In the Gospel parable of the sower and the seed (Mt. 13:18-25), the reception of the Word meets both non-reception and superabundant reception. The Pope himself was well aware of this evangelical experience. (Evangelii Gaudium, #s 276-278). It was the world in which he grew up. Here in the United States, his word and example were met with numerous and diverse responses. Sown in a polarized civic environment and in an ecclesial landscape of diverse pastoral leadership, the Pope’s Gospel word and example could easily be ignored because of cultural, political, economic, and ecclesial indifference. His teaching was sometimes received with a temporary enthusiasm that then capitulated to the uncertainty of a purposely engineered populist confusion. His Gospel message either got choked to death in tangled webs of ideological presuppositions or, more importantly, was also nurtured by the good soil of thousands of people of goodwill.

These types of both non-receptions and receptions of Pope Francis’s evangelical vision proliferated through civic and ecclesial networks, institutional realignments, and advocacy groupings along a spectrum from the far right to the far left. Some initiatives were robust, others less resourced and more fragile. Searing and liberating economic critiques designed to uplift the poor were countermanded either by the institutionalized assertion of neo-liberal market capitalism or by the silence of American people in positions of ecclesial leadership.

His Gospel call to become “brothers and sisters to all” was practiced on the part of some, but it came into conflict with an orchestrated commitment to Christian nationalism. The Pope’s eloquent voice given to the “cry of nature” in Laudato Si’ fell on some ears receptive to the message, but most ears were deaf to science and deaf to global responsibility. Much of this culminated in the sharp exchange between a vice president expressing faith in a politicized theology and a man well-schooled in the Gospel meaning of the Ordo Amoris [order of love]. It is too soon for the tension to disappear.

In the midst of it all, even while being rejected, temporarily received, or choked, some seed “landed on good soil and yielded grain a hundred, or sixty, or thirtyfold.” Perhaps the seeds of various initiatives, in the vision of Pope Francis, are reflective of an ecclesial body that is coming alive. A communal rediscovery of Gospel identity within the Church has begun. Its starting point: listening!

The initial grain being yielded right now is collective discernment of a path forward. Peace will be discovered when the center of Pope Francis’s vision is discovered. This will not be in ideology but conversion, not in abstractions but in people’s reality, not in strident advocacy but in charity, not in politics and economics but in the Gospel’s paschal mystery of Jesus Christ. We can already see some growth from the sown seeds expressed in synodality, for example, in the National Synthesis of the People of God in the United States of America for the Diocesan Phase of the 2021-2023 Synod. “Time is greater than space,” the pope notes in Evangelii Gaudium (#s 223-225). Seeds take time to grow. Some take a longer time than others. The Church in the United States, thanks to Pope Francis, is beginning its journey to become a comunidad en camino [community on the way].