It has not been surprising to see how much coverage secular news and social media have given to the passing of Pope Francis and the transition to a papal conclave. I’ve heard it said that many outside the church are ready to canonize “the people’s pope,” while many traditional Catholics are anxious and uncertain. They are concerned about catechetical clarification and encouraging the faithful to hold fast the deposit of faith Jesus Christ entrusted to Peter and his successors.
A friend who lives in Rome told me she had to stop reading American news coverage because of its political bent. Polarizing labels do not apply to the church’s teachings, and avoiding secular news has helped me enter into the spiritual reality the church is living instead of feeling like Catholics are in a political election cycle rallying for candidates and causes.
I have spent time skimming less publicized documents and teachings of Pope Francis. He wrote beautifully about St. Therese and the virtue of confidence, on the value of literature for forming minds and hearts, and his last encyclical on the Sacred Heart is full of rich reflections. There is no denying that he wasn’t always precise or comprehensive in what he taught. He stirred anxieties about who the church should and should not be reaching out to, but he was above all a pastor, and the fact that more than half a million people attended his audiences in 2024 alone shows how deeply he was loved.
Of the three popes in my lifetime – John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis – each could not have been more different, but each have been dearly beloved by Catholics around the world. No country embraces their leaders’ differences in any way close to how Catholics accept and love each Holy Father as just that, the Vicar of Christ, and humanly as a grandfather figure in faith.
Like other beloved elder mentors in our lives, Pope Francis showed us in word and action where his heart and hope were placed. In the Easter homily he prepared for the day before he passed, the pope emphatically presents Jesus as the one we must seek and run to find: “We must look for him without ceasing. Because if he has risen from the dead, then he is present everywhere, he dwells among us, he hides himself and reveals himself even today in the sisters and brothers we meet along the way, in the most ordinary and unpredictable situations of our lives.” Easter “spurs us to action,” the pope says. “It invites us to have eyes that can ‘see beyond,’ to perceive Jesus, the one who lives as the God who reveals himself and makes himself present even today.”
This sense of hope and grounding in the truth of eternity as our final destination are not only final lessons of this Holy Father, but messages he gave throughout the 12 years he led the church. In his first Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis called believers to faith as “an interior certainty.” “A conviction,” he said, “that God is able to act in every situation, even amid apparent setbacks” because “mission is not like a business transaction or investment … It is not a show where we can count how many people come as a result of our publicity; it is something much deeper, which escapes all measurement.” He calls for trust in the Holy Spirit who “knows well what is needed in every time and place.”
I remember reading his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ and the upheaval it caused for the scientific focus on climate change, seemingly out-of-place commentary for the Vicar of Christ. The call to be good stewards of creation is not a new idea for the people of God – it is one championed by Francis’ recent predecessors – and his addressing of the “throwaway culture” is a necessary call to action. Our last four popes have highlighted the harms of a consumer mentality and challenged believers and people of goodwill to reclaim a sense of creation’s natural order. Part of this order includes death as a natural process, a beginning not an ending.
During the weekly general audiences of 2022, between February and August, Pope Francis offered a series of poignant catechesis on old age and the importance of the elderly. He encouraged an “alliance between generations” that acts as a bridge to transmit wisdom in humanity. In the first teaching, he questioned if there is friendship and cooperation between the different stages of life, acknowledging the mass phenomenon of longevity and that “childhood is distributed in small doses” with plummeting birth rates. The pope noted how the dominant culture has “as its sole model the young adult… a self-made individual who always remains young.” “Youth is beautiful,” but “eternal youth is a very dangerous hallucination,” he said.
In subsequent teachings, the pope reflects on the importance of an “accumulation of cultural memory” and patience necessary for “nourishing” and “leavening” experiences. The final teachings addressed Jesus’ consoling promise as he bid his followers farewell, their passage, as Francis called it, “through the fragility of witness and through the challenges of fraternity. But it will also be a passage through the exciting blessings of faith.” He referred to time as “superior to space. It is the law of initiation,” and called our existence on earth “the time of the initiation into life: it is life, but one that leads you forwards a fuller life … a life which finds fulfillment only in God.” He describes old age as the phase in life “best suited to spreading the joyful news that life is an initiation to a definitive fulfillment” and presents the elderly as “a promise, a witness of promise … the best is yet to come.”
On Aug. 17, 2022, Pope Francis gave the final reflection on old age describing God’s eternity, “always renewing himself,” and stated the elderly’s witness “unites the ages of life and the very dimensions of time: past, present and future, for they are not only the memory; they are the present as well as the promise.” The Holy Father prophetically declared, “it will be the alliance between the elderly and children that will save the human family.” He pleaded for humanity, “which with all its progress seems to be an adolescent born yesterday,” to “retrieve the grace of an old age that holds firmly to the horizon of our destination.”
Like a rallying grandparent, Pope Francis led the church through Holy Week and the celebration of Christ’s passion. He didn’t hide his weakness and dependence on others; he humbly shepherded as he could and gave us himself to the very end, and asserted in that Easter homily that the light of Jesus’ resurrection “is the greatest hope of our life: we can live this poor, fragile and wounded existence clinging to Christ, because he has conquered death, he conquers our darkness and he will conquer the shadows of the world, to make us live with him in joy, forever.” As he said of Mary Magdalene, Peter and John, who hastened to meet Christ, the pope himself hastened to meet the Lord the following morning.
It is this timeless and otherworldly transcendence for which the world looks to the Catholic Church. In her teachings, she is like a wise grandmother who challenges and encourages, who remains always young at heart but doesn’t regret the struggles. I see the cardinals gathered in Rome as grandfather figures, especially those beyond voting age. They are men of prayer and service who aren’t afraid to scuffle with contradiction, ask difficult questions and stand apart from what the young and bold deem fitting for current times in favor of carrying forward Christ’s commission to his first apostles.
The fathers of the Second Vatican Council invite to a similar mindset in no. 48 of Lumen Gentium. After declaring that the church will “attain its full perfection in the glory of heaven when all things will be restored,” they stated that although Christ is fully active in the world, “until the perfection of Christ occurs, the pilgrim church will endure the appearance of the world, and await the revelation of God,” in the meantime being urged to live for him.
Pope Francis’ life ended, as do all significant documents of the church, under the gaze of our Blessed Mother Mary. “Just as the mother of Jesus is the beginning of the church, so too does she shine forth on earth a sign of sure hope and solace to the people of God during its sojourn on earth.” (Lumen Gentium, no. 68). As we mourn the loss of one father, we wait with open hearts to receive the next, trusting Mary will be interceding on our behalf and the Holy Spirit is already preparing him – and us – for this new chapter in salvation history.
To learn more about the conclave, visit the Vatican News site at vaticannews.va. They offer programs, daily podcasts and updates as well as social media.
