The Pope who came from the “end of the world,” as he himself had said at the debut of his pontificate in March 2013, has died. The Pope who came from Argentina, from South America, but that phrase was not just referring to geography, or traditional geopolitics. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, that is his real name, chose, and was the first to do so in his role, the name Francis. Pope Francis, in honor of the Saint of Assisi and his lesson: attention to the poor, the last, the “discarded” of society. Attention to the issues of social justice, a Church aligned not only rhetorically with that great South of the world that is that of inequality, the guests as waiters at the banquet of Western capitalism.
The greatest spiritual leader of the West therefore critical of the deep economic machine of the West itself and its value machine. The first Jesuit pope and the first profoundly reformist, convinced that precepts and norms of an ancient and secular power had to change as time, indeed the times, changed. Since the Vatican is not only the place of the spirit but also that of a government with the classic political struggles of any government, it is not that Francis lacked enemies.
It had struck, at the beginning of his long hospitalization at Gemelli, the liturgical coldness with which that world already from the announcements was preparing for the succession. This is a subject we will have a chance to deal with specifically in the coming days, but as President Mattarella pointed out immediately, the West meanwhile loses one of its landmarks. A West already shaken by many small and large seismic waves, internal and external.
A pope who to the very end carried out his mission, received U.S. Vice President Vance, a pope who in his last public appearance, on Easter Day, the day before he died, remarked on his pacifist commitment, beginning with the war in Ukraine on which he has always spoken out, defying criticism and instrumentalization.
Francis leaves us with a broken world, as he called it in his last speech. A world where war, he told reporters on a plane during one of his many trips, had already subverted peace through its dramatic local “crises.” A prophecy about what is happening, this strange Third World War never declared in public discourse but always at the gates in the horrors we see every day.
Gone, with this lesson of supreme lucidity, is a great man and a great Pastor. Farewell Francis!
The article Pope Francis: the Pope who came from the “end of the world” comes from TheNewyorker.
