On Easter Monday, my wife, Joan, woke me up to tell me the news about the death of Pope Francis. She is a Methodist; I am a Muslim. My first thought was for my Catholic friends, and the lines from John’s Gospel about the raising of Lazarus (Jn 11:23-26) came to mind:
Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
Pope Francis was 88 years old when he died, and he lived as good and long a life as anyone could hope for. But as with a member of your family, even after a good, long life, one wants the people one loves to be always around. My mind went back to two days earlier, when we commemorated the first anniversary of the death of Joan’s mother, who had passed away at age 96. We know from the Gospel that the deceased live again, and we know from experience that we remain in relationship with them long after they are gone.
I never met Pope Francis, but I was one of millions who admired his work. I was intrigued from the beginning when he took the name “Francis.” To many, that brought to mind the beloved, humble friar who founded the Franciscan order. But I knew from my Franciscan friends that St. Francis had a deep connection with the Muslim world during his lifetime. In 1219, St. Francis of Assisi met with the Muslim sultan Malik Al-Kamil in Egypt during the Fifth Crusade, seeking peace. Michael Calabria, O.F.M., one of my Franciscan friends who teaches at St. Bonaventure University, has spoken about the connection between St. Francis’ “Praises of God” and the “Most Beautiful Names of God” in the Qur’an.
During his papacy, Pope Francis also reached out to the Muslim world. In his first Holy Thursday as pope, in 2013, he washed the feet of a female, Muslim prisoner in Rome. That simple act of humility spoke volumes about Pope Francis, both in terms of his connection to Muslims and his concern for those on the margins.
A decade ago, at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, Pope Francis yet again did the astonishing. While people around the world were debating whether they should allow Syrian refugees into their countries, wondering if they might instead be duped into bringing in terrorists, Pope Francis quietly and simply brought in three Syrian refugee families to settle in the Vatican. This showed the concern he has had for migrants, immigrants and refugees since the start of his papacy, when his first trip as pope outside of Rome was to the island of Lampedusa, where African migrants sought refuge in Europe.
In the United States, Pope Francis appointed Robert W. McElroy as the bishop of the Diocese of San Diego in 2015. Like Pope Francis, Bishop McElroy was outspoken about the rights and struggles of migrants, a very real concern for his diocese, which borders Mexico. Bishop McElroy was also outspoken against the Islamophobia, along with a distrust of migrants, that was becoming normalized after the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump. In 2022, Pope Francis elevated McElroy to a cardinal, and then this year he appointed Cardinal Robert McElroy to the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. The significance of appointing Cardinal McElroy to the nation’s capital during the second iteration of the Trump administration was not lost on those of us who had deep concerns about how this administration understands not just Muslims and migrants but also other persons who are marginalized and vulnerable. (This has a personal connection to me, since my most recent book, One God and Two Religions, is a guide for Christians to Islam and Muslims in light of the rise of Islamophobia that came with the first Trump administration.)
An even more explicit connection to Islam and Muslims came in 2017, when Pope Francis met with the grand imam of Al Azhar, Shaikh Ahmed al-Tayyeb. Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which is over 1,000 years old, is one of the most important centers of learning in the Sunni Muslim world, and Shaikh al-Tayyeb is one of its most important religious scholars. In 2019, Pope Francis co-authored the Document on Human Fraternity with Shaikh Al-Tayyeb and released it at a meeting in Abu Dhabi. And of course, Pope Francis was outspoken about ending war, whether in South Sudan or in Israel, Palestine and Gaza.
Pope Francis was a Jesuit, and in addition to the fact that I teach at the Jesuit university in Los Angeles, there is another connection between us. When I became chair of our theology department in 2020, the first non-Christian to do so, I took the 19th Annotation of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. The preliminary meditations, on the principles of consolation and desolation, were revelatory. In our actions, are we moving toward the presence of God in our lives, or away from it? Pope Francis always moved towards consolation.
Pope Francis was an extraordinary religious and moral leader, and I will remember him in my prayers in the days to come. There is a phrase from the Qur’an that Muslims often recite when learning about a death, “Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” which means “We belong to God, and to God we shall return.” The full text is from the Qur’an 2:156, “those who, when they are visited by an affliction, say, ‘Surely we belong to God, and to God we shall return.’”
