Did a Vatican official claim Jesus flirted with the Samaritan woman? What the meditation says

The published text confirms that "flirting" was said, so the report rests on a real remark. Alford attributes the image to Fr Michał Paluch, O.P., her co-author on the reading: "In a somewhat provocative way (but I think it's a useful provocation) he calls the first stage 'flirting' - a conversation between a woman and a man who are both alone." She goes on: "Jesus takes hold of the discussion and transforms it gradually, through his questions, into a meditation on human happiness and fulfilment." In the second stage, quoting Paluch again, the woman "slowly begins to understand that the man she has met is by no means like the others, that this time, unlike what it might have seemed at the beginning, this man is not just flirting" (meditation, pp. 2–3). Vatican News summarised the passage in the same way (Vatican News).

The Catechism uses the meeting at the well to describe prayer: "there, Christ comes to meet every human being. It is he who first seeks us and asks us for a drink. Jesus thirsts; his asking arises from the depths of God's desire for us" (CCC 2560). Alford's meditation also presents Jesus as taking the initiative. It goes on to link the episode to the "law of gradualness" of Familiaris consortio 34. There John Paul II wrote that man "knows, loves and accomplishes moral good by stages of growth", and that this "cannot be identified with 'gradualness of the law'". Alford quotes the same distinction (Familiaris consortio §34; meditation).