Francis’s death-day was particularly fitting. The morning after his Easter appearance among the crowds on the piazza outside St. Peter’s showed his continuing triumph over his own personal cross—this one in the shape of a wheelchair—he handed himself over to the God he had obviously been expecting to meet quite soon. Alive and very much himself only a few hours before he succumbed to a stroke, Francis was as open, vulnerable, and public in his death as he had been throughout his papacy.
Many words have been spilled trying to explain why such a simply lovable man could provoke such strong opposition in some quarters, above all among the U.S. bishops, and probably not a little in the darker corners of the Vatican. The usual explanation offered is that his shoot-from-the-hip approach to answering questions about challenging issues offended the more careful defenders of doctrine. Or they thought he was just plain wrong. Maybe they would have said he was oversimplifying things, because you can’t call the pope “wrong,” can you? Except in private, of course.
For me, the fearlessness of Pope Francis is what explains the extraordinary devotion to his person on the part of so many, and the antipathy of the powerful few. This is not the least of the ways in which he is a reminder of Pope John XXIII, another maverick who turned the chair of Peter upside down. Both of them preferred visiting convicts in Rome’s jails to hanging out with either the rich and famous, while Francis added the annual Christmas excoriation of the Curia. John was beloved by almost all and considered a disaster by the denizens of the Curia.
John XXIII was a fearless pope. He was succeeded by a very fearful Paul VI, who wrote beautifully of the social teaching of the Church and yet lacked the courage to accept his own committee’s recommendation to relax the rules on birth control. His fear led to mass departures from priestly ministry. And if Paul VI was too fearful, John Paul II was not fearful enough. He exuded overconfidence and muscular Christianity, and left the Church weaker still. Enter Benedict XVI, another man made fearful by his experiences in the student riots of 1968 and rendered, for all his learning and holiness, too small for the job. The electors who gathered to replace him didn’t want more fearfulness or insufficient humility, and so they chose the nearest thing they could find to a clone of John XXIII. And even they were surprised.
Francis was fearless, but in his case the fearlessness was nurtured and tempered by his love of the People of God, one of the many ways in which he instantiated the genius of Vatican II. Don’t get me wrong, but I think it is fair to say that he was not in love with the Church, unless by “Church” you mean its members, mostly especially the poor and marginalized members. And he wasn’t in the business of putting people right. The famous off-the-cuff remark “Who am I to judge?” was a response to a question probably asked to back him into a corner but that elicited a gut reaction. Francis’s modus operandi has always been “the medicine of mercy,” to quote John XXIII’s prescription for the ills of the Church. And he was very dismissive of the pomp and circumstance, even from the first moment, when he rejected the finery of office and rode home in the bus with the others.
Fearless. Humble. Forthright. Lovable. Gee, who does this remind you of? As a good Jesuit, Jesus was his model, the one with whom he doubtlessly spoke daily in an Ignatian “colloquy,” as the Spiritual Exercises require. If you are close to Jesus, you have to be humble, you are called to a life without fear, and you must take up your cross daily. Maybe Francis didn’t really want the job of Supreme Pontiff. I rather hope not. But no one before him in the past century, not even John XXIII, has been so nakedly present to those he was called to serve. When you set aside the trappings of the office and refuse the sterile comforts of the papal apartments, there is nothing between you and the world. Even, and maybe especially, your weaknesses are on view. People may rightly call him saintly, but I wonder if he is also actually the most genuinely human pope we have seen in our time.
From the beginning of Francis's papacy, I have thought that his primary objective was to change the culture of the Vatican so that there could be no going back. People say with at least a little justice that Francis’s theology was on the conservative side, but his instincts were clearly progressive. How do those two things fit together? Perhaps only if we see him as a transitional figure and accept that this was also his self-understanding. If he has made no major changes in Church teaching, he has closed no doors. What he has achieved is the practical impossibility of a return to the old ways of the Vatican. He has cleared the way for his successor to do the things he perhaps thought the time was not ripe to achieve. He has done his best to see that the choice of the upcoming conclave will be a decision of a body of bishops who much more fairly represent the global Church than in any previous election. And as we look into the future, we can surely imagine him offering us the words that were also the final words of the poet Seamus Heaney: “Be not afraid.”
