Requiem Aeternam, Franciscvs
an undeniably human pope
“Indeed, this is the reason for hope: we are able to hope because we know that the Father is waiting for us, He sees us from afar, and He always leaves the door open.
Dear brothers and sisters, let us ask ourselves, then, where we are in this wonderful tale. And let us ask God the Father for the grace that we too can find our way back home.”
- Pope Francis, Catechesis, 16th April 2025.
In December 1936, a baby boy named Jorge Mario Bergoglio was held in his parents’ arms and given the greatest gift a soul can receive: adoption into the life of Christ through Baptism. The first sacramental experience is similar for most of us, where we are carried by others to the font and our promises are spoken on our behalf by someone who loves us. We are incapable of understanding then what it means to be a Christian, yet we are filled with the grace of God all the same.
On Easter Sunday, the day before his death, Pope Francis stood with all Catholics as he renewed the Baptismal promise he made when he was barely a week old; to reject evil, and to love God. He had renewed this promise every Easter of his life. But this time, it was a final act of fidelity in the hope of fulfilling that promise in death, which he certainly knew was imminent.
I wrote in my Conclave film review that we should remember the Church is carried by fallible souls. The man who is elected pope carries a tremendous burden and I imagine it’s hard to maintain one’s sanity under such pressure and expectations. There are some who will proclaim “Santo subito”, or “Saint now”, including Cardinal Re in his homily at the pope’s funeral1, but this does a disservice to the fact that we are all sinners - popes and murderers alike - in desperate need of prayers after death.
My own relationship with Pope Francis was complicated. Often, even at home, I found myself defending him; other times, I didn’t love him the way I ought to. In 2022, in the sacrament of confession, I told a priest that I had been harbouring unsavoury thoughts about the pope and the hierarchy of the Church. “That’s perfectly understandable”, the priest replied emitting a chuckle. It’s a humorous anecdote now, but there’s no doubt that the late pope was a divisive figure among clergy and laity alike.
And yet even his critics would acknowledge that Francis lived out his vocation with sincere devotion, even if at times it was a touch dramatic. “God never tires of forgiving”, he once said. “It is we who tire of asking for forgiveness”. That line captured the heart of his pastoral mission. I once said to my father after reading some of the late pope’s writing on confession that Pope Francis would have made an excellent parish priest.
In this role I do believe Francis’ papacy was a great success. He didn’t have the raw human intellect or theological brevity of his predecessor Benedict XVI, but he did have a deeper sense of the pastoral needs of the Church. This was particularly prevalent in his work with the poor and imprisoned - whom he regularly visited and made the point to wash the feet of every Holy Thursday. Also during Covid, when he took up the role as priest for the world, standing alone in a rain-slicked and empty St Peter’s Square to deliver the Urbi et Orbi blessing. Seeing the Holy Father alone with the Blessed Sacrament during a time of great fear and uncertainty was the greatest act by a pope in my lifetime. It was a moment free of politics and simply about presence, reminding the faithful that Christ is with us in stormy seas.
On core hot button doctrinal issues - abortion, same-sex marriage, female ordination - he upheld the Church’s traditional teachings with little deviation. He repeatedly affirmed that abortion was “murder,” calling it akin to “hiring a hitman”, and he closed the door firmly on the ordination of women. Hardly the great reformer or progressive darling some have labelled him. And yet, he did change the way the Church talks about certain issues, particularly homosexuality, introducing a softer, more pastoral language, emphasising the word “accompaniment”. His famous line -"Who am I to judge?” - was a posture rather than a sign of structural reform. Of course the statement, like many others in Francis’ papacy, was embraced by progressives as a turning point, and as heretical and divisive by more conservative types.2 The truth was usually somewhere in the middle.
Francis in his best moments was a sharp critic of global economic systems. He dismissed modern consumerism, calling it a “virus that attacks the faith at its root”. His encyclicals, particularly Laudato Si’, condemned ecological exploitation and framed care for creation as a moral imperative. “The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth”, he wrote bluntly. His economic critiques were often directed at unregulated markets, disparity of wealth, and the global “throwaway culture”. These kind of statements earned him few friends in the Anglophone Catholic right - particularly the Americans, where capitalism and liberalism reign supreme. Yet these critiques continue a long tradition of Catholic social teaching, affirming the arguments made in Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate and Leo XII’s Rerum Novarum that the economy should serve the common good.
Francis’ passionate defence of justice in the public square was undermined by the absence of justice inside the Church’s own walls. Nowhere was this more painful than the case of Father Marko Rupnik, a once-celebrated Jesuit artist accused of sexual and spiritual abuse against adult women. In 2020, Rupnik was excommunicated for the canonical crime of absolving a sexual partner in confession - one of the most serious offenses in Church law. Yet the excommunication was swiftly and quietly lifted by Pope Francis after Rupnik reportedly expressed repentance. No explanations, no transparency, just silence.
