[This reflection was written and filed in the interregnum between Pope Francis’s death and Pope Leo XIV’s election.]

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It has long been observed that the Church is not a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners. And yet, it’s not a hospital where people come if they like or seek treatment elsewhere. Not a hospital where clinics are subject to rigid quality control and physicians administer rarefied treatments for exotic diseases—though both of these modern developments are welcome.

Instead, as the late Pope Francis famously insisted, the Church is a field hospital, operating near the fighting and among the wounded, applying the crudest treatments to those with life-threatening injuries. Pope Francis used the analogy of “field hospital” to describe the drama of evangelization in the New Testament and in our own day. People are spiritually dying, and the resulting despair and violence take a bodily toll.

Older Americans who watched M*A*S*H, the highly praised 1970s sitcom—about the (fictional) 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH)—will understand the concept. Ostensibly set during the Korean War, but more broadly concerned with the U.S. and the Western world during the Cold War, the show’s depiction of the life-or-death urgency of field medicine, punctuated with gallows humor, made for gripping drama and tearful comedy.

Like the medics in M*A*S*H who attend to physical survival, we who attend to spiritual survival also recognize the comic weakness of our effort. As much as we attempt to forge friendship and fellowship with each other, there is always someone who betrays fellowship by competing for power or posturing as a victim. As much as we proclaim the Gospel, we are shouted down by dissenters on TV and social media. Nitpicking complaints or the lure of easier gratification elsewhere erode our shared worship.

Still, our comic inadequacy is overshadowed by the life-or-death urgency of saving souls. In one episode of M*A*S*H, a frustrated character declares: “If I had all the answers, I’d run for God” (as if God were a political position he could run for). Francis didn’t have all the answers, but he reminded us that proclaiming the good news of Jesus really is a matter of life and death—eternal life and death.

But neither is it an occasion for being grim or humorless: Our job is to transmit the joy and friendship made possible by Jesus’ sacrifice for us and the promise of his resurrection. When Jesus rises from the dead, he does not seek retribution from those who failed him. Instead, he invites them to breakfast!

The same paradox is at the heart of the pro-life movement. On the one hand, our mission—extending the protection of the law to the unborn—is a matter of life and death. It does no good to stand aloof or dispense prissy moralisms as if we were consultants in a cosmetic surgery clinic. Instead, we do better to imitate the laborers in a field hospital as we bring hope to despairing mothers or refuge to unwanted children.

And on the other hand, we want to bring life. Human life is more than survival: It requires joy shared with others. When we allow the seriousness of the pro-life cause to eclipse our shared life or our appreciation for others, we cripple our own movement. If we want to inspire hope among mothers, fathers, and the general public, we’ve got to show that we cherish their lives as much as we want them to cherish the unborn.

So for everyone’s sake, let us follow our pro-life calling with all the diligence and urgency appropriate to a field hospital. But at the same time, let us sustain all the joy and conviviality we want for the mothers and children at risk. Anything less would be a failure to signal the life and love that are the foundation of our calling.