Editor’s note: This article is adapted from the Laetare lecture on March 26, given in New York after the author was awarded the Loyola Medal by the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola.
Pope Francis’ vast legacy will take a generation to unpack. But already it is being developed in Pope Leo XIV, who was “the last surprise of Pope Francis” according to the subtitle of a recent account of the conclave that elected him from America correspondent Gerard O’Connell and Elisabetta Piqué. The cardinals spoke in the weeks before that election a year ago of the need to press on with the era opened by Francis, which they sought to capture in such words as humble, pastoral, merciful, synodal, missionary, discerning and fraternal.
Reflecting their desires, Leo told the cardinals right after the conclave that he would “continue on the journey” Francis had started. He described it as “renewing the path of the Second Vatican Council,” which, he said, Francis “masterfully and concretely set forth” in his first great teaching document, “The Joy of the Gospel” (“Evangelii Gaudium”).
Many of the cardinals, especially those from Latin America, got the reference at once, for “Evangelii Gaudium” was the fruit of the groundbreaking gathering of Latin American bishops at the Brazilian shrine of Aparecida in 2007. It was a sign of how far the church traveled under Francis that Aparecida should now be its evangelizing roadmap. When Leo called the cardinals back to Rome in January, they chose to refocus precisely on the pastoral and missionary conversion called for in “Evangelii Gaudium,” and on the key instrument of that conversion: synodality.
It is all too easy to forget now how much incomprehension, even bewilderment and hostility, the document encountered in the “old” ecclesial centers of Europe and North America when it came out in November 2013. “Evangelii Gaudium” spoke a new language, and struck an unfamiliar tone. It was bold, joyful, energetic, charismatic and kerygmatic in its Christ-centered promulgation of the Gospel and its application to modern life. It called the church out of itself, to evangelize: not by moralizing, clarifying and defining but by reorganizing itself to enable the “primary encounter” with the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. And it fearlessly named the obstacles and temptations to that renewal, all rooted in a clinging to prestige and power and comfort.
“Evangelii Gaudium” sounded foreign to the ears of rich-world Catholics because it was. The signs-of-the-times discernment that had reshaped that church in Latin America had barely registered in the European church. Even more than Francis’s 2013 election, that document marked the biggest shifting of gears in the universal church since Vatican II. It was a sign that the Catholic Church was no longer a European church with missions, but a multipolar global church, in which Latin America, no longer Europe, was now the dynamic center of Catholicism.
If we can speak of the first millennium of Christianity as having its center in the East, in Constantinople, and the second millennium as having is center in the West, in Rome, we have now entered a third stage, in which Latin America, on behalf of the Global South, is now the dynamic spiritual source for a global, multipolar church. Francis was the architect of that transition, one confirmed by Leo, the first North American and second Latin-American pope, whose historic task is to consolidate and deepen that path.
Welcome to the Catholicism of the rest of our lives.
Conversion and growth
When historians look back to this great shift in the life of the church, Francis will be rightly regarded as its prime agent. It was he who created space for God’s action in this crucial moment of the church’s story, who navigated the crisis of evangelization that it faced. As his biographer, I can say his life had prepared him for this task. Back in the 1970s, the Argentine Jesuits called Jorge Mario Bergoglio nuestro piloto de tormentas, “our storm pilot.” They were praising not his leadership skills, which—as he was happy to admit years later—were defective: He was in many ways too young and inexperienced to be made provincial in 1973. But he had a quality that in the Society of Jesus is rated much more highly: namely, a refined capacity for the discernment of spirits, above all in times of testing and crisis.
His greatest gift to the church—first as provincial superior of the Argentine Jesuits, then as national and continental leader of the church in Latin America, and finally as the successor of St. Peter—was to open it to the grace of conversion and growth in the midst of turbulence.
