As a Catholic, I have lived under seven popes, beginning with Pius XII. As religion editor of Newsweek, I covered the next five. At the death of each, huge crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square to mourn. But there was something different about the crowds who came to say their goodbyes to Pope Francis—crowds so large that the Vatican had to keep the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica open throughout the night. That something reveals not only the personal charism of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, but also the modern transformation of the papacy itself.
“I’m in a bag, here.” Pope John XXIII famously complained shortly after his election in 1958. Until then, he had been a wide-traveling papal diplomat, at one point using his diplomatic privileges to help Eastern European Jews escape the Nazis. During the previous century, popes never left Italy; if you wanted to see one, you had to go to Rome. That tradition ended with his successor, Paul VI, whose travels to far-off places like India, where few Catholics lived, earned him the nickname of “the Pilgrim Pope.”
Popes going on the road transformed the role of the papacy. To the traditional papal functions of chief teacher and pastor of the world’s Catholics was added the unofficial but essential role of evangelizer-in-chief. John Paul II seized on travel as a way of bringing the Gospel to Catholics and other listeners around the world—and, not incidentally, also as a way of strengthening the union between the local churches and the Mother Church of Rome. As a trained actor and the leading geopolitician of his era, John Paul II had great stage presence and knew how to command a crowd. Over his twenty-six-year reign, he preached Christ to more people in more places than even Billy Graham was able to reach. In contrast, his successor, Benedict XVI, was shy and professorial, at home in small seminars and visibly uncomfortable on the papal stage.
Pope Francis’s mode of evangelization was altogether personal. His large bloodhound eyes took strangers in, one at a time, and the smile that emerged between his jowls said, “I see who you are.” Those same eyes went blank as window shades during must-do meetings: check out the photos of him with President Donald Trump.
Pope Francis needed to touch and to be in touch. That was his evangelistic gift. That is also the point of many of the stories that have emerged since his death. Juan Carlos Cruz, a gay Latino man I met because he had spoken out against the clerics who sexually abused him, heard at least once a month from Francis by phone and periodically visited him at the Vatican. After the Israeli army left Gaza with a single Catholic church standing, Francis called members of the parish almost daily to assure them of his continuing concern. The image of Francis embracing the disfigured head of a man with elephantiasis remains iconic. His personal example gave new meaning to E. M. Forster’s famous dictum, “Only connect.”
That’s why, I wager, more than a quarter-million people who never met him took time to come pay their respects to Pope Francis. From the stories they told to reporters eager to hear them, it is clear they wanted to say goodbye to a pope they felt they knew and who, they felt, knew them. For most of the Catholics born in this century, Francis is the only pope they’ve ever known.
This kind of personal evangelism is difficult to pass on because it is a gift. Even for Bergoglio, it took a while to realize the talent that was given him. But his need to touch went hand in hand with his innate simplicity, his emphasis on mercy as the true mark of a Christian, and his insistence that the Church become a “field hospital” for those living on the margins of society. His example is there for the next pope to build on.
All the rest—the politics, the ideological infighting, the partisanship in and outside the coming conclave—is mere distraction. Whatever his institutional goals, the next pope will succeed if he, too, heeds the voice of the voiceless. Like Francis, he need only connect.
