Please Won't You Be My Neighbor?

by Rob Goodale

A few days ago, my roommate and I walked down the road to the Neon Theater, an absolute gem of a movie house: two screens, cheap popcorn, decent beer selection, nothing like your average cinema and its much-maligned watered-down Cherry Cokes for an extra 25 cents. The Neon was showing Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the new documentary about a Presbyterian minister from Pittsburgh named Fred Rogers.

In truth, I did not grow up in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I was familiar with the show, of course, but I spent much of my formative years splitting residences between the Island of Sodor and the Hundred Acre Wood. An irritatingly precocious tot, it wasn’t long before I began demanding to be treated like a grown-up, and because I was a quick study I knew that nowhere was this more important than in my entertainment habits.

Grown-ups argued about sports and used humor as either a shield or sometimes a weapon and told stories about bad guys hurting good guys and good guys hurting them back, and so that’s what I imagined it meant to be a grown-up. While this tragically was and largely remains empirically true, such empty show has never been the real stuff of maturity. All along, the square geezer with the cardigan and the trolley was quietly, gently, patiently insisting that there was another way.

In his three decades on television, Fred Rogers demonstrated a unique brand of holiness. He was exceptional not because of transcendent talent or exceeding genius, but because he sincerely desired to greet each human person as a neighbor, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what it would cost him. He did this again and again, mostly with the same children that the rest of the entertainment industry greeted solely as a source of income.

He had a unique way of making people feel seen, which Tom Junod described in a 1998 feature for Esquire Magazine: “There was an energy to him, however, a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy, and though I tried to ask him questions about himself, he always turned the questions back on me.” This struck me as eerily similar to the way C.S. Lewis described saints in Mere Christianity: “Every now and then one meets them. Their voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant… You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but need you less.”

Rogers knew from its advent that television would be not just a means of communication, but a ritual: that we would be transformed by what we watched on TV. He believed that the space between a human being, especially a young human being, and a television screen was holy ground, and he was persistent in treating it as such.

But what perhaps made Mister Rogers most exceptional, at least in my eyes, was the way he followed Christ. He recognized the inherent incontrovertible immutable indelible belovedness of each human person: that before anything else, each of us is, as Pope Francis says, “looked upon by the Lord in love.”

Fred Rogers embraced the universal dignity of the human being not primarily as mere dogma or concept, but as a mission: his every word and action was imbued with that reality, so that his whole life became what Pope Benedict XVI described as “that act of the entire being that we call love.”

He is, in my humble and unqualified opinion, a saint: a pillar of human goodness who belongs in the same breath as other 20th century giants like Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II. He will never, of course, be recognized as such by the Catholic Church -- a sad byproduct of centuries of human division -- but I brazenly believe that he belongs in my litany.

As the film ended and the house lights came back up, there was a pregnant pause. No one in the theater spoke. Hardly anyone moved. Sitting on the aisle in the second-to-last row, I myself had an unobstructed path to rush on to the next thing (there is always a next thing, isn’t there?), yet I too hesitated. Perhaps it was because we were all emotionally frayed, our feelings a bit too near the surface for the sunlight. Perhaps we were subconsciously obeying our training and waiting for a vague, wasteful, and only-infinitesimally-relevant post-credit scene. Or perhaps the forty or so human persons gathered in that tiny theater in downtown Dayton silently and collectively recognized a yearning to linger in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as long as we could.