This was a practical charism, one that takes seriously the reign of God at the heart of Christian mission. Jesus’ concern, after all, was to create space—initiate processes, Francis would say—for the reign of God to break through into our history. The breakthrough was signaled in mercy and joy: mercy, because this is the quality of divine grace; joy, because seeing that grace abound among us, and enabling it to take hold and grow, is the source of Christian consolation, even amid death and pain.
Francis’ joy never left him because, like Jesus, he saw grace at work and rejoiced in creating channels for it to spread. That was the joy Francis radiated, which lives on in the titles of his great teaching documents and in the muscle memory of countless hearts. His joy was born not of confidence in the direction of history—Francis saw all too clearly the coming of our current darkness—but in what has happened already: Jesus Christ’s dying and rising, and the life-giving and life-renewing effects of God’s continued action in history. Francis understood this not just as a theological truth but as leadership praxis.
Francis kept close by him a gnomic line from the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “Where the danger is, grows the saving power.” He had learned that it was precisely in the place of the threat to us that God’s saving, liberating action can be discovered. New life is available to us precisely in the place of imminent death. But to receive this as a gift from God is a choice, for it is in the nature of a gift that it cannot be imposed. Francis described that choice as a struggle “to overcome the temptation of closing in on ourselves, so that the love of the Father can make its home in us,” as he put it in the prologue to my 2024 book, First Belong to God.
This struggle to “open ourselves up” or “come out of ourselves” is a phrase you will find in all of Francis’ teaching documents in their Spanish versions, where the expression (inconsistently translated into English) is salir de sí. By it he meant the disposition of our hearts and minds to receive the self-offering of God in Christ. He called this the “primary encounter” because from it new life springs. Where human self-transcendence meets the divine self-gift, God’s reign is born in our time and place. “The heart of Christ is éxtasis, it is opening-up [salida],” Francis writes in “Dilexit Nos” (No. 28), adding: “In his heart we learn to be in relationship with each other in healthy, happy ways, and to build in this world God’s Kingdom of love and justice. Our hearts, united with that of Christ, are capable of this social miracle.”
Francis sought to help us in that struggle by teaching discernment of spirits. It is how we are able to stand in the middle of the flow of messages and narratives that daily flood our zone and hear the still, small voice of the spirit. It is how we find the saving power in the place of danger, how we loosen the taps of mercy waiting to overflow into our world. As pope he showed us how to come out of ourselves to discern where God’s action is breaking through, and to choose this path.
Opening ourselves up
I want to share three examples. The first was the one that gave the pontificate its basic direction: the aforementioned meeting of bishops in Aparecida in 2007. The second was the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, when Francis became, for a time, humanity’s storm-pilot, navigating us to a better place. The third was the Synod on Synodality, which has created a new modus operandi for the church. In each case, there was a salir de sí, an act of self-transcendence, a humble choice to discern. He showed us how to choose that path, and how to reject in each case the temptation to retreat back into illusory self-sufficiency.
I learned from Francis that the two main forms this temptation takes are naïve optimism and apocalyptic pessimism. In the first, we do not need to discern because everything will be taken care of by some magical higher power: a great political leader, deregulated markets, smart bombs, technological breakthroughs and so on. In the second, we do not need to discern because humanity is in an irreversible downward spiral, and the only option for us is to retreat into our bunkers of ideology or fundamentalism.
Discernment instead starts from a place of humble insufficiency. We do not know what we must do. We seek grace and guidance, trusting that God is with us and desires our good. We put ourselves on the line to ask: How must we change? And in responding, we trust that somehow God will use our choice to help bend the arc of history.
It may seem paradoxical, but in admitting our insufficiency and opening up to receive God’s grace and guidance, we greatly increase our own human agency.
The Aparecida breakthrough
When the Latin American bishops met at the shrine of Aparecida in May 2007 for their first continental meeting in 15 years, the crisis they faced was familiar: the dramatic collapse of cultural Catholicism. The time-honored conduits by which faith was passed from one generation to the next were frayed or broken. The “new evangelization” under John Paul II and Benedict XIV, focussed on re-proposing and clarifying church doctrine, had not reversed disaffiliation. Progressives blamed the church for failing to adapt; conservatives blamed the church for over-adapting. But at Aparecida, the bishops saw that neither of these accounts was valid. Discernment was necessary: What must we do? How must we change in order to evangelize in this context?
