At 85, Pope Francis is getting old. Recent images show him struggling to move, so persistent rumors announce his renunciation soon. Will it be? I don’t know, of course, but if it happened, I would understand. To be pope, whatever the petty minds who gloat about the office think, requires an energy that a tired octogenarian has the right to no longer have.
I would understand, therefore, but it would not be without a twinge in my heart, because François, I say it without restraint, is my pope. Of all the sovereign pontiffs I have known in my lifetime — I was born in 1969 — he is the one who reconciled me the most with the Church as an institution, which is sometimes so difficult to love.
There is, in Francis and in his texts, a real simplicity of heart, soul and faith which is obviously due to the perfect sincerity of the man as well as his modesty. “Very, very little jargon,” wrote French sociologist Dominique Wolton about him in 2018, presenting Politics and society (Le Livre de poche, 2018), his book of interviews with the pope. “How does he manage, asked the admiring sociologist, to have this genius for communication, this ability to express himself so simply with a real love of the people, of ‘ordinary people’? »
I have my idea on this: when he expresses himself, Francis does not deliver sermons or popularization, he directly exposes the Christian message in its nakedness, not without specifying, as he does in The Joy of the Gospel, in 2013, that the papal magisterium does not hold the “definitive or complete word on all matters that concern the Church and the world”. With François, the formula “who am I to judge?” rings true.
Denial and Joy
An evangelizer, he says again in The Joy of the Gospel, “shouldn’t constantly have a funeral head”, an “air of Lent without Easter”. The Christian must be able to say no to an “economy that kills”, to the “globalization of indifference”, he must say loud and clear that “the dignity of the human person and the common good are above tranquility of a few who do not want to give up their privileges” and to be aware that “no one can feel exempt from concern for the poor and for social justice”.
This movement of refusal, however, must be accompanied by the exhilarating feeling that “the world is more than a problem to be solved, it is a joyful mystery that we contemplate in joy and in praise”, as Francis writes in praised be you in 2015. To Dominique Wolton, François even says that a sense of humor is “what, on a human level, comes closest to divine grace”.
When far-right commentators call him a communist because of his harsh criticism of capitalism, François will even have fun stinging them to the quick by saying that he is not offended by such a judgment since he knows “many Marxists who are very good people. Yes, that is my pope.
In dialogue with the little ones
In 2017, in a magnificent album entitled Dear Pope Francis (Mame/Fidelity/Novalis), he replied with candor and emotion to letters from children all over the world. When an Albanian girl asks him if he liked to dance as a child, the pope praises joy and tells children that you have to dance “so as not to be too serious when you grow up”.
To a young Australian who worries about hunger in the world and wishes that God would multiply the loaves again, Francis gives a summary of the social doctrine of the Church. “Bread, he explains, there is, you see. And there’s enough for everyone! The real problem is that some of those who have a lot of it don’t want to share it with others. The problem is not Jesus, but the wicked and selfish people who want to keep their wealth for themselves. Jesus is very severe with these people. That’s it, François: direct, joyful, fair, lucid and optimistic.
With the poor
It is he, again, that we find in From the poor to the pope, from the pope to the world (Seuil, 2022), the very beautiful dialogue between François and the poor of the whole world organized by the association Lazare de France.
The questions addressed to the pope in this book cast a wide net and show great freedom of tone. The poor guests want to know what the pope reads — he replies that Verlaine and Baudelaire nourish his “melancholic part” —, how he relaxes — listening to Wagner’s music, he confides —, what his salary is — “ I don’t earn anything”, he says, while explaining that his “poverty is fictitious” since he lacks nothing -, his faults – impatience – and what he admires in people – simplicity and transparency.
Unlike John Paul II, energetic but a bit of a great lord, and Benedict XVI, brilliant but austere, Francis is a pope cool, smiling and modest. He does not hesitate to say that he has never seen God in a dream and that he does not hear celestial voices. Mysticism, obviously, is none of his business. God speaks, he says, but in the heart.
When a Brazilian woman asks him if Jesus is beautiful, he replies nicely: “Our Lord is very beautiful. Of singular beauty. If you see him, there is no doubt, you will fall in love with him. Does he welcome everyone, this discreet God? What about, for example, unbelievers or homosexuals? “You have to know how to read and interpret the Bible”, replies François. “God does not deny entry to anyone because of their lifestyle, social condition or sexual identity. It is clear, it seems to me.
Fighting for justice
In a dialogue with the poor, it was obviously necessary to address the question of social injustice and its causes. François does not need to be asked to talk about his favorite subject. He insists on the need to fight “for an end to material poverty, for justice, so that every man and every woman has work, bread, education”. We must help the poor immediately, of course, but this help “cannot in turn be separated from our contribution to the resolution of social injustice or to the fight against the shamelessness with which wealth manifests itself”.
Catholicism is not a disembodied spirituality. “Some people claim that I am a communist… I only say that if you remove the poor from the Gospel, it collapses”, explains François, before adding that “the great social sin of the world is the bad distribution of wealth”.
Is François preparing to give up his charge? I do not know. I know, however, that his refreshing pontificate has been, for almost ten years, an invitation to all Catholics in the world never to renounce the joy of the struggle for a more just and more dignified world for all, for a world, would have -I simply want to say, more fraternal, more beautiful, more true.
Francis, my pope, will be hard to replace.