Francis showed that it is in weakness, not strength, that you conquer
The Pope knew how to die, trying right to the end to give as much of himself as he could. He was, quite literally, dying in public. Yesterday, he was driving around St Peter’s Square in his popemobile, blessing newborns. He saw JD Vance to wish him a happy Easter. He visited a Roman prison on Maundy Thursday, apologising to prisoners that he couldn’t wash their feet as he normally would, but explaining he wanted to be with them.
In his Urbi et Orbi address on Easter Sunday – read by a Cardinal – he was on typical form, calling on Christians to use Easter “to revive our trust in others, including those who are different from ourselves, who come from distant lands…for all of us are children of God”. He called on political leaders “not to yield to the logic of fear”. If he has been anything, he has been a pope of peace who loathed war.
And when he left the Gemelli hospital, where he almost died, he issued a reflection on hospitals, which was characteristically down to earth: “A hospital is a place where human beings remove their masks and show themselves as they truly are... This life will pass quickly, so do not waste it fighting with people... You are waiting too much: Christmas, Friday, next year... when everything is perfect... Listen, perfection does not exist. A human being cannot attain it because we are simply not made to be fulfilled here... Love more, forgive more..and leave the rest in the hands of the creator”.
That sounds, I suppose, like the secular reflection, that this life is not a dress rehearsal, except it goes back to an older tradition, of the vanity of passing things in the light of eternity. And he was very traditional in his fundamental theology, no matter how disruptive he was in respect of his style and the non-essentials.
All of that was done by a dying man. He was visibly frail as he met JD Vance, and as he went round St Peter’s Square blessing the crowds. He brought dying literally into the public square, in all his weakness in voice and body. And that in itself was a message, that it’s not just in our health and strength and physical loveliness that we are valuable: we mean something even when we’re at the end of life. He hated assisted suicide; he did his best at the last to convey the sense that we matter even when we are losing our dignity.
He was, of course, a controversial pope. But he really did get to parts of the Church and the culture where others didn’t reach. He was less brilliant intellectually than his predecessor, Pope Benedict, but he had a humanising aspect which meant that he could convey the central message of Christianity by what he did as much as what he said. And in dying in public, while still trying to bless prisoners and babies, he showed, as did Christ, whom he loved, that it’s in weakness, not strength, that you conquer. Requiescat in pace, Francis.
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