Pope Francis had just arrived in Philadelphia for the 2015 World Meeting of Families, and the Bishop Shanahan High School marching band from Downingtown, Pa., was there to greet him on the runway.
The band played the “Rocky” theme song and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” as the pope greeted dignitaries before he got into a black, four-door Fiat 500 with a small papal flag and slowly drove by the uniformed band members, waving and giving them the thumbs-up.
Then he glimpsed Michael Keating, the band director’s son.
The car stopped, and Pope Francis got out. He went to Michael, then 9 and in a reclined wheelchair, blessed him, and then kissed the boy’s forehead, cradling his dark-haired head with both hands.
The encounter lasted less than 30 seconds, but, for the Keatings, it continues to resonate.
“It was just unbelievable. We couldn’t believe it was happening,” Chuck Keating, Bishop Shanahan’s band director, told OSV News April 21. “Tears of joy were coming. It was just amazing.”
Michael, now 20, has cerebral palsy, does not have use of his arms or legs, and is considered deafblind, Chuck Keating said. Pope Francis’ unexpected attention and tenderness to their son “is something we cherish,” he said. Each year, the family — which includes Michael’s older sister and twin brother — celebrates that day’s anniversary, Sept. 26, with a special meal, Chuck Keating noted.
The Keatings received news of Pope Francis’ April 21 death with sadness at first, but Chuck’s wife, Kristin, said it would be better for the family to celebrate the late pontiff’s life.
“We’re celebrating his life and what he meant to us, celebrating what he meant to a lot of people, on how he treated people, what his thoughts were, and I think that’s how he wants to be remembered — more celebratory than mourning,” said Keating, 54, a parishioner of St. Peter Catholic Church near Coatesville, about 40 miles west of Philadelphia.
Pope Francis’ “love and his support for all people, all mankind, is what was on display then, and how much he loves everybody,” he said of that Saturday morning in 2015. “We’re always practicing Catholics, but it just gave me a little more reassurance.”
The Keatings were among many Catholics in the U.S. who shared tributes in the hours after Pope Francis’ death from a stroke and heart failure, after struggling to overcome a respiratory illness that led to a five-week hospitalization in February and March. An Associated Press photo of Pope Francis kissing Michael was well circulated in the days following their encounter, serving as a continued testament to Pope Francis’ attention to people society sometimes overlooks.
Mark Schmidt, 41, also knows what it is like to draw the pope’s full attention, if even for a moment. When he and his wife included a papal audience at the Vatican in their October 2019 honeymoon itinerary, Schmidt crafted a note for Pope Francis describing his father’s recent and serious cancer diagnosis and requesting prayers. A Catholic from Des Moines, Iowa, he planned to pass it to the pope via a guard, but he also harbored hope of talking to Pope Francis himself.
Although he and his bride were in special seating reserved for newlyweds, Schmidt said it did not appear as if Pope Francis would pass by to greet them after the audience.
“I just started shouting in terrible Spanish, ‘Holy Father, my dad has cancer! Please pray for him!'” he recalled. He remembers handing his note to someone who might deliver it to the pope, but a guard also directed him to another seating section closer to Pope Francis. Schmidt seized his chance.
“When I got close enough to the barrier and I was able to shake his hand, I just said again … ‘Holy Father, my dad has cancer. Will you pray for him?’ And the look of his face went from this bright smiling (to) … this immediate change. … His whole physical presence changed to concern and compassion for me and my dad right then and there.”
Pope Francis asked for his father’s name; Schmidt shared it. “He said, ‘Let’s pray for your dad.’ And he took my hand, and he said a short prayer, invoking my dad’s name for healing and for peace and grace. … This chaos (from the crowd) is going on around us, and he’s just in solemn prayer with me for this brief moment, and then he said ‘Amen,’ and I said ‘thank you’ and he moved on,” Schmidt recalled.
“It was just surreal. This huge peace had come over me about things,” he said. “And, at the same time, I’m just really jazzed, because the pope just prayed for my dad.”
Later that day, Schmidt called his parents to tell them of Pope Francis’ prayer. He reached them just as his dad was going to receive his first chemotherapy treatment, and they were comforted by the news, he said.
The timing “felt like it was … divine providence,” Schmidt said. “The fact that I was able to be there in that moment to be able to pray with the pope for my dad, when he needed all the prayers he could get.”
Six years later, Schmidt’s dad’s cancer is in remission. “I don’t ever want to be the person to presume a miracle … but I know that spiritually, it was the grace of knowing that he had been prayed for that offered my dad spiritual strength and assurances — not necessarily that he would be healed, but the best of the best was praying,” he said.
A consultant on Catholic social teaching and a historical researcher, Schmidt, now the father of a young son and daughter, said that he has long felt an affinity for Pope Francis.
“From the moment he was elected … the fact that you could tell he had a servant’s heart made me drawn to him,” he said.
That impression also gave Schmidt the certainty that Pope Francis would earnestly care about his father’s illness. “Not that our prayers aren’t efficacious, but you know, the pope praying for one of your intentions is a profound thing.”
