Francis the Great
He, of course, would resile at such a title (“the Great”), refusing at every step to take on the privileges of power, such as when he was first elected and chose to live in the Vatican guest-house rather than the apostolic palace. “How I would love a church that is poor and for the poor”, Francis once told reporters.
And that’s why the title seems appropriate: reflecting, as his papal style did, in simple words and deeply symbolic gestures, a Christ-like kenotic understanding of God:
Although [Christ] was in the form of God and equal with God, he did not take advantage of this equality. Instead, he emptied himself by taking on the form of a servant, by becoming like other humans, by having a human appearance. (Phillipians 2: 6-11).
Liam Hehir offers a more detailed assessment of Francis's papacy (see here), and comes to a different conclusion: that Francis was a deeply flawed, and at times inconsistent, human being, who fumbled his way through contemporary doctrinal debates, avoiding clarity, pleasing neither side, but who gains our thanks for having managed this sprawling, complex institution, and run the race to the end.
I find Liam's view far too cynical (and his characterization of the developing world as theologically conservative, and rather indifferent to modern Western issues, rather odd, if not egregious). Was Francis such a mediocre leader? As someone I know from Latin America has said: "We will miss him but know he has prepared things for after his death."
"Prepared things"?
Liberation theology in from the cold (having being persecuted and silenced during Benedict's reign), a large number of new cardinals having been appointed from the developing world (fewer than half voting cardinals are now European), a vision for a renewal of church community and healing of division based on a radical practice of listening ("synodality”), a return of pastoral priorities and concerns when interpreting and applying doctrine, women appointed to key leadership positions in the Vatican and beyond, a sea-change in leadership style and papal church culture, from pontification to hospitality and encounter…
I had stopped attending Roman Catholic churches by the time Francis became Pope. My own experience of him, like most people's, was at a distance - mediated via TV, books, and the internet. Nevertheless, I was touched by what I saw and heard. I was touched that he kept on asking people to pray for him, and his constant use of the word "close" (or whatever Spanish or Latin or Italian word was being translated here).
Be close to others. Think about faith and its dilemmas from this standpoint - with the face of the other before us. God comes forward to be close to us.
He looked at people. He read people's faces. *
Most of all Francis gave me hope - just knowing he was there, embodying these concerns, making these gestures, washing the feet of female prisoners each year during Holy Week, calling Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza every night (even when ill in hospital), visiting mosques, telling us that God weeps, pushing back against the insanity of Trump. The church felt less inauthentic and hopeless just knowing he was there, keeping the fire of the carpenter and the prophet still burning.
There is a story within Quaker history of two early Friends who set off for Rome, in the sixteenth century, to convert the Pope. One of them, John Luffe, actually gained an audience with Pope Alexander VII.
"Thou pretendest to sit in Peter's chair", said Luffe according to the account. "Now know that Peter had no chair but a boat: Peter was a fisher, though art a Prince: Peter fasted and prayed, thou farest deliciously and sleepest softly: he was mean in attire, thou art set with ornaments and gay attire: he fished for men to convert them, thou hookest souls to confound them...**
The next day Luffe was hanged. (We can imagine this encounter going very differently during Francis's time).
John Luffe, Francis the Great, your great-grandparents and mine, loved ones we’ve recently - and not so recently - lost:
…the dead are with us….Mourning is a very precious [time], because you slowly let go of the person you have known and loved. But you also welcome them into your life in a new way.***
For those in faith,
it is a time of slow adjustment in which you attend to the Lord in whom they are now. It’s not just a time of loss, because they are taken up into God and are present to you in a new and in some ways more intimate way. ***
Accessing grief - let alone grief and faith - can be complex. Sometimes we fall right in, we’re dropped, as though the floor has gone from under us. Other times, we don’t enter straight away. Sometimes, it seems, almost never.
There’s a touching scene where Pope Francis meets a little boy who has lost his father. The boy stands by the microphone to ask his question: Has my Dad, a non-believer and a “good man”, gone to heaven? The boy is very nervous, breaks down crying, and can’t, at first go, speak his question into the microphone. Francis asks him to approach, and embraces the boy - warmly, simply. He’s then able to ask his question - only after he's received the warmth and ‘closeness’ of the “Papa”. The boy then returns to the crowd. With the boy’s permission, Francis tells us the boy’s question, and - indeed - gets the crowd to answer it. It’s quite a moment! Quite a moment of faith ( in many ways) and one of many from Francis’s extraordinary life.
Before the crowd answers, Francis says these words:
What a beautiful thing that a son says of his father, “he was good”… It’s a beautiful testimony on his son’s part…and that he has the courage to cry before all of us.
And Francis’s own answer to the boy? And his support for the (Catholic) crowd to find their “courage”?
God is the one who decides who goes to heaven…God has the heart of a father, and faced with a Dad [who was a good man]….does God abandon his children?
[Crowd:] “No!”
There you go, Emanuele, this is your answer.****
References:
* Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe’s personal recollection of Francis. See his touching statement and interview, with Cardinal Vincent Nichols, here.
** William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (1912), p.424, cited in Ben Pink Dandelion, The Quakers (2008), p.89.
*** Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, see above source.
**** To watch the whole video, click here
