Francis, the Pope for Everyone

Pope Francis has died. I feel as though I have lost my own pastor. People on the margins of our world have lost their most steadfast advocate. 

The pope’s final months have felt to me like the times when my grandparents were at the end of their lives. We waited for updates from the doctors. We waited with dread for the phone call — or in this case, breaking news emails and social media posts — to bring the final news. There were moments of hope, including Pope Francis emerging from the hospital and appearing in St. Peter’s Square. But we knew that at some point, we’d be facing the loss of someone we loved. 

Others will write about Pope Francis’s legacy in the context of public life and global politics; I’d like to discuss how this feels as a lay Catholic losing their spiritual leader — one who sought to make himself as accessible as a local parish priest.

Before blessing the pilgrims in Rome on the night he was elected as pope, Francis asked for the people to pray for him. This desire for closeness with the flock was a hallmark of his papacy. He frequently told priests, “The shepherd should smell like the sheep.” He lived this out in profound ways — washing the feet of incarcerated men and women in Rome, embracing people with severe disabilities, and seeking encounters with people of all walks of life. 

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Pope Francis showed deep love for us but also challenged us. Indeed, “challenging,” is the word I find myself using most to describe him. During his address to the United States Congress in 2015, he included lines that earned applause from Republicans and lines that earned applause from Democrats — and plenty of lines that made each uncomfortable. In his signature way, Pope Francis urged us all to see clearly the ways that our individual activities were creating a more just world — or not. He decried a “throwaway culture” that spans the issues of Catholic social teaching and awakens each of us to take action to push back against it, even in ways that go against the prevailing culture. 

In a 2023 video, he said, “Our necks are going to get stiff” from trying to look away from suffering. 

We miss something, too, if we accept the lazy narrative to simply contrast Pope Francis with the popes who immediately preceded him. There was a widespread meme that went viral (or at least “Catholic viral”) in the early days of Pope Francis’s papacy. Underneath a picture of Saint Pope John Paul II it read, “This is what we believe.” Under Pope Benedict XVI it read, “This is why we believe it.” And under a picture of Pope Francis it read, “Now go do it.” The more that I have read by Pope Francis, the more I have in turn read from Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II. Together, they have strengthened my faith and my understanding of the church. I anticipate that the next pope, no matter who they are, will do the same. 

As I reflect on the excitement I felt at his election in 2013 and the sorrow I feel now, I cannot ignore the ways that my view of the church and its leaders has changed during Pope Francis’s tenure shepherding us. In the middle of 2013, I bordered on hero-worship of Francis. I even used savings from a summer job to buy a full-sized cardboard cutout of him for our Catholic Student Center at my college. The Theodore McCarrick scandal in my home Archdiocese of Washington and the leadership failures that followed were harmed by faith in the institution of the church. When allegations came to light that Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the then-archbishop whom I also admired, lied to the faithful about what he knew and when he knew it, I felt even worse.

To this day, I don’t feel entirely sure what Pope Francis knew and what more I wanted him to do, but it’s worth reflecting at this moment that he did not get everything right. And the next pope won’t, either. We would do well to see the leaders of our church – even the infallible ones – as human beings with flaws, who need our support and prayers. Sometimes, support means pushing them to be better. 

When editors at America Magazine asked Pope Francis to describe himself during an interview in 2013, he said, “I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.” The same can be said of each of us. 

Pope Francis has been there to remind us of our shortcomings — individually and collectively — but his legacy will be how he made so many of us feel loved and valued in the eyes of the Lord. In opposing “throwaway” culture, he not only warned us against throwing people aside; he argued that none of us deserve to be discarded. 

In his speech to World Youth Day in 2023, Francis told young people, “There is space for everyone, and when there isn’t, please, let’s work so that there is…” 

Departing from his script, he said, “Todos. Todos. Todos.” Everyone. 

There is no greater summary of the Francis papacy than that one word, repeated three times for emphasis: Todos. Todos. Todos.

Speaking in front of 500,000 young people on that day, Pope Francis summed up his papacy in clearer terms than anything that can be written to memorialize him.

“Todos.” That is his legacy. And that is our challenge.