Mychael Schilmoeller, 38, also experienced the lasting impact of Pope Francis’ surprise attention and prayer. Now a real estate agent, Schilmoeller was a pastoral care minister at a suburban Minneapolis parish when she traveled with a group of young adults accompanying Minnesota’s bishops to Rome for their ad limina visit with Pope Francis in January 2020.
She was also visibly eight months pregnant with the second of her three daughters.
Her group was invited to meet with Pope Francis after a Wednesday general audience, and her belly caught the pope’s eye. He approached her, met her eyes, took her hand and touched her stomach, and prayed silently.
“That moment is very embedded in my memory,” she told OSV News. “It’s incredibly special for my family, particularly for the child that I was pregnant with at the time. … His presence was remarkable, truly calming and so generous.”
He had asked when she was due, and she told him around St. Patrick’s Day. The baby was actually due a little later than that, but her birthdate ultimately was March 17. That daughter, Rowan, is now 5.
“Pope Francis has always been very passionate about the teachings of the Gospel and the Catholic Church, and his remarks about the dignity of life have always been reinforced in terms of my own beliefs, but knowing his actions, in terms of seeing a mother expecting a child and seeing his smile and delight in that … was so touching,” Schilmoeller said. “He valued this life, and I know that is not always the common reaction.”
Like many Catholics in the United States, Schilmoeller woke up April 21 to news of the pope’s death. “I’m deeply saddened for the loss of a great pope,” she said. “I think the last 12 years have been so incredible. … His remarks have just crossed over to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, and I think that’s one of the aspects of his papacy that is so remarkable.”
Pope Francis’ pastoral acknowledgement of Catholics who sometimes feel like they exist on the margins of the church buoyed Marcee Hinds, who baptized her first child and then began the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults just months after Pope Francis was elected.
A civics teacher in Mobile, Alabama, Hinds had been baptized Catholic as a baby, but she was not raised in the church. Meanwhile, her husband required an annulment from a previous marriage. As the couple waited for the annulment, Hinds felt stuck and did not complete RCIA.
“I was so excited to come into the church, but I was in a holding position,” she said.
Hinds, now 42, may have quit if not for Pope Francis — and her likeminded pastor — whom she saw as giving her space both to be Catholic and to wrestle with her atypical situation.
That period coincided with the two synods of bishops on the family in 2014 and 2015, and the subsequent release of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation “Amoris Laetitia,” which — to some controversy — suggested ways to draw Catholics like Hinds into the sacramental life of the church.
“There was something different about Pope Francis,” she said. “It was just having that reminder that I was loved, that it was OK, that ‘we understand that situation that you’re in,’ that that felt important. … Even when I was in that limbo waiting period, there was always that hope.”
Hinds’ husband ultimately received an annulment, and she was confirmed in 2017.
Said she felt Pope Francis’ “grandfatherly love” throughout his papacy, and that “if I was to go up to Pope Francis and have a conversation, he would have been the most approachable person on the planet.”
Pope Francis was elected a year before Jesuit Father Mario Powell was ordained in 2014, and the pontiff’s ministry has shaped how the younger Jesuit has approached his own assignments, he said.
He has referred to himself as a “Pope Francis Jesuit” who has been inspired by the pope who showed “God’s joy, God’s love and God’s mercy in a messy world and in our messy lives.”
“That’s really what I try to do in the ministries I’ve had since ordination,” Father Powell, 43, told OSV News. “Jesuits are known for the intellectual life of the church and certainly higher education. I have found in the years since then (Pope Francis’ election) that my heart has been drawn in a different direction as a priest.”
Father Powell’s first assignment as a priest was as director of Regis High School’s REACH program, which “was founded to help prepare, largely, sons of migrants to get into Jesuit high schools in New York City,” he said.
While his work was based at the school’s location on Manhattan’s Upper East Side near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he spent most of his time in the South Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Harlem, he said. “My office was really out in the streets trying to recruit people who would never look at a Jesuit high school” because of their high tuition.
“We were walking with them and listening to their hopes and dreams,” he said. “You realize that that’s a special privilege to be able to give oneself, especially as a priest, to people who don’t have a lot materially. I found myself certainly more attached to that type of ministry.”
“Pope Francis talks about the fact that we can see God easiest on the margins,” Father Powell added. “We don’t go to the margins to bring people to the center. We go to the margins to find Christ and encounter Christ there. And that, for me, is still something that I fundamentally believe and hopefully can authentically live out.”
Now the provincial assistant for secondary and pre-secondary education for the Jesuits’ USA East Province, Father Powell said he was still processing Pope Francis’ death, and he wanted to resist early attempts to “rush to try to frame his pontificate and create a narrative.”
“If you want to know who he was, look at who he was talking about and what he was talking about at the very end: He was talking about migrants and in his Easter message, ending war,” he said.
“His pontificate — I know we look at it being finished,” he added, “but I would hope that certainly, as a fellow son of Ignatius (the Jesuits’ founder), that in a small way, his pontificate is not finished, because it still has my vocation.”
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