The Healing Journey

May 31, 2025

The following is an excerpt from a piece that appeared in “Evangelization & Culture” of the Word on Fire Institute.

Pope Francis and the Elephant Man

By Dr. Tod Worner

He was hideous.

With an oversized skull that bulged forth frontally with multi-lobed bony protuberances, a chin that jutted rightward, dragging his mouth down in a permanent frown, scales and scars dominating half of his face, and awkward wisps of hair pronouncing (and not obscuring) his deformity, John Merrick seemed a monstrosity.

Was it any wonder that he was exploited in a London freak show? Was it any surprise that he was hunted, harassed, and hounded by brutal street urchins?

The Elephant Man, based on the true and tragic nineteenth-century story of Joseph Merrick, was director David Lynch’s masterpiece. Garnering eight Academy Award nominations in 1980, the tale unfolds the rescue of a severely deformed man (presumably afflicted with Proteus syndrome) from the brutality of the freak show by the caring physician, Dr. Frederick Treves, who seeks to study and help Merrick….

After suffering from years of neglect and abuse, John Merrick (the film changing his name from Joseph) finds himself clothed, fed, and housed in a comfortable private suite in London Hospital. And even though he is contending with overwhelming physical deformities, searing emotional trauma, and ongoing illness, Merrick proves to be a kind soul, a sensitive gentleman, and a keen devotee of the beautiful.

In 2013, eight months into his papacy, Pope Francis concluded his Wednesday audience and found his way into the crowd. The forty-eight-year-old Vinicio Riva stood alone in a sea of faces. With a deformed face and neck littered with pedunculated neurofibromas and open sores, this victim of von Recklinghausen’s disease was among the first the pope approached.

As Riva recalled, “When the pope drew close to me and hugged me tightly, and he kissed me, he gave me a kiss on the face. My head was against his chest. And his arms welcomed me, he hugged me tight. Tight. I tried to speak. I couldn’t.” It was in that moment, the shocked man admitted, that all of his sorrows left him. “The pope didn’t think about whether to hug me or not. He didn’t know if I was contagious or not. But he caressed me all the same. And I felt his love.”

Pope Francis has died, but this is the story I will always remember. The unwanted and undesired, the unclean and untouchable who has forgotten his dignity—who has lost the sense that he is an irreplaceable child of God—is the person whom we, as Catholics, need to reach. You, whom others mock. You who are invisible. You who are hated. You who are broken. Christ loves you. Christ hungers for you. Christ will never leave you. Ever.

Joseph Merrick died in 1890. He was nearing twenty-eight.

Vinicio Riva died in 2024. He was fifty-eight.

And Pope Francis died on April 21. He was eighty-eight.

What awaits them—and us—after stumbling our way through this earthly vale of tears? What will comfort the weary and the afflicted who wonder whether we are truly loved or lovable? Perhaps Georges Bernanos said it best: “Such distress, distress that has forgotten even its name, that has ceased to reason or to hope, that lays its tortured head at random, will awaken one day on the shoulder of Christ.”

©Evangelization & Culture of Word on Fire Institute

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