Francis is the only pope I’ve ever had; his pontificate began five years before I entered the Church. I came in as a trad, primed to despise him as “modernist,” “liberal,” “spreading scandal,” “sowing confusion,” and so on.
The Holy Father wore down my prejudices. It started with Laudato si’, which I read on a whim, deciding to “give it a chance.” In it I found quite a bit more than the pro forma confirmations of Catholic orthodoxy and political litmus tests I was looking for. The encyclical offered a lens through which to see the entire twenty-first-century world: a context, spiritual and social, for all the discrete problems I saw in it and many I did not, or did not want to. Our status as creatures in relation to our Creator demanded that I think differently about ecological and economic questions than I had before.
I began to realize I had much to learn from Pope Francis. He always seemed determined, for example, to remind every part of the Church, every group and subculture, that it needs the bishops. From his reform of Opus Dei to Traditionis custodes, Pope Francis would not let me forget that, complain as I might about my bishop, the episcopacy was what ensured my continuity with the history of the Church, my access to the sacraments, and my unity with fellow Catholics.
I needed so much more catechesis than R.C.I.A. could offer, and Pope Francis gave it. He was not so “confusing” as I’d at first believed. He was unequivocal, in fact: unequivocal about mercy, about the Church’s mission to reach the lost, about its doctrinal commitments and pastoral responsibilities, and above all about the presence of Our Lord in every neighbor I’d ever been tempted to wish away. If that ever struck me as “unclear,” it was because I had been unclear about what the Gospel asked of me. The Church did not need me to be its soldier in a culture war; I needed it, the field hospital, to bring me face to face with the Divine Physician. Perhaps, in my insistence on being out of step with the Holy Father, it was I who had been “spreading scandal” and “sowing confusion” all along.
One summer I visited Rome and exchanged a “buongiorno” with him at Casa Santa Marta. He gave me the same wide smile I saw in every photo and video of him greeting other young people. He seemed so sincerely happy to see me. On the same trip, I said a few Rosaries in the chapel where he would later lie in state. On my first date with the woman whom I would one day marry, we bonded over our mutual esteem for Laudato si’. And during the coronavirus pandemic, I played hooky from work to tune in to the livestream of his Urbi et Orbi, to watch him walk out of Saint Peter’s alone and, facing the dark world (where I was, far away), raise Our Lord in blessing. I didn’t want it to end.
And in a sense, it never did. The last years of his papacy saw Pope Francis ever more isolated, standing alone before resurgent nationalisms and imperial violence. Among “world leaders” there is no comparable advocate for the dignity of migrants and the civilian victims of war, no one begging for peace, no one insisting on the brotherhood of all human persons. As Francis grew sicker, he felt all the more indispensable.
I will have to learn from my cradle Catholic friends how to have a second pope. But, Lord willing, I will never have to learn how to be without Francis. With the help of the divine mercy he always proclaimed as pontiff, may Francis enter the presence of Our Lord interceding for us, for peace, and for our fellow creatures all the more.
This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.
