Says Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image Journal, an arts and religion quarterly: “In the Catholic tradition, faith is about making the invisible present. Catholicism celebrates the physicality of the sacraments — Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine. We witness through our bodies to others.
“What we see when we see the pope is the way time reveals what lies beneath the externals. Our existence is a kind of testing and refining, a purifying that shows what we are really made of,” Wolfe says.