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GLORY BE: There have been standing instructions at the Indy offices that I was to be interrupted if and when the pope ever called. Only my mechanic, a miracle worker in his own right, had that exalted clearance. He called me many times. The pope, sadly, never got around to it. To be honest, I just wanted to thank him.
Yes, I ditched the church in 7th grade, having experienced the precocious crisis of faith then making the rounds. But this guy Francis was something else. When Francis — the first Jesuit pope, the first citizen of the “the Americas” to be pope, and the first pope ever to take the name Francis — was sworn in as capo de tutti of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics 13 years ago, Pope Francis looked merely promising.
At leasthe wasn’t a reactionary like his predecessor.
In subsequent years, Francis would emerge as a heroic, lonely, and profoundly comforting figure on the world stage. For me, he’s been a much-needed tonic to the toxic culture of contempt, cruelty, indifference, and disdain unleashed by the growing legion of wannabe despots and dictators now getting elected.
I hate to steal anything from Bob Dylan, but he nailed it when he described Francis as being “a voice of mercy in a time of noise.” Francis, he said, demonstrated that “Faith doesn’t have to shout to be heard.”
A month before Francis died, Elon Musk was explaining how empathy had been “weaponized.” Apparently, Democrats had a secret plan to take over the U.S. government forever by legalizing all illegal immigrants they allowed over the borders and then harvesting their votes. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk claimed.
Huh?
A month later — on the day he died — Pope Francis had prepared remarks he intended to make to the Easter crowd gathering at St. Mark’s Square. “How much contempt is stirred up at times toward the most vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants?” he had written.
On other occasions, he denounced as “not Christian” leaders who wanted to build walls, not bridges. God, he stressed, lives in everyone. “He is present in the unwashed visitor, often unrecognizable, who walks through our cities, who travels on our buses, and knocks on our door.”
On another occasion, he asked, “How is it not news when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”
It was a rhetorical question. Except, of course, it isn’t.
At a time when the term “populist” has lost all connection with any reality, Pope Francis was the genuine article. He grew up in Argentina, the son of Italian immigrants called golindrinas — blackbirds — the Italians who worked as seasonal laborers. As a young man, Francis danced the tango — doesn’t everyone from Argentina — and he worked briefly as a bouncer at a nightclub. When he became pope, he insisted on driving an old Fiat, eschewing the bloated splendor of his Vatican digs.
No, Francis never changed church doctrine. What he did may have been more profound; he changed culture. Those who came of age in the shadow of the church experienced a tectonic shift from dogma and guilt to acceptance and love.
Three months into the gig, a reporter asked Francis about gay priests. “Who am I to judge?” he famously replied. His predecessor, when asked the same question just a few years prior, said they should be uprooted from the ministry forthwith.
Soon after, Francis issued his 45,000-word encyclical “Praise Be!” excoriating the mayhem we’re inflicting on Planet Earth. Climate change, he took seriously. “Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their existence,” he wrote. “We have no such right.” In a more understated way, he would later note, “Right now, we don’t have very good relations with creation.”
Pope Francis was all about the Good Samaritan. That parable was his mantra. What we were doing to the planet, we were also doing to the poor. Money should serve, not rule, he noted. Given how violently skewed the distribution of wealth — globally — had become, Francis worried a lot about what he called “the globalization of indifference.” Given how many people starved as the top 20 percent gorged, he suggested, the meaning of “Thou shall not kill” needed to be seriously reexamined.
Not to belabor the obvious, but in the United States, the top one percent controls 30 percent of the wealth. The bottom 50 percent, by contrast, controls 2.6 percent.
You do the math.
I can’t.
At the risk of repeating myself, can you please explain why we insist on calling people hell-bent on eliminating funding for Head Start — which in Santa Barbara County offers free daycare, free preschool preparation and training, free meals, and free medical treatment to 600 families of the working poor — “populists.”
Francis went out as he came: pedal to the metal. On Easter Sunday, he exchanged pleasantries with Vice President JD Vance — a very recent convert to Catholicism, with whom he recently had a very pointed disagreement about immigration and theology. Then he addressed the Easter multitudes in St. Mark’s Square, with only the strength to bemoan the festering humanitarian crisis that still is Gaza. Then he slid into the popemobile for his last Easter joyride.
Not long after, he had a stroke, went into a coma, and had a heart attack.
Along the way, Francis had much to say. “Life is a journey,” he said. “When we stop, things don’t go right.” He also said, “And here is the first word I wish to say to you: joy!”
Hey, man, it’s not too late to call.
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