This morning I read James Martin’s chapter on the Last Supper in “Jesus: a Pilgrimage.” You would expect a Catholic priest to focus on the Eucharist part (the bread and wine). Instead, Martin focused on Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. He mused, “I wonder how different the church would be if we spent as much time thinking about the Washing of the Feet as we do about Transsubstantiation.”

Jesus said he was giving the disciples an example to follow. Martin mentions how Pope Francis has followed that example. He spent his first Holy Thursday (the commemoration of the Last Supper) as Pope not in a grand basilica, as has every other Pope in recent decades, but in a juvenile detention center, where he washed the feet of poor and trouble youth. He spent the next year doing the same in a home for elderly and disabled people, and the following year washing the feet of prison inmates.

I couldn’t help musing, very briefly, on which presidential candidate on either side would be most open to washing the feet of, say, his cabinet members. Or even better, of Senators in the other party. That, of course, would be criticized as unPresidential.