These allegations remained hidden until late 2022 and it wasn’t until October 2023, under immense public pressure and renewed scrutiny, that Pope Francis ordered the reopening of the case, lifting the statute of limitations to allow a canonical trial to proceed. Though this was a necessary step, it came far too late, and only after significant damage had already been done to the Church’s credibility.
Francis’ predecessors were not good on this issue either, but simply being better than them does not constitute success or absolve him of any personal moral failings, as his most ardent supporters would have you think. The wider Church still has issues dealing with sexual abuse; we don’t wish to think of our priests as anything other than good and holy men who say mass, baptise us, and hear our sins. Acknowledging the sinfulness of our priests, bishops, and popes is a step in the right direction. In one of his first interviews as pope, when asked “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” Pope Francis replied: “I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner”. That to me is the defining trait of the Francis pontificate: acknowledging that the Petrine ministry isn’t about reaching a level of unattainable holiness, but a very specific vocation entrusted by Jesus to a man capable of great sin like any of us.
These failings, however, did make it impossibly difficult to take serious his criticisms of the rigidity of traditionally minded Catholics, who became a frequent punching bag during the Francis pontificate. I consider myself ‘tradjacent’ - someone who loves the Traditional Latin Mass, but is also uncomfortable with polemics and finds much of the trad community insular. I certainly agree that there is an element of performative piety and far to great an obsession with aesthetics or the idea of what a Catholic should be among the trads. Francis was right to bring attention to this, but his criticisms ignored that there are plenty of people who find their sense of accompaniment in the stability and timelessness of the Catholic tradition and liturgy, myself included.
These attacks were particularly strange given the emphasis of “synodality”.3 The focus of the last years of the Francis pontificate was consumed by this theme - the idea of “journeying together”, culminating in the Synod on Synodality. In theory, it was meant to foster communion amid disagreement.
The synodal process felt muddled and inaccessible, and poor participation rates outside the professional Catholic class seem to indicate that. As do the plethora of ecclesial documents littered with out of place babbling corporate jargons. The one success from this multi-year ordeal seems to be: we had a lot of disagreements without the threat of a schism. Which makes Francis’ predisposition to antagonise traditional Catholics all the more jarring. How can one champion dialogue and inclusion while saying things like “rigidity is the sign of a bad spirit hiding something” and marginalising those whose fidelity to tradition is not a rejection of the Church?4
Still, synodality at its best, pushes toward a Church that walks with its wounded and holds lofty hopes for all. He was a pope of hope after all. My favourite quote from Francis was "This isn't dogma, just my thought: I like to think of hell as being empty. I hope it is". He had a deep, abiding belief in the mercy of God and a hope for a more peaceful world.
He made unwavering calls for a cease to hostilities in Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza, even in his final hours. He called the arms trade “an industry of death” and emphasised that peace wasn’t a political ideology but a Gospel vision of human dignity and solidarity. His calls always pointed back to the Beatitudes and the promise that the meek, merciful, and peacemakers shall all share in the Kingdom of Heaven.
These appeals to peace and mercy were hallmarks of his papacy, even if they don’t easily resolve the contradictions some of us felt during it. As someone with interests in political models of subsidiarity and distributism, who is passionate about caring for the environment, who attends the traditional liturgy of the Church, and who was a victim of clerical sexual abuse, Pope Francis is a hard one to assess. Such is the nature of a Church two thousand years old, it can take centuries to properly evaluate a papacy. For now, I’d say he did a satisfactory job in a role I’d never wish for myself. Ask me again in fifty years.
Jesus once asked Simon Peter, “Do you love me?” (John 21:15-25) It’s the same question we answer at Baptism and the one Francis answered the day he became pope as well as the day before he died when he renewed his baptismal promise. And this is the image I find myself holding onto: an old man, once a baby, still trying to live out his parents’ wishes for him - to answer that question with a resounding “Yes!”
We do not know the fate of anyone’s soul. But today we pray in the hope that the baby baptised in Buenos Aires is once again in the arms of his parents, surrounded by God’s merciful embrace he spent his lifetime preaching. And if nothing else can be said with certainty, we can at least say: Pope Francis was a beloved child of God who lived a humble Christian life. And that is no small thing.
May he rest in peace.
Not these exact words, but asked for Pope Francis to “pray for us” implying he is in Heaven already.
I am fascinated that those with the strongest opinions on Pope Francis tend to be non-Catholics.
A word that still seems impossible to define, even by the “experts”.
Though in a tiny minority of trad circles there is a rejection of Vatican II and the novus ordo liturgy altogether.