to take, although since Francis had only been pope for fifteen days, he certainly did not have much time to get around to that.
Instead, I submit that the decision that Francis made to set aside law for the sake of persons actually illuminated and contextualized the nature of liturgical law, which exists for persons: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27) A liturgical rite is a symbolic action. Think about what the washing would symbolize in a coed youth prison if a distinction was made between “male convict” and “female convict” when Christ’s vicar came into its walls to place himself before the prisoners as their servant.
In that sad context, the primary realities are “guilty,” “captive,” “marginalized.” In washing the feet of twelve, he showed them that Christ came to be a servant to them all. If Pope Francis had washed only the feet of males, what would that have signified for the young women prisoners, many of whom probably find themselves in the prison after suffering the abuse of men (e.g. pimps, absentee fathers, etc.)? It would have signified exclusion and alienation, which is already the very substance of their shattered lives—a dark solitude that the pope came to invade and to illuminate, if only for a moment.
In the Gospel of John, the washing of the feet is a multivalent symbolic action, one weighted with multiple meanings. This would be the heart of the commentary explaining the 2016 modification:
Illuminated by the gospel of John the rite carries a double significance: an imitation of what Christ did in the Upper Room washing the feet of the Apostles and an expression of the self-gift signified by this gesture of service. It is not by accident this is called the Mandatum from the incipit of the antiphon which accompanied the action: “Mandatum novum do vobis, ut diligatis invicem, sicut dilexi vos, dicit Dominus” (John 13:14) [“If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14)]. In fact the commandment to fraternal love binds all the disciples of Jesus without any distinction or exception.
In other words, the foot washing primarily symbolizes not the apostolic band being washed, but the nature of the one who comes from the Father to wash them, humbling himself to serve them. That one is Jesus, who after washing his disciple’s feet immediately tells them of his Passion and of their need to believe in his divinity: “I am telling you before it happens, so that when it happens you will believe that I AM” (John 13:19).
The meaning could hardly be clearer: the one who gets down on the ground and washes dirty feet, who then goes further and offers himself up to his executors out of love for the persons attached to those feet, is the Divine Son. This is the great message of Christianity about divinity: God the All-Powerful Legislator of the Universe, whose very “logic” offers the intelligibility that makes the cosmos unsurpassable in symmetry and beauty, is so “high” that in love he can and does descend to the lowest. In the words of St. Ignatius of Loyola, “Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to be able to be encompassed by the smallest: that is divine.”
Accordingly, a pope going into a prison and putting the priestly ordination symbolism in the foreground by making sure that only males were washed would have betrayed that primary symbolism, the real thing to which the foot-washing rite so beautifully gestures. Even the rich significance for priestly ordination with which Holy Thursday is nobly weighted would have been falsified had our good Pope Francis done that, because divine servitude to all prisoners (read: you and me) is the more essential Christian reality in which Holy Orders is a unique participation. The Catholic priesthood is an exponent of Christ’s foot-washing in the original sense of that word: “an expounder or interpreter” of it. Ministerial priesthood is exalted in the Church precisely by being a qualitatively unique participation in the servanthood of Jesus Christ. It exists for service. Pope Francis was never more priestly than he was in Casal del Marmo last Thursday.
What about the rubrics? Law is important, but life more so. The only way for Pope Francis to have had both the law and life in the context of the Casal del Marmo was for him not to go there in the first place. Would any Christian prefer that to what he actually did? For what he did was to go down to the lowest place, to bring hope to captives, to break out of what he called “ecclesial self-referentiality” in a speech offered in a pre-conclave meeting.
There he presented two models: one is the “evangelizing Church that comes out of herself” and another is “the worldly Church that lives in herself, of herself, for herself,” which he denounced as “theological narcissism.” The cardinals seem to have listened—they elected him. And on Holy Thursday 2013 he made good on what he told them. Breaking out of self-referentiality, even when doing so flies in the face of custom, was the running theme of Francis’ pontificate. But in the words of Tertullian, “Dominus noster Christus veritatem se, non consuetudinem cognominavit” [Christ our Lord called himself truth, not custom].
The imprisoned female feet lovingly washed by the Holy Father offered to the Church and the world a better representation of Jesus’s own symbolic action than the rubrics envisioned. Law certainly is necessary. But by placing life over legality, Pope Francis showed us more than law. He showed us the Lawgiver, who is Love.
To conclude, I will offer this excerpt from the homily he offered twelve years ago. May it move our hearts to love the poor and imprisoned, but also to love our departed Holy Father:
It is the Lord’s example: he is the most important, and he washes feet, because with us what is highest must be at the service of others. This is a symbol, it is a sign, right? Washing feet means: “I am at your service.” And with us too, don’t we have to wash each other’s feet day after day? But what does this mean? That all of us must help one another. Sometimes I am angry with someone or other . . . but . . . let it go, let it go, and if he or she asks you a favor, do it.
Help one another: this is what Jesus teaches us and this is what I am doing, and doing with all my heart, because it is my duty. As a priest and a bishop, I must be at your service. But it is a duty which comes from my heart: I love it. I love this and I love to do it because that is what the Lord has taught me to do. But you too, help one another: help one another always. One another. In this way, by helping one another, we will do some good.