Cardinal Bergoglio framed that discernment in a homily he gave at the shrine early on in the meeting, one that was the basis of his famous speech to the cardinals before the conclave six years later. He reminded the bishops in Aparecida that the early church spread only through the action of the Spirit, opening them to “the cognitive wisdom that destroys all gnostic pretensions in the Church.” The Spirit, in other words, showed the apostles that the real power here was God’s. The “Church of gnostic pretension” is what the church had too often become in the age of secularization.
Faced with the rejection of the truths of Christianity by secular modernity, the church too often doubled down, retreating into what Bergoglio named as “the sufficiency of our own knowledge,” whereas what was needed now was renewed dependence on the Spirit’s action. “By pushing us to evangelization,” he said, the Spirit “frees us from becoming a self-referential Church, like the stooped woman of the Gospel who does nothing but look at herself while the people of God are someplace else.” The simile suggested that disaffiliation was less about people abandoning the church than the church abandoning people, focussing on its own institutional preservation in an age of secularity.
What he said next led the 200 assembled bishops to break into applause. “We do not, in fact, want to be a self-absorbed Church, but a missionary Church,” he told them. “We, the people and the pastors, speak on the basis of what the Spirit inspires in us, and we pray together and build the Church together; or better yet, we are instruments of the Spirit who builds her up.”
This was the discernment behind the breakthrough of Aparecida. Those who were there describe it as an experience of the Spirit that freed them from despondency and division. They came to see that secularization and disaffiliation were not symptoms of a decline but an invitation to conversion, to be freed of the attachments to power and status that accrued to the church in formerly Christian cultures. In Aparecida, they saw the need to be “a poor Church, of the poor,” as Francis put it starkly after his election, meaning one that evangelized from a place of poverty and humility, dependent on grace. It is the only way that the church can evangelize credibly in cultures no longer supportive of Christianity.
This vision of an evangelizing synodal church of missionary disciples is the one that bursts out of the pages of “Evangelii Gaudium.” It was born of a decision to discern. That meant that the bishops did not simply blame culture for the church’s failure to evangelize, but asked how they themselves needed to change in order to carry out Christ’s mission. As Francis wrote in 2021 to a German cardinal, Reinhard Marx:
Reform in the Church has been brought about by men and women who were not afraid to expose themselves to crisis and let the Lord reform them. That is the only way; otherwise we would only be ‘ideologues of reform’ without putting our own flesh on the line.
Covid: theological reflections
My second example is the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21, which was not just a death-dealing, economy-paralyzing disruption but also a kind of apocalypse, revealing the dysfunctions and cruelty of a society consecrated to the individual pursuit of wealth. At his famous moment of prayer and blessing on March 27, 2020—one of the most watched moments in human history—Francis led a meditation from St. Peter’s Square, inviting us to see what the crisis had laid bare and to enter into discernment. Jesus was in the boat with us, suffering with us, but ready to move us into new life. “You are calling on us to seize this time of trial as a time of choosing,” Francis prayed. “It is not the time of your judgment, but of our judgment: a time to choose what matters and what passes away, a time to separate what is necessary from what is not.”
Francis saw that if only humanity could take advantage of the stoppage to grasp what is truly of value, we could abandon our eagerness for power and possessions and open ourselves to what the Spirit was ready to show us, “spaces where everyone can recognize that they are called, and to allow new forms of hospitality, fraternity and solidarity.”
