A perfect Roman day dawned on Saturday, April 26, the morning the Catholic Church laid to rest our beloved Pope Francis. Below a sky of brilliant blue, a crowd of more than 250,000 gathered to bid farewell to an extraordinary pope. Embraced in the arms of Bernini’s imposing colonnade and facing Maderno’s facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, the congregation in the square and the millions following from afar were greeted by the Vatican’s Baroque splendor in all that glorious light.
The world’s eyes, however, were focused not on architectural glories or nature’s bounty but on a simple wooden box before them: the coffin of the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church.
Pope Francis was taken to his earthly rest in a stirring ceremony rich with tradition but also one with reminders of the simplicity he preferred—and which he requested for his own funeral. It was a poignant final note that the leader of a worldwide congregation of 1.4 billion believers was also first and foremost a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. The church no longer proclaims sic transit gloria mundi upon the election of a pope, but Francis clearly believed it: Our focus, that simple coffin emblazoned with a cross said, is ultimately on Christ, not on the passing glories of this world.
At this writing, the conclave that will elect his successor has just begun, but we must take the time to reflect on a revolutionary papacy, one inflected by lights and shadows as always, but more than anything defined by a sense of movement.
In a speech to his fellow cardinals before the 2013 conclave that ended with his election, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio said, “The church is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not only geographically, but also the existential peripheries.” Under the first Latin American pope, it did. Francis reached away from the powerful and toward the marginalized; he moved the papacy away from the Apostolic Palace and toward simplicity; and he pushed the Roman Curia away from a centuries-old primacy of its office for doctrine toward an embrace of synodality and evangelization.
From the moment he first emerged on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, eschewing the papal mozzetta and pausing to ask for the prayer of the people in the square, Francis garnered widespread love—an affection that was cemented in the early months of his papacy, when he chose to live in a modest apartment and asked, during one of the freewheeling airplane press conferences that would become his hallmark, “Who am I to judge?” He was often called “the world’s parish priest” for his pastoral style, one clearly grounded in people’s personal experiences. It was a style that valued popular piety, embodying the Argentine “theology of the people” in which he was formed as a young Jesuit and as the archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Still, the personal edification many drew from Pope Francis did not always translate into a trust in his institutional reforms, in part because, as Francis often said himself, he was more focused on “starting processes” than “occupying spaces.” A case in point was the Synod on Synodality, which aimed to shift the church from a centralized, top-down structure to a more participatory one. Francis saw this as the next step in implementing the reforms of the Second Vatican Council: making laypeople the protagonists of evangelization. But its own complicated and interlocking structures, including an implementation phase that is still ongoing, have varying levels of buy-in across the church and within the college of bishops.
If the synod did not fully move the church beyond the “self-referentiality” Francis warned against before the conclave that elected him, he made much more progress toward that goal when it came to his outreach to the world. Beginning with his 2013 visit to Lampedusa soon after his election, Francis highlighted migration as the defining issue of our time. He won fans in developing nations and earned ire from wealthy ones with his criticisms of an unequal world order—one in which the poor faced the ecological consequences of wealthy nations’ exploitation without receiving proportional economic benefits. His constant stress was on a renewal of our lives through the values and message of the Gospel. Nowhere was this seen more clearly than in his landmark 2013 apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium” and his encyclical “Laudato Si’.”
What will come next?
Pope Francis leaves his successor with a number of tasks he began but was not able to bring to completion. Among them are two that were pivotal in his own election: the reform of the Vatican bureaucracy and a more effective response to the abuse crisis. While he accomplished a significant clean-up of Vatican finances, achieving a sustainable budget and furthering constitutional reform of Curial departments will be left to the next pope. Similarly, while Francis made legislative reforms that provide a framework for greater accountability for how bishops deal with abuse in the church, he did not enact those processes frequently or thoroughly enough for them to be well-tested.
Another major task for Francis’ successor—one unforeseeable in 2013—is to determine what it means for synodality to be, as the synthesis document that Francis adopted into his own magisterium describes, a “constitutive dimension of the church.”
Francis often said that his approach to reform prioritized changing hearts and cultures before imposing structural changes. Likewise, his changes to the papacy were most notable in his pastoral approach rather than in consolidating reforms of its structures. But he would almost certainly say that our hearts and cultures need to continue changing in order to make any structural reform possible or worthwhile. He would ask us to continue giving ourselves to the culture of encounter.
“Despite his frailty and suffering towards the end, Pope Francis chose to follow this path of self-giving until the last day of his earthly life,” said Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re in his homily at Francis’ funeral. “He followed in the footsteps of his Lord, the Good Shepherd, who loved his sheep to the point of giving his life for them. And he did so with strength and serenity.”
Francis chose to be entombed not in St. Peter’s, the traditional resting place of popes, but in the Basilica of St. Mary Major. The journey of his coffin, in the same white popemobile that he had ridden through St. Peter’s Square for the last time one week earlier, surrounded by his flock along the ancient papal route through Rome to that final resting place was perhaps the most poignant moment of his funeral. The final words of “In Paradisum,” the church’s traditional antiphon sung for the dead on the way to their final resting place, might offer the words that are the most fitting farewell to a man whose pastoral love we were graced to witness:
May choirs of angels receive you
and with Lazarus, once a poor man,
may you have eternal rest.
Grazie, Francesco. We are blessed to have walked with you.
