I’m an English major, and I’m also Catholic. For me, the two are very compatible – the Mass itself is almost a living tradition of the story it tells, and Catholic ceremony is ripe with literary appeal; allegory, symbolism, and metaphor are all key components to Catholic worship that make it a beautiful faith.

The Church also has its share of notable characters, all of whom add to its poetic richness. St. Peter, for example, was (we’re told) crucified upside down. St. Francis of Assisi received the stigmata – an embarrassing (and painful) occurrence for a man of radical humility.  And who could forget Jesus, the main player, the great protagonist? He’s interesting too – and not just because he’s God.

These days, in fact, Jesus has been gaining attention because of what the pope, his vicar, has been saying about him. Pope Francis preaches things about Jesus that make us all uncomfortable with the God-man we thought we knew. In fact, the pope is driving a wedge into my childhood view of Christ: mild-mannered, all-loving, blonde and blue-eyed. Pope Francis, some say, is a communist – all “Help the poor! Help the poor!”

But, of course, the pope’s statements could be true: that Jesus actually meant what he said when he told his followers that what they did to the least of those, they also did to him.

And if this is actually true, then Pope Francis is painting a much more radical, but perhaps more accurate, view of Jesus, and accusations of him being a communist are unfounded.

In fact, those who criticize the pope are solidifying his message; people criticize Francis because they know that what he’s saying is true, and it makes them uncomfortable.

Pope Francis defends his “communist” stances by saying in a recent interview with Andrea Tornielli that “this concern for the poor is in the Gospel, it is within the tradition of the Church, it is not an invention of communism and it must not be turned into ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history.

The Church, when it invites us to overcome what I have called ‘the globalization of indifference,’ is free from any political interest and any ideology. It is moved only by Jesus’ words, and wants to offer its contrition to build a world where we look after one another and care for each other.”

Francis is right; the things that he says — that we should help the poor and avoid indifference — are spoken by Jesus himself and the only reason that the pope is criticized for saying these things is because people realize their bold truth: maybe we should take Christ more seriously.

As Michael Gerson, an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, wrote in an article about Dorothy Day in 2012, “If true [that Jesus is found in the poor]…we yawn at duties that should cause us to tremble.” Pope Francis speaks the truth; if we feel uncomfortable, then the ways things are currently done are probably not good for those in poverty.

Gerson continues in his Dorothy Day article to say that  “the Church is an institution strengthened by such political contradictions—between pacifists and just-war theorists, distributionalists and free marketeers, establishments figures and impatient prophets—because they serve to highlight the place of overlap. The Eucharistic altar is large—as large as politics and the world.” Indeed, even if Francis were a communist (he’s not), he would still be making a valid – and, in fact, very Christian – point.

The world has 1.2 billion Catholics, and a faith of such immense proportions cannot be trimmed down into any digestible, easy-to-understand dogma – except, of course, for its most basic principle: Help the poor!