Among all the news articles I have read in the past couple of years, I am not ungrateful that one poignant, below-the-fold story has remained with me, a glow-in-the-dark star stuck to a ceiling. When Pope Francis visited Indonesia in September 2024, The New York Times reported about a group of transgender women in South Jakarta enthusiastically preparing to attend the papal Mass at the Bung Karno Stadium in Jakarta. The reporter, Emma Bubola, described them donning feathers, glitter and rosaries. One of the women explained, “Pope Francis deserves our best outfit.”
The subhead of the article put it succinctly: “For many trans women living on the fringes of the nation’s society, the Catholic Church is a haven, and Pope Francis a personal hero.”
Yet if Francis’ inclusiveness made him a hero to some, it made him a headache for others and came with some blowback, as did other areas of his papacy. His casual communication style was startling in a church used to solemn, careful pronouncements from Rome. His comments occasionally were “clarified” by follow-up press releases from the Vatican. (I admit my own frustrations with him at these moments.) His inclusive, pastoral nature often ruffled the feathers of those who thought he was loosening the borders of church teaching, of who was on the “right” side of moral error and who was not.
Pope Francis died one year ago on April 21, Easter Monday, at his apartment at the Casa Santa Marta in Vatican City at the age of 88 after a 13-year papacy. He succumbed finally to cerebral stroke and cardiovascular collapse after a prolonged sickness. Even though he had made one final Easter ride through St. Peter’s Square in the popemobile the day before, his death did not come as a surprise. He had been in the hospital for 38 days prior with respiratory illnesses, including bronchiectasis and double pneumonia.
Tens of thousands of people came to the Vatican to view his body and encomiums came in from across the globe. One of the most widely circulated on social media was from Bob Dylan, even though it wasn’t actually from Bob Dylan (which, for what it’s worth, is very Bob Dylan). “Pope Francis was a voice of mercy in a time of noise,” wrote whoever (maybe ChatGPT?), “He walked with humility, spoke with fire and dared to love the unloved.”
Now that we have moved past the time of eulogies and poetic quotes, it’s worth asking: How do you measure the legacy of Pope Francis? What shines even brighter now, with the benefit of distance, a year’s time? What resonates even more clearly now?
His most obvious legacy at this moment, at least in the United States, would be his ardent defense of the rights of migrants. It was crystallized in a letter he sent to the bishops of the United States last February excoriating the policy of detainment and deportations about to be unleashed by the Trump administration. The letter was an extraordinary, specific condemnation from the head of the church (and, frankly, the moral authority of the world) of a presidential administration planning to marshal the full force of the federal government to carry out grave, troubling and violent acts against our own people.
“I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” Francis wrote. “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.” He encouraged the faithful “not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”
The pope acknowledged that nations had a right to regulate migration, yet he said that regulation “cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”
In the wake of Minneapolis (and the other ICE-invaded cities), in the shadow of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the demonstrations and boycotts and shutdowns and smoke grenades and tear gas and skirmishes in the streets that the presence of masked federal agents stalking and snatching up people of all stripe and status has incurred, in the contrails of the outrage and pain and violence and essentially, as one headline put it, the unraveling of America in that city, this line from Francis is worth repeating: “What is built on the basis of force and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”
Look what happened to that cold, terrorized, brave northern metropolis and you see that Francis knew what he was talking about. His prophetic voice about the moral catastrophe unfolding in the United States right now is where Francis’ legacy burns the most brightly.
Yet, in its own, less dramatic way, amid his urgent vital defense of migrants and any other number of causes Francis spoke up about, it was his quieter and simpler outreach to the L.G.B.T.Q. community that was perhaps the most singular and astonishing. A pope of the Catholic Church, a man in his 80s who sits on the chair of Peter and commands something grand and a bit ominous called “the magisterium,” with all its dogma and all of its “hard teachings” on any number of sexual prohibitions…becomes a hero for Indonesian trans women? Really? What on earth has happened here?
Mercy was the pope’s pillar of fire for everything he did and spoke about—mercy not merely in terms of lenience on criminals and sinners, but with a definition rooted in the corporal works of mercy: bestowing compassion on all those who struggle and live on the margins. Washing the feet of juveniles in a detention center; praying at Lampedusa on behalf of migrants who had drowned in the Mediterranean; staying in daily contact with the members of Holy Family Church, bombarded and under siege in Gaza City during the war, and numerous other acts signified his pastoral priority of mercy.
