For the past month and a half, the world has waited for what seemed like the inevitable passing of Pope Francis.
The spiritual and titular leader of 1.3 billion Catholics was hospitalized for a severe respiratory infection that turned into double pneumonia and partial kidney failure — a scary diagnosis for the healthiest person, but a veritable death sentence for an 88-year-old missing part of one lung.
People prayed and wept worldwide, not just because of his declining health but because it was coming at the worst time possible.
Because wherever you look, despots are on the march.
Politicians. Tech bros. Captains of industry. Podcasters and social media influencers. They preach that might makes right. They revel in cruelty. They demand adoration, if not outright adulation.
These self-aggrandizers attack anyone who disagrees with them. They yearn for the era of kings and emperors. They scoff at concepts like transparency. Humility? That’s for the weak. Their message to the masses is simple: Don’t look to yourself or your community for salvation from our troubled times. You must believe in us.
Standing athwart this mountain of egomania was Francis.
Popes wield such power that they can speak ex cathedra — literally, from the papal throne — to make infallible pronouncements on morality that the faithful must obey. Under their domain are billions of dollars in assets and hundreds of thousands of priests. Their every word makes worldwide news. It’s the type of clout that Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their fellow tyrannical travelers strive for every waking second of their lives.
Yet Francis has rejected all trappings of sovereignty and cult of personality. Instead, the pope has lived and preached what Jesus commanded his followers to do in the Sermon on the Mount, which to the right might as well be the Communist Manifesto nowadays.
Pope Francis waves to a crowd after meeting Indigenous peoples and members of the parish community of Sacred Heart in Edmonton, Canada, in 2022. He was on a “penitential” visit to Canada to beg forgiveness from survivors of the country’s residential schools, where Catholic missionaries contributed to the “cultural genocide” of generations of Indigenous children by trying to stamp out their languages, cultures and traditions.
(Gregorio Borgia / Associated Press)
Within the first weeks of his papacy, Francis urged priests to be “shepherds living with ‘the odour of the sheep’” and leave the comfort of their positions for places “where there is suffering, bloodshed, blindness that longs for sight, and prisoners in thrall to many evil masters.”
His appointments to the College of Cardinals — the men who will pick his successor — have leaned toward prelates who have ministered on the front lines of poverty and war instead of those with high public profiles. He praised the worth of Indigenous people across the globe and opened the synods — advisory councils previously made up of bishops — to lay people so they could be more involved in imagining the future of the church.
Above all, Francis hailed migrants in an era when they are loathed worldwide. At a refugee camp in Greece in 2021, he decried our “age of walls and barbed wire.” In February, as Vice President JD Vance — a convert to Catholicism — was justifying Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation program, His Holiness wrote a pointed letter to U.S. bishops, tying the plight of the undocumented to the Holy Family and urging church leaders to remind their parishioners about the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Conservative Catholics — many of them in the U.S. — have long accused their leader of liberation theology, if not downright heresy, for his work. Francis, with the characteristic pluck of his Argentine upbringing, lampooned them in a “60 Minutes” interview last year as people with a “suicidal attitude” that “closed [them] up inside a dogmatic box.”
Francis merely urged everyone to read up on their Gospels, where Jesus consistently assailed the rich, lionized the poor and lingered with the meek instead of the mighty. In an era of strongmen, those lessons were a necessary corrective to the corrosive words and actions from Trump and others.
This was the voice in the wilderness the world was at the brink of losing. Yet the health of Pope Francis has now improved to the point he was discharged from the hospital and was able to make a public appearance Sunday — frail and weak-voiced and in a wheelchair, but very much alive.
His miraculous comeback couldn’t have come at a better time for all of us to embrace his message of mercy and brotherhood anew — especially Catholics in the U.S.
A Gallup poll found that church attendance for Catholics dropped 7% since the start of Francis’ papacy. The Washington Post reported that 59% of Catholic voters chose Trump in the 2024 election. A recent Pew Research Center study revealed that 41% of Catholics think recent immigration to this country has been “change for the worse,” compared to 33% who think it has made things better.
It’s an odd turn from members of a faith that has relied on immigrants to replenish it since the days of Lord Baltimore.
Trump’s administration is full of Catholics who seem to have misread the New Testament, or skipped past Matthew 25, where Jesus said God will remember on the Day of Judgment who welcomed the stranger and visited prisoners and who didn’t. Trump’s inner circle includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who just finished a trip through Central America urging those countries to take in the migrants Trump wants deported — and ICE director Tom Homan, a man so heartless that he was featured in a Valentine’s Day Instagram post issued by the White House that promised people in the country without legal documentation that they will be deported.
New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan laughed alongside Donald Trump at a charity dinner last fall, gave the invocation at the president’s swearing-in and told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo with a straight face that Trump “takes his Christian faith seriously.” Meanwhile, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gómez, who presides over one of the largest archdioceses in the world and is a Mexican immigrant himself, has spent more time railing against the supposed evils of woke culture than he has openly criticizing this administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
The archdiocese has long held special masses and novenas — nine days of prayers — on behalf of immigrants. But in a column last month in the L.A. archdiocese’s publication urging immigration reform, Gomez couldn’t even bring himself to criticize Trump by name, while pointing out that “the other political party” — Democrats — deported millions when Barack Obama was in the White House.
When an Episcopalian bishop — a female priest, no less! — urges Trump to have mercy on migrants, as Mariann Budde did during an inaugural service in the nation’s capital with the president in the pews, you know that Francis’ U.S. flock can and must do so much better.
Pope Francis arrives for his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican in 2024.
(Andrew Medichini / Associated Press)
Sometimes, it takes the near-loss of something — or someone — we took for granted to stir a reckoning. May the illness of Pope Francis spur self-reflection among Catholics, but also all Americans, about why we should help the neediest among us instead of follow those who only want to rule.
Pope Francis: Gracias for your witness. Praise God for your continued recovery. I’m sorry we’ve failed you so far. Pray for us.