Remembering Pope Francis

                   Korea Culture and Information Service via Wikimedia Commons.

          The world has lost one of the most charismatic pontiffs of the last century with the passing of Pope Francis, the first Latin American prelate of the church’s 1.3 billion Catholics. Francis was a reformer who made himself available to the faithful, and traveled to 66 countries, including eleven in Latin America. He vigorously engaged with the crises of his time such as war, mass migration and man-made climate change.  His first trip abroad as pope in 2013 was to Brazil, but he never returned to his homeland, Argentina, during his period as pope.

            Thirty-eight years after a right-wing death squad assassinated Mons. Oscar Romero of El Salvador as he said mass—having called upon the army to “stop the killing” in the civil war—Francis canonized Saint Romero of the Americas, as he is often called. Other popes and conservative bishops had delayed the recognition. He put other martyrs who devoted their lives to Latin America on the road to sainthood, such as Stan Rother of Santiago Atitlán, the Martyrs of Quiche, and Brother James Miller of Huehuetenango in Guatemala, thus recognizing the suffering and resilience in Central America during genocidal wars. While the pope was critically ill in the hospital recently, he approved the canonization of the Venezuelan “doctor of the poor,” José Gregorio Hernandez; he named as “venerable,” the first step in the canonization process, the self-educated Afro-Puerto Rican teacher Rafael Cordero, who dedicated his life to providing schooling he had been denied to the land’s poorest children. With these choices, Frances indicated that he considered such individuals from his home continent as role models.

            Not all the late pontiff’s achievements were public. In 2014, he quietly mediated between Barack Obama and Raúl Castro of Cuba to bring the heads of state together, helping to advance ongoing secret negotiations and acting as a guarantor for final talks that culminated in the restoration of diplomatic relations. Donald Trump’s administration severed relations again, but the events showed rapprochement was possible and sowed hope for the future. The pope’s diplomacy was key to releasing hundreds of Cuban prisoners, and his emphasis on dialogue over fear and confrontation, promoting “open hearts and open minds,” as he said during a memorable visit to Cuba in 2015, was directed toward the diaspora community and the government, in aspiration for reconciliation.

            Francis saw his papacy a continuation of the milestone meetings of the 1960s called Vatican II, called by Pope John XXIII to modernize the church and “let in the fresh air.” Vatican II shelved Latin for worship in local languages, declared that all people—not just Catholics— might be saved, and for the first time since the French Revolution promoted democracy and the separation of church and state. After his election in 2013, Francis took up John’s objective that the Roman Catholic Church become the church of the poor, eschewing its traditional identification with the rich and powerful.

            He advanced ecumenism with outreach to Islam and other faiths. He also opened doors for the divorced and remarried. He reached out to gays beginning with his famous answer to a reporter’s question about gay priests, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”  When the conservative U.S. bishops’ conference tried to forbid Holy Communion to newly elected President Joe Biden in 2021 for supporting abortion law, Francis’s Vatican stopped them. “I have never denied the Eucharist to anyone,” the pope said. Abortion, Francis maintained, was no more “pre-eminent,” as the U.S. bishops termed it, than other pro-life issues such as capital punishment or care for the poor.

            Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires of Italian immigrant parents, raised in a close-knit extended family in the middle-class Flores neighborhood, and studied chemistry before entering the priesthood, working at a laboratory during an era when a junta government disappeared and killed suspected leftists. When his former supervisor at the lab, Dr. Esther Careaga de Ballestrino, with whom he had remained good friends, called the newly ordained Fr. Bergoglio to give the last rites to a relative, he arrived to find the call was a ruse, and Ballestrino begged him to take away the family’s books on Marxism and communism—he delivered them to a seminary library. (A founder of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, mothers whose children had been disappeared, Ballestrino was arrested by authorities and killed, her remains recovered in 1977.)

