Thank you forever, Pope Francis

by Gianni Valente

Rome ( Fides Agency) - “Remember your leaders, who preached the word of God to you, and as you reflect on the outcome of their lives, imitate their faith."This passage from the Letter to the Hebrews was very dear to Father Bergoglio. He often quoted it when he wanted to show how beautiful and important it is to remember the people and friends who brought us Christ's liberation and who have already left this world. Those men and women who “brought us closer to sources of life and hope from which those who follow us will also be able to drink.”

Pope Francis also left this world today, April 21, Easter Monday, due to complications from a seasonal illness. As is the case with many elderly people in the Villas Miseria of Buenos Aires, who in the heart of the Argentine winter ask San Pantaleo, doctor and martyr, for protection from atching the “flu” and falling ill with pneumonia. Thus, the offering of his mortal body, of his never-spared physicality, of the increasingly fragile reality of his human condition, that he never shied away from until the last of the days of work, hardships, inclement weather, and contagious diseases to which his vocation and ministry exposed him, was fulfilled to the very end. Even his death, which coincided with Holy Week, when the Church celebrates the mysteries of salvation brought to fulfillment by Christ, is also part of the mystery of offering and self-giving that marked his life.

Now, for his children and for all those who loved him from near and far, the time has come to remember him. To give thanks with hearts filled with peace and gratitude for the things that he remembered, repeated, and showed to the Church and to the world during his mortal life. Small things and great things. Old things and new ones.

Even during his years as Pope, Bergoglio repeatedly told us that faith does not come from man. Faith is a gift from Jesus. And no one can go to Jesus unless Jesus himself draws them to himself, unless he wins and captivates hearts “by attraction,” as he always said, quoting Pope Ratzinger, by “delectatio,” as St. Augustine said.
That is why he said that “Each of us is chosen, no one chooses to be Christian among all the possibilities offered by the religious ‘marketplace’, we are chosen. We are Christians because we have been chosen” (Homily of April 2, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic). He also said that faith is not “a spiritual path to perfection,” but “a gift of the Holy Spirit, a gift that goes beyond all preparation.” And when it weakens, it can become “only a culture or a gnosis, a knowledge” (homily, January 26, 2015).
This is why he said that “It is not enough for us to know that God exists: a risen but distant God does not fill our lives; a distant God, however just and holy, does not attract us. We too need to ‘see God,’ to touch with our hands that he is risen, and risen for us, like the disciples: through his wounds.”

Pope Francis repeated that the Church is the work of Christ and His Spirit. That the Church is His, that it is not “built” by itself, it is not self-sufficient.
He repeated that only Christ, by forgiving it, can free/bring the Church itself from its inertial self-referentiality, from its withdrawal into itself.
Pope Francis continued to repeat tirelessly that the “protagonist of the Church” is the Holy Spirit, the One who “from the very beginning gave the Apostles the strength to proclaim the Gospel,” and even now “does everything,” “carries the Church forward,” and even “when persecution breaks out,” it is He “who gives believers the strength to remain in the faith.”
Pope Francis repeated that “it is not we, the popes, bishops, priests, or nuns who carry the Church forward,” but “it is the saints” (homily at Santa Marta, January 12, 2016).

As Pope, he said that changes and possible reforms in the Church are fruitful if they have as their ultimate criterion the good and salvation of souls and serve to remove burdens and veils from the work of grace, to make it easier for souls to encounter Christ. Even with contradictions and things that went wrong, even with his human errors and his fragility as a “sinner whom Christ looked upon,” he has given witness that the miracles that save the Church cannot be performed by a poor man. He experienced in the flesh of his limitations and his earthly days, even as the Successor of Peter, the “Mysterium Lunae,” the formula - so dear to him - with which the Greek and Latin Fathers of the early Christian centuries suggested the most intimate nature and mystery of the Church, which can remain an opaque and dark body, with all its apparatus, its performances, its glorious antiquities, and its shrewd modernity, if Christ does not illuminate it with His light, as the sun does with the moon.

Pope Francis has repeated and demonstrated with insistence devoid of human respect that in the mystery of salvation wrought by Christ and his Spirit, it is the poor of all poverty who are loved. The little ones, because of their smallness, enter more easily through the narrow gate that leads to the banquet of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Pope Francis has repeated that the salvation promised by Jesus is for everyone, that its horizon is the world. And he freely inspires in his followers a closeness of mercy and charity toward all the expectations, sorrows, despair, sins, and miseries of the world. Towards all members of the human family, beginning with the derailed lives of the most wounded, the fallen and shipwrecked, those who suffer most and are most in need.

