In the popular imagination, papacies are defined by one or two key themes addressing the state of the world as they see it. For example, John Paul II highlighted the conflict between “the culture of life and the culture of death.” Benedict XVI emphasized the struggle against “the dictatorship of relativism.” Francis enjoined us to include those on the financial and existential peripheries.
What about Leo XIV? It’s too soon to tell. But I find myself pondering the pledge he made in his first papal Mass to associate himself with “ordinary people.” I hope that his words will spur people to articulate a Catholic response to the populist movements sweeping the globe today.
We live in a culture where everyone actually wants to be elite—even though more and more people are decrying elitism. In other words, no one wants to be ordinary or even to associate with those who are ordinary. This goes for YouTube influencers and high-school athletes no less than Wall Street moguls and Ivy League alumni.
This is a big conversation. But let me get the ball rolling with an example from experience. I have read a lot of college and law-school application essays in my time, and many reflect the pressure to stand out somehow. Some detail exceptional achievements: making the U.S. Olympic team, patenting a scientific invention before the age of sixteen, working with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. Others depict overcoming significant personal hardship—whether discrimination as a social minority or a catastrophic event like a car accident or serious illness in the family.
I have a lot of reservations about the hegemony of this type of essay. The genre is problematic on its own terms. On the one hand, the true extent of someone’s abilities may not even be apparent before the age of eighteen, and if you don’t come from a well-to-do family, you may need to work at Dairy Queen rather than spend the summer volunteering halfway around the world, even for a cause that you support with all your heart.
On the other hand, there can be too much pressure to write about unusual hardships or ones that relate to timely social struggles. For example, a young person may have faced significant emotional and economic difficulties in dealing with her parents’ acrimonious divorce. But that particular test of character may be too common these days to impress an admissions committee. Increasingly, as LGBTQ people gain broader social acceptance, coming to grips with one’s sexual identity is falling into the same category. What about catastrophes? While life throws hardships at everyone, not all hardships are timed to arrive before one’s seventeenth birthday. And some hardships are simply too personal to talk about with strangers, even to gain a coveted spot in a selective college.
There’s a bigger problem with the implicit logic of these essays: they lead us to downplay the importance of ordinary people—that is, the vast majority of us—in a well-functioning society. Ordinary people are essential in all fields. We need a Maria Montessori—but her work is in vain without thousands of caring elementary-school teachers. We need a Franklin Roosevelt—but it is the tens of thousands of committed bureaucrats who administer the social safety net he imagined for the New Deal. We need a Warren Buffett—but scores of financial advisors to help people plan wisely for retirement and old age. The people who make the difference are the many who actually implement new visions, not just the few who dream them up.
If we step back further, we can see that the very label “extraordinary” is problematic, even and perhaps especially for those to whom it is attached. To label somebody as “extraordinary” is to set them apart from the vast run of humanity. It can be a misleading badge of isolation, because no one is “extraordinary” in every aspect of their lives. This blanket statement applies across the board to talents, duties, and interests. A great college football player may be horrible at English lit (and vice versa). Unless he is very wealthy, a great novelist may still have to spend two hours on a Monday morning tussling with the cable company. And a great philosopher may not always want to discuss philosophy—sometimes she might like to talk about the local baseball team, the latest murder trial on Court TV, or the new dog’s obsession with catching bunny rabbits. Moreover, unless she comes from a remarkably erudite family, she might actually need to talk about these things at the dinner table or a family wedding.
A different but related question: What about people who are marginalized and minoritized because of a social identity such as race, sex, religion, disability, or sexual orientation? While it is important to recognize and honor diverging experiences, it is equally essential to highlight our fundamental commonalities. Sometimes, it is attention to ordinariness that helps us see equal humanity across social differences.
For example, while scholars have critically analyzed the antisemitism in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Shylock’s passionate evocation of common humanity is unsurpassable (act 3, scene 1):
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
Focusing on commonality can also help us break free of soul-destroying stereotypes. For instance, the great abolitionist Sojourner Truth (d. 1883) famously upended the rigid divisions and distortions entailed by categories of race and sex:
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Sojourner Truth was no ordinary woman—she was a powerful and courageous prophet of emancipation. But she vividly invokes the grief that any ordinary mother would feel when confronted with brutal, malevolent, and permanent separation from her beloved children. In so doing, she breaks our hearts.
Where does concern for ordinary people—or better to say, the ordinariness of people—fit within the framework of Catholic social teaching? In my view, it is one way of reflecting on what it means for everyone to be created in the image and likeness of God. It draws on the Catholic natural-law tradition by asking us to reflect on our common human nature. And it points toward recent magisterial treatments of solidarity: Pope Francis’s call to brotherhood and sisterhood in his encyclical Fratelli tutti (2020) points to the blessed ordinariness of each of us.
