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BEFORE going in for heart surgery, a “rather vain Jesuit” asks God whether this is the end, and is informed that he would live for another 40 years. Delighted, he subsequently goes in for “a hair transplant, a facelift, liposuction, eyebrows, teeth”. Emerging from the clinic, he is run over by a car. It proves fatal. He is incensed upon meeting his Maker. “Oops, sorry!” Is the divine response. “I didn’t recognise you.”
This joke is borrowed from a guest essay published in The New York Times last December, credited to none other than Pope Francis. It was adapted from his autobiography, published the following month. It is hard to imagine any of his three immediate predecessors publicly sharing a similar quip.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s sense of humour was among the more endearing features of his dozen-year stint as the Bishop of Rome. The Argentinian child of Italian immigrants was an unexpected choice when Benedict became the first pope in almost 600 years to resign. He took his name from the 13th-century Italian friar Francis of Assisi, best remembered for his devotion to the poor, to animals, and to the environment.
As pope, Francis honoured the legacy of his namesake to a considerable extent, but frequently fell short of progressive expectations, while consistently attracting the wrath of conservative Catholics, especially from the US. Many of them saw him as a heretic, notwithstanding the notion that all popes are divinely ordained. The conservatives were wary of his overtures to LGBTIQ+ conservatives and to women (who remain excluded from the clergy), but equally angered by Francis’ empathy for refugees, and his revulsion over deportations from Europe or North America.
During a visit to Mexico in 2016, the pope decried those talking about building walls rather than bridges. “This is not the gospel”, he noted. The thin-skinned Donald Trump, not yet president, dubbed the comment “disgraceful”, adding that “No … religious leader has the right to question another man’s religion or faith.” Now the re-elected US president intends to attend the pope’s funeral. “Rest in peace Pope Francis! May God Bless him and all who loved him!” Trump declared on his Truth Social feed, the exclamation marks barely concealing his delight.
Francis leaves behind a complicated legacy.
Trump’s vice-president, J.D. Vance, a self-described “baby Catholic” was seemingly the last foreign visitor to receive an audience with the pope, albeit only for a couple of minutes. There’s little scope for any conspiracy theories, mind you, given that Francis suffered a near-death experience in February, but after his apparent recovery was keen to be seen as remaining in charge.
On his last full day on earth, Francis’ final Urbi et Orbi message delivered in St Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday decried the “contempt stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalised, and migrants”, calling for trust in those “who come from distant lands”, because “all of us are children of God”.
Francis came to the papacy at a time when all too many Europeans were revolting against immigrants, and pointed to common humanity as a guiding path. His well-meaning endeavours have, in the final analysis, made little difference. More broadly, his description of capitalism as “the dung of the devil” deserves to be appreciated. His 2015 encyclical Laudato Si focused on climate change and those who would suffer most from it. “Capitalism,” he recognised therein, “is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”
It’s easy to agree with that description, yet wonder whether institutionalised religion offers viable solutions to global dilemmas. This is not a complaint against Catholicism. It covers all forms and denominations of organised faith. All embrace compassion and empathy for all human beings, but these days hardly any care to practise what their ancestors preached.
Blind faith, whether it relates to religion or an ideology, is tricky. Francis was aware of the issues within Catholicism, from corruption at the Vatican to child abuse by priests, but made only incremental progress in tackling them. He was not comfortable with the Marxism-inflect liberation theology that attracted many of his 1970-80s Jesuit contemporaries in Latin America, which was banished by the Vatican under his predecessors.
Francis/Bergoglio nonetheless consistently demonstrated a humanity that often escapes self-ordained upholders of supposedly Christian values. His successor will emerge in the days to come, and one can only hope it will be someone who values the imperfect yet largely commendable legacy of his predecessor. And perhaps, paraphrasing Lenin’s reference to George Bernard Shaw, his epitaph should be: a good man fallen among Catholics.
Published in Dawn, April 23rd, 2025