Throughout the Easter season that year, he kept up that message: how from a crisis such as this, we never come out the same—better or worse, but never the same. How, then, to come out better? I invited him to explain, in a short book that could distill the spiritual method that (I had by then realized) informed his way of leading the church. Let Us Dream divided the method into three stages: contemplate-discern-propose. It was the traditional approach of see-judge-act used in theological reflection, but in an Ignatian key. At each stage is an invitation to discern and a corresponding temptation.
In the first stage, contemplate, we look hard at the reality of what is happening and let ourselves be drawn to places of pain and need, what Francis famously called “the existential margins.” From here one can see more clearly where one can meet Christ in his wounds. The temptations are narcissism, pessimism, discouragement, indifference—all the ways that close us in on ourselves, screening out what is happening. If, on the other hand, we are willing to contemplate reality and to be moved by what we see, we face a lot of disturbing questions. What is being revealed? Why are things this way? Where is God in it? How does the diabolos operate here?
In the second stage, discern, we “enter into discernment,” which means—says Francis—that we resist the temptation to make an immediate decision, latching onto immediate or technical solutions. Instead, we have the courage to ask, like the people of Jerusalem listening to Peter, “What must we do?” And in our thinking and dialogue, we are invited “to leave space for this gentle encounter with the good, the true, and the beautiful,” as Francis put it. Citing the theologian Romano Guardini, he called this “incomplete thinking.”
Entering into discernment, we find various excitable spirits threatened by any hint of change: spirits of accusation and resentment, of rigidity and black-and-white thinking. Here are the signs of resistance to humility and poverty of spirit. But if we sit in prayerful peace and open up, other spirits present themselves. We detect hope, fresh thinking, compassion, peace, consolation. This is who God is and how we recognize his calling to us.
Jesus does not describe in detail what the reign of God looks like but invokes it by signs of togetherness, fellowship, abundance—festal meals and healings. As Francis once said in a speech in Chile, the issue is not feeding the poor or clothing the naked or visiting the sick, but rather recognizing that the poor, the naked, the sick, prisoners and the homeless have the dignity to sit at our table, to feel “at home” among us, to feel part of a family. These are the signs that the kingdom of heaven is already in our midst. We look out for those signs, and, seeing them, we pursue them, letting them lead us.
Francis used this method not just to understand but to act. Having seen where the reign of God is waiting to break through, we can make proposals, initiate actions, create spaces. A key principle is that such action is carried out together. “You only come out of a crisis in community,” Francis said in Let Us Dream, which, like “Fratelli Tutti,” has beautiful passages on what it means to rediscover our belonging to a people.
Francis saw in the Covid-19 crisis a profound social fracturing, the loss of belonging to God, to creation and to each other. But he also saw in the response to the crisis by ordinary people signs of where God’s spirit was leading us, a consciousness of the dignity of being a people. That is where he found the saving power: there, in the danger of the pandemic.
This brings us to the third stage of Francis’ theological method: propose. This led to the invitation of “Fratelli Tutti”: to create from the collapse of the world order a new road map, one based on the shared dignity of all. It takes form in a common-good politics of the people that transcends both neoliberalism and populism; civic dialogue to overcome the paralysis of polarization; a renunciation of the desire to dominate and to wage war; and the building of an economy that provides for all yet respects the ecology of creation. In this new future is a place for all religions, no longer at war with each other but working together in the service of fraternity.
This is not, of course, what happened. In his 2023 letter “Laudate Deum,” Francis expressed frustration that “global crises were squandered when they could be the occasions to bring about beneficial changes,” citing both the 2007-08 financial crisis and the 2020-21 pandemic. Already in Let Us Dream, Francis foresaw that there would be a bid by economic elites to recover the status quo ante, and he predicted, correctly, that in response there would be a social explosion exploited by populists.
The dream of a synodal church
Yet Francis could still act to help bring about that new future through the church, which brings us to our third “moment”: synodality. In his 2015 speech calling for a “wholly synodal Church,” he said it would help the world rediscover the dignity of participation and authority as service, and create “a more beautiful and humane world for coming generations.”
