By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

“You know that it was the duty of the Conclave to give Rome a Bishop. It seems that my brother Cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth to get one, but here we are.” That was then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Buenos Aries, Argentina, and newly elected as Pope Francis on 13 March 2013, addressing the throng of faithful Christians and curious tourists from the papal balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. “Sacristy sarcasm,” as a Catholic writer has aptly described it, was one of many endearing attributes of Pope Francis who passed away on Easter Monday after celebrating the resurrection of Christ the day before. Francis was the first Jesuit to become Pope, the first Argentinian Pope, and the first Pope from outside of Europe in over a 1,000 years.

He broke conventions from the outset, preferring the plain white cassock and his personal cross to richly trimmed capes and gold crucifixes, and took the name Francis not after any preceding Pope but after Saint Francis of Assisi, the 13^th century Italian Catholic friar, one of Italy’s patron saints and the Church’s patron of the environment. Born to immigrant Italian parents in Argentina, the quintessential periphery of the modern world, Francis became the Pope of the world’s migrants, its peripheries, and its environment. The protection of migrants, the theme of the peripheries and the stewardship of the environment have been the defining dimensions of the Francis papacy.

Addressing the cardinals before the Conclave, Francis called on the Church to “come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not only geographically, but also the existential peripheries”. Francis was the first Pope to break the Eurocentric matrix of the Church. His predecessor from Germany, Pope Benedict XVI, had been an unabashed Europhile who had expressed concerns over non-Christian Turkey joining the European Union and was known for his views alluding to violent aspects of Islam.

In contrast, Francis dared to take the Church “beyond the walls” and reach out to humanity as a whole. His October 2020 encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,” (Fraternity and Social Friendship), was an inspired call to fight the dominant prejudice of our time targeting Muslims. Muslims and Christians in the Middle East are among the more vocal in sharing their grief at his passing. He has consistently called for unity in their battered lands, “not as winners or losers, but as brothers and sisters”. During the devastation of Gaza after October 2023, he kept close contact with priests in Gaza and practically called them every night until he fell ill.

Within the Church, Francis recast the College of Cardinals to make it globally more representative and reduce its European dominance. The 135 cardinals under 80 years who will conclave to elect Francis’s successor include 53 cardinals from Europe, 23 from Asia, 20 from North America, 18 each from South America and Africa, and three from Oceania.

His first encyclical in 2015, Laudato Si’” (“Care for our Common Home”) on the environment was again a first for the Church. It became the moral manifesto for climate change action both within and outside the Church, and a catalyst for consensus at the historic 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference. The encyclical focuses on the notion of ‘integral ecology’ linking climate crisis to all the social, political and economic problems of our time. The task ahead is to take “an integrated approach” for “combatting poverty, “protecting nature” and for “restoring dignity to the excluded”.

The twelve years of the Francis papacy were also years of historical global migration from the peripheries and social and political backlashes at the centre. In one measure of the problem, there were 51 million displaced people in the world in 2013 when Francis became Pope, but the number more than doubled to 120 millions by 2024. Pope Francis countered the political backlash against migration by projecting compassion for the migrants and the marginalized as a priority for the Church. He famously rebuked Donald Trump in 2015 when Trump was foraying into presidential politics and touted the idea of a “big, beautiful wall” at the US-Mexican border, and said that building walls “is not Christian.”

In January, this year, Pope Francis called out US Vice President JD Vance’s flippant interpretation of the Catholic concept of “ordo amoris” (the order of love or charity) to justify Trump’s restrictive immigration policies. Vance, a Catholic convert since 2019, had suggested that love and charity should first begin at home, could then be extended to the neighbour, the community, one’s country, and with what is left to see if anything can be done for the rest of the world. America first and last, in other words.

The Pope’s rejoinder was swift: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” The Pope went on to condemn the Trump Administration’s conflation of undocumented immigrant status with criminality to justify their forced deportation out of America.

Papacy and Modernity

The Catholic Church and the papacy are nearly 2,000-year old institutions, perhaps older and more continuous than any other human institution. The papacy has gone through many far reaching changes over its long existence, but its consistent engagement with the broader world including both Christians and non-Christians is a feature of late modernity. The Catholic journalist Russell Shaw in his 2020 book “Eight Popes and the Crisis of Modernity”, provides an overview of the interaction between the popes of the 20^th century – from Pius X to John Paul II – and the modern world in both its spiritual and secular dimensions.

The dialectic between popes and modernity actually began with  Pope Leo XIII of the 19^th century, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum was a direct response to the spectre of socialism in the late 19^th century and elevated property rights to be seen as divine rights located beyond the pale of the state. As I have written in this column earlier, in Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis drew on anterior Christian experiences and declared that “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.”  He also moved away from the Church’s traditional privileging of individual subsidiarity over the solidarity of the collective to emphasizing the value of solidarity, decrying the market being celebrated as the panacea to satisfy all the needs of society, and calling for strong and efficient international institutions in the context of globalized inequalities.

The popes of the twentieth century have grappled with both secular and spiritual challenges through some really tumultuous times including two world wars; the rise and fall of fascism and Nazism, not to mention communism; the liberation of colonies as nation states; economic depressions and recessions; the sexual revolution; and, in our time, massive migrations, climate change, never ending conflicts, and most of all the challenge of acknowledging the centrality of the human person including the recognition and realization of human rights.

In varying ways, popes have been advocates of peace and provided moral and material support to resolving conflicts around the world. Pope Francis has been more engaged and more ubiquitous than his predecessors in using the papacy to good effect. His Argentinian background gave him the strength and a unique perspective to take on current political issues unlike the Italian popes of the 20^th century; the Polish Pope John Paul II who had quite a different experiential background and therefore a different agenda; or Benedict XVI who was mostly a German theologian.

A pope’s ultimate legacy largely depends on what he does with the Church that he inherits, both as an institution and as an agency, and what he leaves behind for his successor. As the Catholic Historian Liam Temple, at Durham University, has observed in his obituary, “Pope Francis embodied a tension at the heart of Catholicism in the 21st century: too liberal for some Catholics and not liberal enough for others. As such, his attempts at reform necessarily became a fine balancing act. History will undoubtedly judge whether the right balance was struck.” At the same time, Pope Francis’s broader legacy could well be his, hopefully irreversible, achievement that took the spatial and social peripheries of the world to the centre of papacy in Rome.