Pope Francis’ Passing
I grew up as a Catholic; my mom was very devout. I went to a Catholic school, served as an altar boy during mass, and attended religious instruction. I drifted away from the Catholic religion during my high school years due to three reasons: the first was the Church’s attitude on sex, the second was its obsession with money, and the third was its role in supporting governmental oppression, particularly in Latin America. But Pope Francis was very important to me as the best that the Roman Catholic Church had to offer to our world.
As a young man, a traveler and a student, I loved the great architecture and art inspired by the church during the Middle Ages and the roles of the Irish monks in preserving books and learning during the predations of the Vikings. I loathed its conversion by the sword and its roles in colonial oppression all over the world.
The inspiring teachings of Jesus and the exemplary lives of the saints from long ago have stayed with me and inspired so many. The history of the Catholic Church has been intertwined with oppression of ordinary people by kings, nobles and the Catholic hierarchy, and that has stayed with me as well. So too have its roles in suppression of women and colonial peoples, offset in some measure by its modern-day defense of immigrants and the poor under Pope Francis.
Pope Francis has been one of those very few but most memorable Catholic leaders of my lifetime, along with JFK and Mother Teresa. We visited his parish in Buenos Aires. We remember Pope Francis in context with the other great religious leaders of our time such as Martin Luther King, Bishop Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and Gandhi. It requires a great leader and a great cause at a receptive time in history. It takes a man who meets the moment at the particularly consequential time in the history of the world or the nation. Pope Francis has been that man for the world at a time that has needed him most.
The Catholic Church under the leadership of Pope Pius failed to meet and was abject, equivocating and exceedingly neutral in confronting the challenges of Hitler and Mussolini before and the evils of the Holocaust during World War II. Pope Francis by contrast has met head on and challenged the rising hatred and oppression of minorities and immigrants, people of a different color and background by Trump and his act alikes around the globe. Let us hope the Church finds a worthy successor; we will all still badly need it. Pope Francis will be a very tough act to follow with lots of opportunity for ecclesiastical backsliding into the church’s bad practices of its past.