The dream of a synodal church was born of the discernment of Aparecida: to open up the people of God to the action of the Spirit. In the clerical sexual abuse crisis, Francis came to see that synodality was key to a broader ecclesial conversion, one that dethroned clericalism and gave form to Vatican II’s understanding of the Spirit acting through the assembly of the people of God, interpreted and acted on by the bishops and the pope. But he also saw that it was “a gift we cannot keep to ourselves,” as he put it at the end of the process in October 2024. Rather, he said, referring to the dream of peace in our time of wars, it “gives us the courage to bear witness that it is possible to walk together with our differences without condemning each other.”
The multilayered crisis to which Francis discerned synodality as God’s response was described in the first chapter of “Fratelli Tutti”: the breakup of belonging, the collapse of multilateralism and the political normalization of polarization and conflict—all of which he had long identified in his famous “third world war being fought piecemeal” metaphor. Synodality was the saving power God has made available in the danger of our moment.
The crisis was not in the fact of disagreement and tension, which he saw as the stuff of life itself. Creation was full of restless dynamic opposites: male/female, universal/local, truth/mercy, tradition/newness and so on. These tensions are fruitful when they lead to discernment, which shows us how to transcend yet include the good in both poles, lifting us onto a new plane. The temptation that sterilizes is stale conflict, which ends up destroying any chance of change or growth. “For in crisis there is a seed of hope, whereas in conflict there is a seed of hopelessness,” Francis wrote in that letter to Cardinal Marx.
Francis saw synodality as the church learning to live fruitfully in tension, practicing discernment in its ordinary life, being led by the Spirit deeper into the mystery rather than getting stuck in gnostic pretension. In the synods on the family, youth and Amazonia, Francis taught the bishops the art of discernment in common, showing its fruits. After Covid, he saw it was now time to call together the whole people of God to rediscover this way of being together.
Synodality flows from “Evangelii Gaudium”: the church gives witness in today’s world by embodying “God’s style,” as Francis called it, evangelizing by communicating the life of God. Synodality is learning to struggle to come out of ourselves to meet the life of God. It is to enter into tensions, to choose to listen, discuss, reflect and pray, and to create room for the Spirit to act, and impelling us to evangelize.
In Let Us Dream, Francis says the sign of such action is the overflow (perisseuo in the Greek of the New Testament). Overflow is the sign of the presence of God: net-breaking catches of fish, multiplying loaves, stone jars of water turned into vintage wine at a festal banquet. It is the “overflow” because it is the very heart of God that flows out at such moments; and because God’s love is scandalously boundless, not measured according to what we deserve. “Such overflows of love happen, above all, at the crossroads of life, at moments of openness, fragility and humility,” Francis wrote, “when the ocean of His love bursts the dams of our self-sufficiency, and so allows for a new imagination of the possible.”
It was to encourage such overflows in the church, Francis told me, that he called the Synod on Synodality, which may be simply defined as the attempt to deal with disagreement through overflow rather than conflict. That is why it is also “a service to humanity that is so often locked in paralyzing disagreements,” as he put it in Let Us Dream. In the danger of our civic and ecclesial breakdown, Francis saw in synodality God’s saving power.
When I look back at Francis’s legacy, I see this continuous salir de sí: his courageous, confident self-transcendence to receive the extra thing the Spirit offers us in our time of need. His Aparecida discernment showed that the church needed a very different kind of proclamation in this change of era, one that required a missionary and pastoral conversion, that would ultimately be carried forward in a synodal conversion. Francis showed us how to enter into that wisdom: how to take risks, how to go the extra mile, how to create gestures that create space for God’s action. The new era of the church that Leo is pressing forward was born in that homily in Aparecida: “We, the people and the pastors, speak on the basis of what the Spirit inspires in us, and we pray together and build the Church together.”
This is the true legacy of Francis—showing how to find God’s path forward in the midst of our crises: as the people of God and as earthlings who share this planet. This legacy is his gift to us, and our responsibility now.
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