Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV, and the urgency of listening

By Alessandro Gisotti

“When someone speaks to you, wait until they finish to understand them well, and then, if you feel led, say something. But the important thing is to listen.”

A few days after his death, a brief video of Pope Francis recorded in January 2024 was released. Less than a minute long and addressed to young people, the video highlights the late Pope’s urge to listen as an urgency for life, as well as the testament of a Pope who, over twelve years, made himself available to listen to everyone, especially to the most distant, the inconvenient, the discarded of this world. His focus, in short, was on those whom we prefer not to hear because their words, their stories, often make us uncomfortable.

Pope Francis made the primacy of listening the golden rule of communication, whether referring to professional journalists or to interpersonal communication—the kind that rhymes with relationship and is, at bottom, the salt of every human bond.

Listen first, and then speak. Listening as the first act of communicating. Listening, seeing, and experiencing firsthand before reporting—especially on the many deep wounds that lacerate the body of our humanity.

These verbs echo once again on the eve of World Communications Day, celebrated on Sunday, June 1, for the fifty-ninth time.

Certainly, on the broad theme of communicating, both Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV (even before being elected to the Chair of Peter) emphasized, with great conviction, the centrality of listening in communication. They urge us to give time and space to the other, to meet them in silence before—in fact even more than—in the word.

As is well known, Pope Francis—a promoter of what he called “listening therapy” and “pastoral care of the ear”—often recalled the Poor Man of Assisi, who urged his friars to “incline the ear of the heart.”

This echoes what the Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine, had already asserted eight centuries earlier: “Do not let your heart be in your ears, but let your ears be in your heart.” The Augustinian Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, has made this maxim both a way of life and a method of pastoral action. No friend or collaborator—whether from his years in Peru, his time as Prior General of the Augustinians, or then as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops—has failed to highlight this quality first and foremost: “He is a man who listens.”

Interviewed about the new Pope by L’Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, Pro-Prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization, stressed that Pope Leo XIV “is endowed with a capacity for deep and patient listening. Before making any decision, he devotes himself to careful study and reflection. He expresses his feelings and preferences without seeking to impose them.”

Today, unfortunately, we live in a world where influence and importance no longer come from listening, but only from having “the last word.” This is certainly true even in the digital realm, where the temptation to close a conversation with an attention-grabbing post makes us forget that communication should have no winners or losers, but should be a mutual enrichment—even (and perhaps especially) when we disagree.

Listening, then, means attending to the humanity of the other, to their uniqueness. This is something Pope Leo XIV learned from his youth: first in the Order of St. Augustine and even before that in his family home in Chicago.

As he recounted in an interview as a Cardinal, when he was about to enter the novitiate, he had a long conversation with his father. “Even if I had heard my formators’ teaching a hundred times,” he confided, “when my father spoke to me in such a deeply human way, I said to myself: ‘Here is so much to listen to, so much to think about in what he told me.’”

We need women and men capable of listening. And the higher their level of responsibility, the more necessary this virtue becomes.

Today, at their very heart, the gravest crises afflicting the world stem precisely from the inability to listen to one another, to “put ourselves in the other’s shoes.” During the Covid-19 pandemic—a terrible period from which we should have learned some lessons—we were forced to return to the essence of communication: dialogue with our neighbor and, first of all, with ourselves and our imperfect interiority.

As noted by psychiatrist Eugenio Borgna, during lockdown there arose “an unbounded desire to be heard,” a desire that will always accompany us.

This desire is one that no Artificial Intelligence can satisfy. Even the most advanced computer technology can indeed respond to a question. But it can never address our silence or our primordial need to have by our side a heart that listens to us.