Pope Francis
In Memoriam
I’m too young to have been really aware of John Paul II when he died. I vaguely recall watching his funeral on TV. And Benedict’s retirement was very different from a death, and when he did die, I felt like there was years of preparation and expectation for it.
In that sense, Francis’s death is new for me. It’s also complicated. The death of a pope—someone so distant but yet so intimately connected to my life—is a weird thing. So is the death of someone who, more than anyone else, positively changed my understanding of God, but who also made decisions that deeply disappointed me.
My faith, as a teenager and young adult, was formed by the JPII Generation. During that time, Christopher West’s version of Theology of the Body was new and exciting. Leaders in the young adult group I attended attributed their conversion to John Paul II. I cheered when John Paul II’s biographer, George Weigel came to my alma mater. John Paul II’s fingerprints were all over every aspect of my Catholic formation.
As much as that American JPII culture helped me build a foundation of faith and religious practice, it was also deeply ill. Forged as a reaction to the “crazy season” after Vatican II and the widespread rejection of the Church’s sexual teaching, a central part of this generation’s Catholic identity was being opposed to, and fearful of, whatever was considered liberal.
The spirituality that I inherited from members of the JPII generation contained a lot of fear.
The turmoil of the culture—especially from the threat of Communism and the aftermath of the sexual revolution—I think provoked a tendency to see the Church and her teaching in a defensive way. The Church was seen as an objective, unchanging bulwark in opposition to the changing culture.
But this defensiveness came at a cost. It turned the outside world into something to be feared instead of persons to be loved. The comfort of the objective ideal left little room for the weak who were unable to live the moral law. It created a tendency to fill in the grey areas of Church teaching with clear black and white answers of our own making.
The JPII generation took the heroism of John Paul II’s life and teaching and subtly turned it into a Pelagianism that made us, and not God, the primary actors in our growth in holiness. At least, that’s what was passed on to me.
In this environment I experienced a particularly rigid interpretation of orthodoxy being prioritized above respecting every individual’s dignity and conscience. There was an internal “cancel culture” of anyone that wasn’t in political or theological lockstep. There was a fear of dialogue, of learning from those we disagreed with. There was the expectation of immediate conformity without space for limitations or the process of grace and healing.
For much of my young adulthood I had a transactional relationship with God. In other words, as long as I performed well (didn’t sin and followed the rules) I was in God’s good graces, but if I failed to keep my end of the deal, God turned away from me until I won back his good graces. I had to meet God halfway.
My faith life became merely sin management. It reduced the adventure of holiness to simply not sinning. It also twisted my relationship with God to being all about me. I had to follow the rules to stay saved. I had to go back to God for his forgiveness after I sinned. I was the primary actor in this relationship, not God.
This transactional faith turned me into the older son in the parable of the Prodigal Son, the son who felt entitled, angry, and bitter. The son who didn’t know his own identity because he didn’t know how much his Father loved him. In what would be his final Wednesday Catechesis, Pope Francis described me as he reflected on this parable:
It is the eldest son who represents those for whom the parable is told: he is the son who always stayed at home with his father, yet was distant from him, distant in heart. This son may have wanted to leave too, but out of fear or duty he stayed there, in that relationship.
I was rigid and scrupulous, fearful that one mistake would cut me off from God and send me to hell. I saw God as a judge who probably only really cared about me when I followed all the rules. Then once I had successfully managed my sins (or at least the ones I thought were most serious) I felt like I had earned my relationship with God.
I was self-righteous and unsatisfied. And the version of Catholicism I was formed in almost led me away from God and the Church. And if it weren’t for Pope Francis, I probably would have left.
During that time I also came to the limit of my ability to perform. I had done everything right. I had checked all the rigid boxes. If we're thinking about a transactional faith, I'd kept up my end of the bargain, and yet me and my relationships were suffering.
I experienced a season of real depression and spiritual desolation, and I didn’t know how to process it. I did everything God asked of me. I was the obedient son. So why was I suffering?
Ten years ago, during the Jubilee Year of Mercy, I read Francis’s book, “The Name of God is Mercy.” It's a short book, and I read it three times. Afterwards I said to myself, “I want to believe in the God that Pope Francis believes in.”