            As liberation theology spread through Latin America, Bergoglio championed a version called “theology of the people” which did not use Marxist economic analysis. But he supported the “slum priests” and others in the Third World Priests Movement, some of whom were inspired by Marxist ideology; they labored far from the tango salons and café society of Buenos Aires, in its hardscrabble shantytowns. Even as a bishop, Bergoglio visited the villas miserias, taking public transportation, ministering to the poorest residents. “When someone says that I’m a Papa villero (a Pope of the shantytowns), I pray only that I might always be worthy of it,” he wrote in an autobiography called Hope.

            As the first Jesuit and first non-European pope since the eighth century, from a mostly poor continent, Francis brought a new perspective to the gilded halls of the Vatican. As soon as he was elected, he booked a trip to Lampedusa, the Italian island facing Africa where thousands of refugees were landing, to say Mass and express solidarity. He continued to stand for welcoming the stranger with dignity as a tenet of Catholic social teaching as anger grew in Europe at increasing immigration and a new administration in the United States pledged mass deportation.

            In February U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance, a Catholic since 2019, justified President Trump’s crackdown on migrants, mostly from Latin America, with an interpretation of medieval theology positing the ordo amoris, the order of love, as care that begins with family, then reaches other circles like community and only at the furthest edge embraces the stranger. Francis came back with a corrective theology lesson of his own. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover … by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” he said. U.S. bishops have strongly defended immigrants. On Saturday, the Vatican said Vance met with officials for “an exchange of opinions” and briefly on Sunday with Francis for “an opportunity to exchange Easter greetings.”

            Hours before he died, on Easter Sunday, Francis was cheered by thousands gathered in a flower-filled St. Peter’s Square with an appearance from a balcony from which he blessed the crowd. His Easter message, read by an aide because the pope’s voice was still weak from his recent hospitalization, addressed conflicts in various parts of the world, expressing solidarity with those suffering and appealing “to all those in positions of political responsibility” to use resources as “weapons of peace” that help the needy and promote development “instead of sowing seeds of death.”

            Francis shook up the Curia, the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy meant to advise the pope, reforming it to combat clericalism. Department heads no longer must be cardinals or even priests, but may be lay people or ordinary religious, including women. He appointed women to important positions; but he did not go far enough to honor the desires of certain Catholic women to become priests, declaring ordination must be reserved for men. Francis faltered in failing to confront the seemingly intractable clergy sex abuse crisis at the beginning of his pontificate, disbelieving victims in Chile and defending a bishop accused of witnessing and ignoring abuse. In time and after investigations, Francis admitted to “grave errors in judgment,” defrocked bishops and accepted the resignations of others, apologizing to victims, inviting some to talk personally to him. In 2019, he called global bishops to a four-day meeting in Rome, insisting that clergy sex abuse and cover-ups threaten the entire Church and promised to confront abusers with “the wrath of God.” Nevertheless,like his predecessors the German Pope Benedict XVI and the Polish John Paul II (1978-2005), failure to fully engage the crisis may be a stain on his legacy.

In Aparecida, Brazil in 2007, Bergoglio redacted the signal final document of the Latin American Episcopal Council meetings, a touchstone event of modern Latin American church history imbued with the spirit of Vatican II, and previous meetings in Medellin and Puebla. He emphasized the “peripheries” where troubled souls live as the object of care and evangelization. “I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security,” he said on the eve of the conclave that elected him pope. He asked prelates to wear their chasubles “humbly,” as he did while living simply, disdaining traditional papal sumptuary customs of ermine and fine brocade, typically wearing a plain white cassock, declining to live in the lavishly appointed papal apartments, choosing instead a room in the guesthouse for Vatican visitors, eating in the communal dining room.

In the practice of austerity, Francis personified a constant in modern Latin American theological reflection. He chose his papal name only at the last minute, for the saint of Assisi who ministered to the poor, when it became clear the 2013 conclave was throwing him the most votes, and his good friend Cardinal Cláudio Hummes of Brazil leaned over and whispered, “Jorge, don’t forget the poor.”

An upcoming conclave will choose a new pope. Reportedly, Francis occasionally said he thought of an aspirational successor who took the name John XXIV, in honor of the pope who called for Vatican II and “let in the fresh air,” and who would continue its spirit of engagement with the world.