Francis raises spirits

Praise for pope who crosses boundaries.

How to sum up a week that begins with the Jewish New Year (happy 5776!) and ends with Pope Francis kicking off visits to Cuba and the United States?

Good yontif, pontiff! My father always used that line whenever a pope came to New York around the Jewish High Holy Days (yontif is Yiddish for holiday). Pope Francis will address the United Nations General Assembly later this month, just as three predecessors did over the past 50 years.

But to a degree unseen with his predecessors, this pope has crossover appeal.

His words and deeds have moved countless people, Catholics and nonCatholics alike.

Which explains why there’s such buzz over Pope Francis’ trip to Havana, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

He’s the anti-Donald Trump: A guy who lives humbly and eschews the trappings of wealth. A guy not afraid to speak his mind — only he takes up for the poor, oppressed and dispossessed. A guy who doesn’t need votes, but wants to win hearts and minds.

He washes the feet of prisoners. He embraces migrants and refugees. He sounds the alarms of global warming and income inequality. He wants to build bridges, not walls. I’m not religious, but I can’t wait to hear what Pope Francis says on his trip. Will he give a tongue-lashing to the Castro Brothers over human rights and free elections? Will he chide America’s leaders, corporations and citizens for conspicuous consumption, selfish materialism and a value system that places individual wealth over universal health, education and welfare?

As a Washington Post profile published Monday put it, “There’s no question that Francis is striving to be less an enforcer of religious discipline than something akin to a global Jiminy Cricket, a voice of conscience whether you believe in God or not.”

This pope is stirring the pot, opening the doors to change, stressing humanity over dogma in these complex, scrambled times.

The world has radicals purporting to be religious doing heinous, inhumane things (ISIS, al-Qaida). The United States has fundamentalists who don’t know how to separate their personal religious views from government jobs serving the public and refuse to follow the law of the land.

The Catholic Church is still trying to rebuild trust and regain moral footing after the sexual abuse scandals involving priests in past decades.

Traditional labels are dissolving, with more multicultural families embracing bits and pieces of different religions. Amar’e Stoudemire, the newest arrival to the Miami Heat, explained to my colleague Ira Winderman how he considers himself “culturally Jewish” while still believing that Jesus is the Messiah.

“I’m not a religious person,” Stoudemire said. “I’m more of a spiritual person.”

Maybe that sounds odd. But it makes perfect sense to me, someone who had a bar mitzvah and considers himself a culturally Jewish agnostic. I worked on Monday, but on Sunday I took my daughter (who had her first Holy Communion in May) to a Rosh Hashanah dinner where we dunked apples in honey for a sweet New Year.

I believe in morality and the Golden Rule; whether God exists seems unanswerable to me.

But like Pope Francis, I yearn for peace, justice and understanding in a world filled with violence and division.

L’shanah tovah, and long may this Holy Father serve.

Michael Mayo