In a casual aside in an article two or three years into Pope Francis’ pontificate, and a year or two before I came to Our Sunday Visitor, I wrote that the Holy Father was not (as both his supporters and detractors claimed) the first “Third World Pope” or “Pope from the Global South” but rather a thoroughly European and even Italian one.
He had (I had argued in numerous articles) more in common with his immediate predecessors, Pope Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II, than most commentators were willing to admit.
As different as they were from one another, John Paul, Benedict and Francis were all pastors at heart, men who understood that doctrine and dogma are distillations of truth — formulated as Christians grapple with their encounter with Christ and not in themselves the path to that truth.
Each in his own way called modern men and women to that encounter, because all three recognized that the memory of Christ was fading, and fading fast, especially in Europe and the countries of the western hemisphere and the global south that had been colonized by European Christians.
In sheer numbers, there have never been so many Christians as there are today; in a deeper sense, however, the smaller church predicted by the future Pope Benedict in 1969, a church that “will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning,” is already here.
Pope Francis declared Pope Benedict a “prophet of this church of the future,” and throughout his entire pontificate, Francis heeded his call. If doing so seemed messy at times, so be it.
Pope Francis had little patience for those who have traded the encounter with Christ for the ossified ruins of Christendom. In his apostolic exhortation “Christus Vivit,” he declared, “Christ is alive! He is our hope, and in a wonderful way he brings youth to our world, and everything he touches becomes young, new, full of life.”
I cannot say that it was Francis’ pontificate alone that brought me to Our Sunday Visitor, but this thread that connects John Paul II, Benedict and Francis — this hermeneutic of continuity — had convinced me by early 2017 that not only are there no political solutions to cultural problems, but there are no cultural solutions to those problems, either. There is only a religious one, and it must begin with our personal encounter with Christ.
Throughout his pontificate, with the fire and occasional cantankerousness of some of the early fathers of the church, Pope Francis admonished us to quit worrying about the sins, real and imagined, of others, and to see in them the face of our Savior — and to serve him through serving them.
For this, some thought he did not believe in the reality of sin. They apparently never bothered to read any of the homilies from his daily Masses, in which the Holy Father spoke frequently of sin, the devil and hell, and attacked the ideologies of left and right — including the “ideological colonization” of family life — for presenting a secular, structural alternative to the very real and necessary work of discerning God’s will and doing it.
From St. Peter on, the office of the papacy has been occupied by men who were not perfect, and Pope Francis was no exception. But at his best, he shared with his immediate predecessors a twinkle in his eye and a welcoming smile that rose from the joy in his heart — the joy of encountering the risen Christ and the joy of sharing him with others.
That joy can overcome all fear, all division, all strife. That joy can and must move us to make Christ known to all nations, to become true missionary disciples, to hand down the truth of the encounter with Christ by creating the conditions in which those who do not yet know him may come to do so.
This is the legacy of Pope Francis. May God grant him blessed repose and eternal memory.
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