The Catholic Church — the role of the papacy in particular — first caught my attention when I was a semi-lapsed Protestant attending a quintessentially secular, Marxist-leaning university in Boston. 

Reading The New York Times in the dining hall, I stopped at the story about Pope Benedict’s so-called “Regensburg Address.” 

“What had this elderly and strangely dressed figurehead said that had people fire-torching convents?” I wondered to myself. I went back to my dorm room and printed it out and read it in one sitting. 

It pierced my mind with its depth and clarity. After four years of moral relativism with an intellectual veneer, I was not accustomed to reading anything so strikingly … bold. A total takedown of relativism, it was written on a moral and intellectual plane I had never encountered. 

This led to more Catholic reading, and it didn’t take long before Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body made its way to my desk. 

I became Catholic two years later. 

I want other young people floundering in a world awash in the sexual revolution, rabid secularism and zealous self-expressionism to have the same experience. 

My conversion was before the iPhone existed, and the march of technology has only amplified the confusing noise that young people are drowning in today. 

Now as a mother to five, including one on the cusp of becoming a teenager, this feels all the more pressing. 

The clarity of the Church’s teaching is a great gift to the world. It is a lifeline to all those deeply wounded by the breakdown of the family and the loss of community and human connection, as well as those trying to live purposeful and meaningful lives in full communion with their loving Creator. 

It feels as though every single current in our culture flows against the path to human happiness, which can only be achieved by abiding in the light of Christ. And so, I would posit that now is the time to proclaim the Church’s teachings that run against the cultural grains with more clarity than ever. 

As we read in the Gospel of Luke Chapter 11:

“No one who lights a lamp hides it away or places it under a bushel basket, but on a lampstand so that those who enter might see the light.” 

While some have to be convinced of the necessity of the papacy, I saw its essential role from the get-go thanks to a few-thousand-word lecture by Pope Benedict, whose courageous words made it all the way from a university in Germany to my dining hall and hoisted me out of a pagan hellscape. The pope is the guiding light for those of us here on earth, guiding us to Rome and ultimately to our heavenly home. He is the successor of Peter, the first fisher of men. 

Clarity is an essential role of the papacy, and when dimmed, it puts the Church and souls in danger. But it must also come in hand with compassion, needed more than ever in a hurting post-Christian world. 

Pope Francis, who himself embodied mercy and compassion, so vividly likened the role of the Church to that of a “field hospital after battle.” In a world rife with suicide, abortion, sex-trafficking, divorce, loneliness and hopelessness, that hospital needs more and more beds. 

But sometimes the medicine is harsh or tastes rather bitter in a world that has soured on the truth. 

As Pope Benedict once replied to a reporter trying to goad him with a question about the Inquisition, “Love is always linked to the truth, and if one separates love and truth, it is no longer love but a caricature of it. For example, if we have a drug addict, love is not to have him confirmed in drugs. … True love is to set him free even if he opposes. And so I would say true love is to help someone find the way.” 

He helped me find the way. My hope and prayer is for a pope who can help others as well, with clarity, courage and compassion.