The Courage, Endurance, and Humility of Pope Francis

One year ago this week, on the morning of Easter Monday, April 21, 2025, our beloved Pope Francis was called home to the God he served so well for 88 years, especially in the final 12 years during which he was called from Argentina to Rome to be the Successor of Saint Peter.

Imagine all this! Here was an Archbishop of the great city of Buenos Ares who had passed the 75-year-retirement-age for bishops, who intended to submit his resignation (again) to the Vatican in 2013. He had a room picked out in a nursing home, where he intended to live out his old age ministering to the elderly who are often forgotten, distressed, physically afflicted, and — especially — lonely. It was not his plan to become Pope at the age of 76, but once he was chosen he embraced the papal ministry vigorously with the mind and heart of a pastor.

I learned so much from his teaching, his preaching, and his witness. I’m sure countless others did too. He preached the mercy of Christ, the ardor of Christ for our salvation, the Lord’s closeness to every human person, and His tenderness with our wounded souls and all our afflictions of mind and body. Francis especially wanted to draw our attention to the poor and to those who were “on the margins” of modern society, as well as those neglected by the ministry of the Church.

He also lived the Gospel of mercy for the poor with countless gestures: embracing the sick, visiting prisons and consoling the prisoners one by one, eating with homeless people … these gestures which came from his own heart and shaped the attention of Catholics and others to focus on recognizing Christ in every person and serving Him through them.

There are many extraordinary gestures of Francis that were unforgettable, that we all witnessed on internet media or television. For the moment, I wish to recall one particular example: Francis’s audience with the leaders of different factions near the end of a brutal civil war in the new African nation of South Sudan. Nearly half a million people died and many others were displaced in the fighting there from 2013-2020. In 2019, these leaders were trying to work out a peace agreement, to find a unified modus vivendi for political stability that could overcome the violent divisions they represented. 

Francis often “threw away the script” for these kind of meetings, but this time it was beyond anyone’s expectations. Already frail with age and struggling with mobility problems, Francis went down on his knees and kissed the shoes of each of the rival leaders. Once his own attendants realized what he was doing, they assisted him: Francis clearly needed help bending down, stretching himself to place his lips on the feet of six people and then getting up again. Then he exhorted, counseled, and begged them to persevere in the peace process. 

It was an astonishing gesture! It may have helped to bring about the “beginning of the end” of the civil war in 2020, though violence continued to flare up. Francis visited South Sudan in 2023 (the long pilgrimages he made to Africa and Asia in the last two years of his pontificate were heroic triumphs of evangelical ardor over the limits of human exhaustion). He said Mass in the capital city of Juba, and — realizing that much of the ongoing violence was fueled by vengeance for atrocities committed by both sides during the civil war — he begged the people to forgive one another: “Even if our hearts bleed for the wrongs we have suffered, let us refuse, once and for all, to repay evil with evil. Let us accept one another and love one another with sincerity and generosity, as God loves us.” 

Sadly, the always-fragile peace agreement and the frequently-violated ceasefire between factions has been threatened by an increase in violence over the past year. But a special bond has been formed between the people of this troubled new nation and a humble, courageous Pope. The fruit of Francis’s extraordinary witness to Christ’s love for these people will grow with time.

Now, as we mark one year since his death, I want to remember this beloved Pope, pray for him to enter into the fullness of eternal joy, and also continue to be grateful for his successor, our current Pope Leo XIV, and to pray for him and his ministry in our current, increasingly chaotic and dangerous times.

The words of Pope Francis in his last two homilies (the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday 2025) continue to be powerful, encouraging, and relevant to the present day. Popes are only the “servant[s] of the servants of God.” They come and go — although the popes of my lifetime have been especially enlightened and strengthened by the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us through the strange darkness of our times — still, popes are only servants. Jesus Christ is the only Lord, who is always the same. Jesus the unfathomable gift of inexhaustible Love for each of us and all of us, for our salvation, for our total fulfillment as human persons, for our eternal destiny to share in the companionship and love of the Triune God — the glory of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — forever. The night of this life is long, but the Risen Jesus is here. We must stay with Him and follow Him, for He is our hope.

Quotations from Pope Francis, Easter 2025:

“The light of the Resurrection illumines our path one step at a time; quietly, it breaks through the darkness of history and shines in our hearts, calling for the response of a humble faith, devoid of all triumphalism. The Lord’s passage from death to life is not a spectacular event by which God shows his power and compels us to believe in him… On the contrary, the Resurrection is like little seeds of light that slowly and silently come to take root in our hearts, at times still prey to darkness and unbelief… We cannot celebrate Easter without continuing to deal with the nights that dwell in our hearts and the shadows of death that so often loom over our world. Christ indeed conquered sin and destroyed death, yet in our earthly history the power of his Resurrection is still being brought to fulfillment. And that fulfillment, like a small seed of light, has been entrusted to us, to protect it and to make it grow.

“When the thought of death lies heavy on our hearts, when we see the dark shadows of evil advancing in our world, when we feel the wounds of selfishness or violence festering in our flesh and in our society, let us not lose heart, but return to the message of this night. The light quietly shines forth, even though we are in darkness; the promise of new life and a world finally set free awaits us; and a new beginning, however impossible it might seem, can take us by surprise, for Christ has triumphed over death.”

“This message fills our hearts with renewed hope. For in the risen Jesus we have the certainty that our personal history and that of our human family, albeit still immersed in a dark night where lights seem distant and dim, are nonetheless in God’s hands. In his great love, he will not let us falter, or allow evil to have the last word. At the same time, this hope, already fulfilled in Christ, remains for us a goal to be attained. Yet it has been entrusted to us so that we can bear credible witness to it, so that the Kingdom of God may find its way into the hearts of the women and men of our time.”

~Easter Vigil, April 19, 2025

“Brothers and sisters, this is the greatest hope of our life: we can live this poor, fragile and wounded existence clinging to Christ, because he has conquered death, he conquers our darkness and he will conquer the shadows of the world, to make us live with him in joy, forever. This is the goal towards which we press on, as the Apostle Paul says, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead (cf. Philippians 3:12-14).”

~Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025