“We don’t call him Holy Father for nothing,” Cardinal Dolan told cameras at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral five hours after Pope Francis died. “There’s a death in the family.” There is substance in this mush. Pope Francis is not only a spiritual father but also like a family member: oftentimes so easily lovable, sometimes involved in more or less obscure quarrels, memorable for a handful of outbursts. We were proud of how splendidly he modeled our Christian family name with authenticity, humility, and simplicity. On some occasions he was erratic and imperious. The family gossips can recount some extraordinary name-calling. I expect it will be more or less the same when I die, minus Francis’s broad example of edification to the world. And so what? I recall that Our Lord Himself shut down the Pharisees’ leading questions with cryptic and cutting remarks, although He was not as publicly committed to the nostrums of open dialogue and broad consensus as His Vicar, admittedly.
Pope Francis’s highly personal and idiosyncratic style is related to some failures of his papacy; past some point, however, to hold any pope responsible for the state of the global Church is an opinion for journalists who want for time, or historians, for subtlety. Pope Francis was not historically important, like John Paul II, the last man to die as pope. And unlike his noble predecessor, Benedict XVI, there was no moment of tragic recognition in which he confessed that he was unequal to the demands of the office. His dramatic gestures of piety and mercy could never have saved the Church. But that is not what a Holy Father is for—indeed, it is enough even for Our Lord to save one soul. I think the most thoughtful obituaries of Pope Francis echoed Matthew Walther’s article “The End of the Heroic Papacy,” published on The Lamp’s website three years ago. To desperately search for a new hero-pope to save the Church, riding out like Leo the Great against Attila the Hun, is at best foolishness and at worst despair in Our Redeemer and His promises. Modern attempts to make the papacy great again, as a sort of iconic media personality, have revealed their limits. It will be enough for Leo XIV to be a steady steward.
Behind my house a great oak tree stands almost six stories tall. Despite the reassurance of the arborists, I worry that it’s dying. I still worry a dead branch will fall and crush a child on the swing set below. But it is too lovely to cut down, and my wife says that I am a worrier. And though the ax lies at its roots, so to speak, I’m grateful when it shades our backyard company in summer. Some adventitious water sprouts are now shooting from the lower trunk. These shoots remind me of the eighty-one people I saw enter the Church at the Easter Vigil alongside a former student and friend of mine, Ardith Amon, at Saint Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Avondale, Arizona. The whole population of the Americas seems to be moving into the new developments being built into the desert to the west of Phoenix in the Salt River Valley. Here are signs of hope and growth, but are they false signs of the vigor of the Church as a whole?
The next morning, of course, Pope Francis died. Our concerns remain with his surviving family. Yet the Church, like the shade of a great tree, still gathers a wonderful family around us, including newcomers and new friends. The people I met in Arizona were generous and kind; many of them, moreover, were zealous and well-formed in our faith. The Church is not a metaphorical family. Our brothers and sisters earnestly try to imitate our Head, and though there are fraternal disagreements and sometimes hurts among us, we must not leave our parish events as quickly as we exit online chatrooms. My friend Jeff Pojanowski defended “mere Catholicism” in a short reflection written on that Easter Monday a few hours after the Holy Father’s death. It is a good reminder for digital-age Christians of an increasingly difficult bare minimum.
Fear for our family members threatens to overwhelm our hopes for their adventures, for example, when a grown child moves across the country to start a career. Likewise, fear for the Church, of which so much clickbait is made, threatens to engulf our hopes for the new blessings that God bestows in and through Her. Pope Francis, when he announced the theme of this jubilee year of 2025, reminded us that we have a duty to train ourselves in hope daily. We ought to remember this teaching, and not for one day allow our fears on behalf of our spiritual family overcome our hopes for them in Christ.
This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.
