During the 2012 presidential campaign, I served as a national co-chair of Catholics for Obama. Little did I suspect that three years later I would be at the White House watching my president welcome my pope. What an amazing gift.

This was the second time I had been invited to the White House to welcome a sitting pontiff. The first was in 1979, when I was invited by President Jimmy Carter to greet Saint Pope John Paul II. Although I don’t recall many details of the 1979 ceremony, the attendance at the ceremony for Pope Francis seemed to be much larger and there was an electricity among the crowd that I’ve seldom experienced.

The multitudes attending listened with earnest attention as Pope Francis introduced himself. “As the son of an immigrant family, I am happy to be a guest in this country, which was largely built by such families.” It was apparent throughout his presentation that the pope was subtlety urging us to reform our immigration laws and be a more welcoming nation, as we have been historically. In addition to urging the United States to welcome immigrants, Pope Francis also challenged us to “support the efforts of the international community to protect the vulnerable in our world and to stimulate integral and inclusive models of development, so that our brothers and sisters everywhere may know the blessings of peace and prosperity.”

Throughout his speech, Pope Francis challenged us to live the gospel and reject “every form of unjust discrimination.” His message reflected the Matthew 25 scripture where Jesus says, “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink, a stranger, and you welcomed me, naked, and you clothe me, ill and you cared for me, in prison, and you visited me.” The pope continually reminded us not to forget the poor, the sick, the homeless, and the immigrant. And he walked his talk by visiting the homeless and those who care for them while he was in the United States. I was particularly impressed with his focus on inmates in prison, urging us to eliminate the death penalty and reform our laws that put people in prison, saying, “there are no throw-away people.”

Pope Francis praised President Obama for “proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution.” He noted that “climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation,” which is consistent with the pope’s most recent encyclical, Laudato Si. In this encyclical, the pope touched on every major environmental and economic issue facing humanity today. It is well worth reading.

The four Americans mentioned by Pope Francis are near and dear to my heart: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day and Father Thomas Merton. As he said so eloquently, “A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did; when it fosters a culture which enables people to ‘dream’ of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.”

Most Americans are familiar with the extraordinary work of President Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. The lesser-known Americans mentioned by the pope are two who have directly impacted my own spirituality. Dorothy Day, who is on her way to being canonized as a saint, was a convert to Catholicism and a social justice activist. She was arrested in 1917 for picketing the White House demanding the right to vote for women. In 1933, she founded the “Catholic Worker,” which focuses on taking care of the poor and the homeless as well as engaging in civil disobedience at nuclear missile sites and military bases that operate drones.

Father Thomas Merton was also a convert to Catholicism. He is often called the greatest spiritual writer of the 20th century. Father Merton’s writings nurtured my soul as he opened our hearts to Eastern religions and initiated the Christian meditation called Centering Prayer. I have had the privilege of facilitating a Centering Prayer meditation for the inmates at the Englewood Federal Correctional Facility for the past 15 years.

It was especially heartwarming to see my pastor in the 1970s at Holy Cross Church in Thornton accompany Pope Francis throughout his visit to Philadelphia. He is now Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, formerly archbishop of Denver.

As an aside, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Speaker John Boehner met privately with Pope Francis. Do you think he might have talked to the Pope about his decision to retire? Just a thought.

Former state Sen. Polly Baca was a national co-chair of Catholics for Obama in 2012 and is a former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.