The “pastoral conversion” he suggested to the whole Church was not and is not a retreat into a parallel world, separate from the world of men. It is precisely an “imperfect” and “battered” Church, a “Church with wounds,” he said, “that is capable of understanding the wounds of today's world and making them its own, suffering them, accompanying them, and seeking to heal them.” Because “a Church with wounds does not place itself at the center, does not believe itself to be perfect, but places at the center the only one who can heal wounds, and that is Jesus Christ.” (Address during the trip to Chile, January 16, 2018).

Much has already been written about this, and much more will be written. But for more than twelve years, the words and gestures of the Bishop of Rome who arrived from Buenos Aires have also and above all become almost daily companionship and comfort for multitudes of souls scattered throughout the world, of every language, culture, and nation, through the ordinary magisterium of the homilies at Santa Marta, the reflections accompanying the Angelus prayer, and the catechesis in St. Peter's Square and in the Paul VI Hall.
This unmediated closeness to the multitude was perhaps the most intimate treasure of the twelve years of his pontificate. An incomparable treasure, a flow of healed life, which he presented in simple and repeated terms, the words and gestures most proper and intimate to the dynamism of Christian faith and experience, reduced to their minimal traits: grace, mercy, sin, forgiveness, charity, salvation, predilection for the poor.
Perhaps above all for this reason, the people of God have continued to bless Bishop Francis of Rome and to pray for him, as they did at his request on the first evening of his pontificate, when Pope Francis invoked the prayer of the crowd gathered in St. Peter's Square ("I would like to give you the blessing, but first I ask you for a favor, I ask you to pray to the Lord: the prayer of the people who ask for the blessing of their bishop").

In the weave of those prayers, the People of God, with their sensus fidei, have always recognized and continue to recognize that the election of Pope Francis was a gift, a sign that the Lord still loves his Church. And only this enduring love of their Lord, a love without repentance, can make the Church—and also the Papacy—interesting to the world, interesting to everyone.

With the same serene confidence, the People of God began months ago to accompany the Successor of Peter, chosen from “almost the end of the world,” in his last days. There was no sense of doom or abstract anguish over “unfinished projects” or “plans gone awry” in the hearts and eyes of those who accompanied him with their prayers during these last months of illness. There was only peace and moving gratitude in the prayers that rose to heaven for Pope Bergoglio from St. Peter's Square and from homes, churches, and squares around the world. This was in complete harmony with the words with which the Pope himself had imagined his end. “The Lord, with his goodness,” Pope Bergoglio had pointed out in one of his homilies at Santa Marta, “says to each of us: 'Stop, stop, not all days will be like this. Don't get used to this as if it were eternity. There will be a day when you will be taken away, the other will remain, you will be taken away, you will be taken away.' It is going with the Lord, thinking that our life will end. And this is good.”
Thinking about death, he added, “is not a bad fantasy, it is a reality. Whether it is ugly or not, depends on me, on how I think about it, but it will be there. And there will be the encounter with the Lord. This will be the beauty of death. It will be the encounter with the Lord. He will come to meet us. He will say, 'Come, come, blessed by my Father, come with me.'”

Those who perceived him as a comforting companion on their journey prayed for him with peace in their hearts. This was something he himself often testified to, incredibly, in the midst of storms.
Now, the same multitudes pray for him to Mary, Our Lady of Lujan. Mary, Salus Populi Romani. May she come and take him in her arms, like a child, on his final journey.

On January 28, 2018, when he celebrated Mass on the feast of the transfer of the restored icon of Salus Populi Romani in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, the Pope recalled that “Where Our Lady is at home, the devil does not enter. Where the Mother is, turmoil does not prevail, fear does not win. Who among us does not need this, who among us is not sometimes troubled or anxious? (...). And we need her like a traveler needs refreshment, like a child needs to be carried in her arms.”

For this reason, as he himself wished, Pope Francis' mortal remains will rest forever in a chapel in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, connected by Via Merulana to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran. He will rest under the gaze of the Salus Populi Romani. Forever, in the heart of Rome.(Fides Agency 21/4/2025).

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