Pope Francis has received praise from all quarters for pausing to hold a severely disfigured man. While receiving an audience in St. Peter's Square, Francis spent several minutes comforting and praying with the unnamed person, who sufferers from neurofibromatosis, a condition that causes tumors to grow all over the body and can result in serious conditions like cancer.
Writing in British newspaper The Guardian, Jonathan Jones calls the pope's action “gothic,” saying, “What is gothic is the return to 13th-century values in this picture of a Christian leader showing humility and charity by physically interacting with someone visibly sick and visually different from those around him ... Charity and humility and love really are Christian ideals, and for someone in the pope's position of power to so graphically express them is full of concrete meaning.”
An article in the Washington Post says, “In the pope’s prayer over the man, many saw echoes of Jesus’ healing of the leper.”