I recognized that I didn't believe in that God, but also because the pope presented God in this way, then maybe God actually is as good as the pope says he is? Maybe God isn’t transactional, maybe his love is unconditional?
Maybe God loves me gratuitously, who loves without coercing me to perform, who loves in a way that respects my freedom, who allows me to show up as I am, a God who allows me to belong to him without first needing to do anything?
In the parable of the Lost Sheep, Jesus said that the shepherd chases after his lost sheep “until he finds it” (Luke 15:5). God is relentlessly pursuing me. God desperately desires to have a relationship with me. God wants to heal me of my sin and transform me into something divine, and I don’t have to convince him or perform for him. I don’t have to meet him halfway. I just have to let him catch me
Francis’s spiritual legacy is mercy. We don’t have enemies in a culture war, we have brothers and sisters who, like us, have been wounded by sin and need to be shown mercy. Francis wants us to meet others where they are at, to show them the love of the Father, and accompany them, step by step, back to Jesus. We are not soldiers fighting a war, we are field medics in search of the wounded and suffering.
I believe that his image of the Church as a field hospital and the centering of the Kerygma undermines the fear-based culture war Christianity that was so prominent in my Catholic formation.
I believe Francis’s teachings have helped combat spiritual abuses in the Church. I think synodality—the need for transparency, accountability, and cooperative decision making—could provoke structural reform. I think Francis’s teachings about sin and human dignity have helped correct areas where Church teaching has been (and is still being) misunderstood and misused to spiritually abuse people. I think his criticism of clericalism is dead right and absolutely needed.
However, in the past few years, I’ve felt real tension in my view of Pope Francis. He has made governing decisions that have failed to live up to his own teaching. Maybe the most notable, and egregious, is the handling of Fr. Marko Rupnik. I see these things as real failures that have harmed real people. They cannot be excused or minimized.
There may be calls for Francis’s canonization, and as holy as I believe he was, my voice won’t be added to them. I would love to see Francis canonized, but only after several decades, and only after we have had real transparency about both his positive reforms and his seemingly utter failures, only after the People of God can reckon with the truth of his papacy.
Reflecting on my own experiences as a young adult, I can say that while I was probably doing the best I could with what I had, I was also wrong. I was wrong to let fear drive so much of my faith. And Pope Francis’s teaching showed me a way out of that fear.
Yet, in the wake of his death, I still have fear. His presence in the Church was a reassurance that a Catholicism that respected dignity and conscience belonged. That I belonged. Now that he’s not there, my belonging feels less secure.
But even now, Pope Francis directs by heart through that fear. In his final homily, Easter Sunday, he wrote:
The Jubilee invites us to renew the gift of hope within us, to surrender our sufferings and our concerns to hope, to share it with those whom we meet along our journey and to entrust to hope the future of our lives and the destiny of the human family. And so we cannot settle for the fleeting things of this world or give in to sadness; we must run, filled with joy. Let us run towards Jesus, let us rediscover the inestimable grace of being his friends. Let us allow his Word of life and truth to shine in our life. As the great theologian Henri de Lubac said, “It should be enough to understand this: Christianity is Christ. No, truly, there is nothing else but this. In Christ we have everything.”
And this “everything” that is the risen Christ opens our life to hope. He is alive, he still wants to renew our life today. To him, conqueror of sin and death, we want to say:
“Lord, on this feast day we ask you for this gift: that we too may be made new, so as to experience this eternal newness. Cleanse us, O God, from the sad dust of habit, tiredness and indifference; give us the joy of waking every morning with wonder, with eyes ready to see the new colours of this morning, unique and unlike any other. Everything is new, Lord, and nothing is the same, nothing is old” (A. Zarri, Quasi una preghiera).
Sisters, brothers, in the wonder of the Easter faith, carrying in our hearts every expectation of peace and liberation, we can say: with You, O Lord, everything is new. With you, everything begins again.
May the Church continue to experience the reforms and newness Pope Francis so strongly worked for. And may Pope Francis experience the peace and liberation of Christ this day.
May Pope Francis memory be eternal!
Amen.