On the night of March 13, 2013, when news broke that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio had just been elected the next pope, under the name of Francis, I was sitting in the recreation room of the Jesuit community in Nairobi, Kenya. The cardinal entrusted with making this historic proclamation carefully stuttered out the words in Latin, almost rendering it unintelligible. It took a while for what was traditionally dubbed an “announcement with great joy” to sink in: We have a pope!
A Jesuit from South America? I recall the incredulity mixed with the excitement of witnessing history in the making. That night, Pope Francis entered the global consciousness with humility, as he bowed his head suppliantly for a blessing from the jubilant crowd at St. Peter’s Square and the millions who were following on television and on the internet. Pope Francis exited with similar humility on April 21, but not before showing himself to be one of the finest specimens of humanity to have graced the 21st century.
I was privileged to meet Francis on several occasions. In 2019, he convened the leaders of the factions of war-ravaged South Sudan for an unprecedented spiritual retreat that I co-facilitated at his residence in Rome, the Casa Santa Marta. He opened his house to them and commissioned them go forth and make peace, falling on his knees to kiss the feet—some would say stained by blood—of the South Sudanese belligerents. Everybody in the room was stunned into silence, and tears streamed down the cheeks of some. To those who tried to resist his humble but potent gesture, Francis pleaded: “Please, allow me.” That was the man whom God missioned to renew the face of the church and to witness to the power of reconciliation, justice and peace.
Francis’ pontificate was an instructive and fascinating chapter on how to be a church. He called for the church to become a “field hospital” for the wounded of heart, soul and body; a purveyor of joy for those whose joy had been robbed by despair; a channel of mercy for those relegated to the margins of orthodoxy and society; and a bruised community journeying in the streets with the homeless and aimless, the hopeless and friendless. These people were his regular guests at the Vatican and on his numerous apostolic journeys.
A Jesuit colleague once commented on how in his later years, Francis’ physique seemed to gradually transform, making him look like a revered predecessor, Pope John XXIII. What John did with the Second Vatican Council, Francis achieved with the Synod on Synodality. With characteristic audacity and conviction, tinged perhaps with hubris, he declared that “the journey of synodality is the journey that God wants from his church in the third millennium.” He persevered in his conviction against resistance and opposition from ecclesiastics who perceived synodality as a threat not only to received tradition but also to their customary privileges, entitlements and perks.
I saw another side of Pope Francis during the Synod on Synodality. Every day in the Paul VI Audience Hall, he was wheeled into the hall long before official proceedings would commence. He welcomed all comers with a smile, a word of encouragement or a blessing, and he never refused a selfie. Here was a man who abhorred protocol, a person you could put your arms around as a fellow pilgrim or a favorite grandpa. Francis was an ordinary Christian who joyfully carried the good news of Jesus Christ in his heart and radiated it to anybody he was privileged to meet.
I recall the turbulent years of the Covid-19 pandemic, when one leader after another floundered and flailed, endangering the lives of their people. The world seemed like a rudderless ship destined to capsize under the dereliction of bad leadership. Francis stepped into the breach like a beacon of light, an anchor of hope and a well of charity in a world battered by a formidable foe. He named the crux of the moment with solemn clarity: “Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities; it has taken over our lives, filling everything with a deafening silence and a distressing void that stops everything as it passes by.”
Francis’ words acted like a soothing balm on the soul of every human being caught in the throes of the pandemic. We are in a storm-tossed boat, he declared, but hold on, Jesus is with us: “We have an anchor: By his cross we have been saved. We have a rudder: By his cross we have been redeemed. We have a hope: By his cross we have been healed and embraced so that nothing and no one can separate us from his redeeming love.” At one of the darkest moments of the 21st century, Francis, by his life, words and deeds, taught the world priceless lessons in solidarity, compassion, mercy, hope and leadership.
Pope Francis neither feigned infallibility nor mimicked perfection. Remember when he self-identified as a sinner in an interview with America and other Jesuit journals? “I am a sinner,” Francis said. “This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.” And he would expound on it several years later in an interview with the Italian magazine Credere: “I am a sinner.... I am sure of this. I am a sinner whom the Lord looked upon with mercy. I am…a forgiven man.... I still make mistakes and commit sins, and I confess every fifteen or twenty days. And if I confess it is because I need to feel that God’s mercy is still upon me.”
Francis committed a few faux pas on matters of clerical sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable people. But he was not afraid to admit his mistakes and errors and to ask for forgiveness. On the role of women in ministry in the church, he was perhaps unusually diffident and erred too much on the side of doctrinal caution, despite breaking with tradition to appoint women to positions of importance previously reserved exclusively for high-ranking clerics at the Vatican. In the end, some of his pronouncements on the “feminine genius”—that “Mary is more important than Peter”—and the femininity of the church sounded more like flattery than revolutionary. His widely publicized categorical “no” to a journalist who asked him whether a girl growing up Catholic today will ever have the opportunity to be a deacon left me dismayed and disappointed. His decision to commission inconclusive studies on the female diaconate scuttled an opportunity to recover a venerable tradition of the church that affirmed the ministerial role of women.
Of all the religious leaders who have lived in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Pope Francis stands out. With prophetic insistence, he called the world to correct course and learn to care for our common home, the Earth. With passion and compassion, he channeled our gaze to the plight of displaced people, refugees and migrants looking for a cool place to lay their heads. With unrelenting energy, he opened our eyes to the shame and callousness of war and violence which defeat our humanity. And with the ebullience and humility of a good shepherd, he led the church to existential and geographical peripheries to embrace, honor and defend the dignity of the poor, oppressed and marginalized.
Pope Francis was not afraid to call out those within the church who were content to use their status to pursue and serve personal interests. The spirited resistance to his reform of the centuries-old Vatican bureaucracy was well documented, as was his characterization of clericalism as a cancer that gnaws at the ecclesial fabric of the people of God. He won himself no small number of enemies, buoyed by the conviction that the Holy Spirit was the most important protagonist in any worthy enterprise of ecclesial reform.
When I met Pope Francis briefly in March 2024 during a visit by a delegation from Santa Clara University led by the university’s president, Julie Sullivan, he said, “Pray for me.” These were his customary parting words.
In Africa, a person of Francis’ moral caliber and spiritual substance holds the coveted designation of “ancestor,” whose role includes everlasting solicitude for the community he or she leaves behind. The church and the world can rejoice to have a good disciple, a faithful servant and a beloved ancestor praying and interceding for us in the presence of God.
Rest in peace, dear Francis.