And in very simple ways the pope exhibited mercy to the gay community. A mere five words by Francis to a reporter’s question about the possible presence of gay priests in the Vatican seemed to build a 5,000-mile footbridge from Rome across the Tiber toward the L.G.B.T.Q. community across the globe. The pope’s response, “Who am I to judge?”, created an epic cultural shift for the church’s relationship toward a group that has felt barely tolerated, if not entirely scorned, by the church. He also had audiences with trans men and women and insisted that pastors baptize the children of gay couples among other gestures towards the gay community.
The place where the pope’s mercy toward the L.G.B.T.Q. community most came under fire was in a “declaration” called “Fiducia Supplicans” that sought to “broaden and enrich” the meaning of the very nature of priestly blessings. In short, the church released a document that proposed the possibility of simple blessings of couples in irregular situations, including gay couples.
And a segment of the Catholic church lost its mind.
After the release of “Fiducia Supplicans,” I wrote my own story about reactions to the declaration, noting that it “has met with resistance or even outright rejection in parts of the world. Some lay Catholics, bishops and confraternities of priests have condemned it. The bishops’ conference of nearly an entire continent declared, with little subtlety, ‘No blessings for homosexual couples in the African churches.’”
One canon lawyer called “Fiducia Supplicans” “a manifest disaster that should be revoked and withdrawn by the Holy See.”
I was skeptical of the declaration myself and described the wording of the document as almost sounding “jesuitical.” It declared that it was possible for a priest to bless a couple but not their union as a couple. How do you do that? It is confusing! Why not allow blessings for just the individuals in the irregular unions but not the couple itself?
Nevertheless, in the two plus years since “Fiducia Supplicans” was released, you could say my own view on the matter has been “broadened and enriched.” Or maybe I’ve just lightened up, started to have an ounce more mercy on everyone and everything, even papal declarations. The fact is, developments in doctrine, the reframing of precepts, new ways of looking at ecclesial matters—they are opaque at first. They can be confusing. They do scandalize the faithful. They do require study and discussion and debate and sometimes even a tectonic prayerful shift in thinking to absorb their meaning.
Even longstanding teachings need close study to be absorbed and understood. Consider the traditional church teaching that salvation only comes through Christ and the church and yet those who sincerely seek God and, through no fault of their own, don’t know Christ and the church can achieve salvation. You want confusion, fodder for high dudgeon and debate, and a call for study and prayer?
The rhetorical scaffolding to declarations like “Fiducia Supplicans” came from the foundational document of Francis’ papacy, “Evangelii Gaudium” (which his successor Pope Leo is also holding forth as a roadmap for the church today because it is superb; read it). One passage crystallizes the pastoral thrust of Francis’ entire papacy by describing what evangelization is not:
A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. In neither case is one really concerned about Jesus Christ and others.
This is more true than many of us churchmen would like to admit.
In considering “Fiducia Supplicans,” one could take a few hours and write up a stirring academic explication of the document, setting down all kinds of robust defenses and justifications against its many detractors; all very well and good in the Catholic intellectual tradition.
And/or one could simply say of the church: We are making this work. We are plumbing the depths of Catholic spirituality and the Christian faith and finding ways to invite gay couples deeper into the realm of God’s mercy through the office of a simple blessing. We have decided to do that and we are doing that. Deal with it.
Living out an active mercy like this is an antidote for those of us who (like me to be sure, and any number of sandy-haired, Western, pertinacious master’s-level theologians) operate from moral syllogisms. But Christian mercy moves like cool water through any other number of human impossibilities. It offers a baffling mystical counter to what we know to be true: A dead human cannot rise from the grave. Lazarus is a dead human. Lazarus cannot rise from the grave. How did that one work out for us?
Everything is reversed. The lame walk, blind see, deaf hear, dead come to life. Our faith in a nutshell. Gay couples can’t receive a blessing. A gay couple receives a blessing.
Probably the best way to measure the legacy of the vicar of Christ a year after his death is to measure our own closeness to Christ himself. Ultimately it is not about Francis; it is about us. Did his witness draw us nearer to the savior of the world? Are we living with more “Christ-consciousness,” and inviting others to do the same? Are we more merciful? (Even toward Francis himself!) And is our mercy not just for “other people” but ourselves, too? The ones we are harshest toward often reside in the mirror. To restate the old populist cry: “We are the ones we have been waiting to show mercy to.”
Have we let go, more and more, of trying to wrap up the world in our ways of judging and proceeding instead of widening it out for God’s way of doing things? Have we become, even in the least bit, the kind of people that terrified migrants would find welcome with, or that a group of outcast women in a country hostile to their very existence would put on their best outfits for? One way to measure the impact of this pope is to answer this question: Who visits you, confides in you, lays their glitter before you? Who finds in you shelter and haven? Who?
This article appears in April 2026.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts