The first Latin American pope in history. The first non-European pope since the eighth century. The first Jesuit pope. The first pope to take the designation Francis. The oldest pope to occupy the See of Peter for a century.
A Synod on the family, youth, the Amazon, and synodality itself. Encyclicals on the light of faith, ecological conversion, and social friendship.
Apostolic exhortations on the joy of the Gospel, love in the family, the holiness of everyday life, the plight of the Amazon, and the hopes of the young.
Two Jubilee Years and various initiatives of reform, stretching from the Roman Curia, and the Secretariat for the Economy, to the ecclesiastical universities and diplomatic corp.
The ministry of the Holy Father Pope Francis could well be evaluated from this standpoint, a certain novelty and prolific output that has reshaped the papacy and sought to open doors to the renewal of the Catholic Church’s life and social engagement.
Time and providence will reveal the legacy of this striking pontificate for the universal church.
However, even now and through the days of Pope Francis’ hospitalisation and acute illness, one could not help but deduce that this papacy will be notable in the end not for any immensity of achievement but for the intimacy of its form.
It is a pontificate that has spoken loudly by the smallest of gestures, by signs that are not without gravity for the self-understanding of the church.
Pope Francis’ long embrace of simplicity of life, his visitation of the homeless and imprisoned, his paradigmatic embrace of Vincenzo Del Prete, a man afflicted with disfiguring tumours, and his concerned meetings with victims of human trafficking and with anguished refugees remain in the popular imagination and align with the pope’s vision for the church.
In his preaching and by these actions we detect the fundamental spiritual diagnosis Pope Francis made of the church’s situation. In his estimation the church is at risk of growing tired and weary, insular and self-concerned.
The Holy Father pointed toward a “pastoral acedia” or spiritual desolation that endangers the church’s vitality and mission in and to the world.
This acedia is a spiritual lethargy or sloth that threatens to detach the Christian spirit from the joy of serving others, cocooning even the faithful within fruitless routine, which, for all the church’s treasure and wisdom, hampers its capacity for inspiring and transforming lives, which frustrates its own mission by a telling lack of joy.
As spiritual director of the universal church, the antidote raised by Pope Francis was the centrality of evangelisation as declared in perhaps the most significant document of his 12-year pontificate, Evangelii Gaudium.
The revitalisation of the church’s life is not secured by clever tactics of self-preservation or addressing structures, as necessary as such reform may be, but by a “pastoral conversion” that is oriented outwards, guided by the Holy Spirit to geographic, social, spiritual and existential peripheries in which the majority, and perhaps all of us at some time, live in one form or another.
Perhaps frustratingly for many, it was not a pontificate that sought to take on the challenges of modernity and political and philosophical ideologies as did the Great John Paul II, though Pope Francis’ thought would engage the “peripheries” created by poverty, consumerism, individualism, political corruption, and the wages of war and sin.
Unlike Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis’ papacy was not primarily an intellectual project that underscored the continuity of tradition or prized doctrinal clarity. Rather, Pope Francis sought to “personalise” the face of the church, to render particular the universal.
This could be seen in his efforts to re-invigorate the episcopal conferences, his emphasis on synodality as a local manifestation of the church as a communion, and his encouragement of local pastoral decisions closer to the lives of the people whom those decisions affect.
This intent was also embedded in the language and preaching of Pope Francis. “Mercy” and “encounter”, “accompaniment” and “collaboration”, “dialogue” and “tenderness” are not policy positions or grand institutional schemes for a worldwide enterprise, but personal attributes, qualities and virtues that seek, by way of the humanity that the Word assumed, to transform the church from within.
Of course, when things become personal, they can also become messy, as human lives are, and as the Holy Father’s pontificate has been, undeniably.
As time passes the Holy Father’s particular contribution to this chapter of the church’s life will become clearer either by future confirmation or contrast.
Much like the Gospel itself, the fruitfulness of his witness and teaching will be much determined by what we do with it.
One thing is sure—we cannot deny Pope Francis’ voice, and the voice of the poor and many besides for whom the Holy Father will remain a figure of hope, in the history of the church and in the margins where, as he long preached and served, “the heart of Christ” can be found.