Pope Francis Round Up and AMA

Celebrating the final days and legacy of a down-to-earth pope.

I often think you can tell a movie or TV show is great by the quality of the things that are written about. Pope Francis being Pope Francis, there are some really wonderful things being produced.

One of my favorites is this little piece from Vatican News describing the Pope’s final hours. I have to be honest, going in I was a little skeptical. We Catholics have a way of constructing narratives around people’s deaths that can sound a little too perfect. I was fearful of something like “Francis looked to the heavens and said ‘It is finished.’”

But instead we’re given this very sweet narrative of Francis and his nurse, a man named Massimiliano Strappetti, and how grateful Francis was to be able to go back to St. Peter’s Square. It’s truly lovely.

Francis Sullivan, the former CEO of the Australian Catholic Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which organized and oversaw the Australian Church’s response to the sexual abuse crisis, had a nice piece in the Guardian looking at Francis as a pastor and his evolving response to the scourge of abuse.

“To his credit Francis embarked on a personal conversion in his attitude and approach to the handling of the sex abuse scandal,” Sullivan writes. “Early in his papacy he took too long to believe the testimony of some victims and appeared to side with their abusers and the bishops who concealed the crimes. But once the scales fell from his eyes he became resolute to impose a new regime of transparency and accountability. He famously summoned all the Chilean bishops to Rome, dismissing many of them due to their mishandling of abuse cases in that country.”

[I’d forgotten he did that with the Chilean bishops!]

Over at America, there’s a wonderful piece from Benjamin Trotta, the 12-year-old son of America’s Executive Vice President Heather Trotta (who I mentioned recently amongst the people who gave me some really good advice about taxes and life). It’s such a breath of fresh air to hear a kid talking about the Pope, and also so helpful. To see the Pope through Ben’s eyes brings back so much of the feeling I had when I first got to see him on television and in Rome. I can’t recommend it enough.

America’s Colleen Dulle is also doing a bunch of Facebook Reels answering people’s questions and comments about the Pope and the process now. If you’re on Facebook I highly recommend following her; as far as I’m concerned there’s nobody who explains church stuff better than Colleen.

I’m also going to do an AMA on Facebook Live tomorrow at 10:30 am EST. If you go to my Facebook page, you can post questions now. Tell your friends, it’s open to the public! And I’m inviting people to have fun with it. I’m no expert on papal politics, but I am pretty good at making things up.

Finally, there’s Paul Elie in the New Yorker. I love his opening:

Pope Francis smiled a lot, easily and broadly. He thrived on direct, informal encounters: phone calls, penned notes, hugs, audiences with small groups. He was impatient with protocol: he carried his own overnight bag, bused his own tray at the cafeteria, and answered reporters’ questions in his own words, extemporaneously. He was attentive, determined, testy, mercurial, sometimes deliberate, sometimes in a hurry, hard to read, and hard to pin down.

If you’ve read or seen other things that you’ve liked, please, feel free to share it in the comments!

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I’ve one got more story, just for you.

The decade after Pope Francis finished as provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina was a tough time. He’d been a very divisive and autocratic provincial. When he was assigned afterwards to be the rector of a university in Buenos Aires, it went so badly that the superior general of the Jesuits had to step in and remove him.

He spent a few months in Germany, ostensibly to do a PhD – a very strange assignment for a guy now 50 years old. When that didn’t work out he ended up at the University of Cordoba, 400 miles from the center of things in the province, and served there for over two years as just a confessor and spiritual director. According to one report in the Atlantic, the Society was so concerned that he no longer have influence over the goings on of the province that his supporters were told not to contact him, and he had to receive permission to make phone calls. In a word: Yikes.

But there’s an interesting story that emerges from this period, which author Paul Vallely reports in his great book on Francis, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots. While he was in Germany, Bergoglio came upon a painting in a church in the city of Augsburg. It was called “Mary, Untier of Knots”; it depicted Mary loosening and unwinding the knots in a white wedding ribbon.

The painting had been commissioned by a couple that had been having problems in their marriage; the priest had asked them to bring in the ribbon that had been used to bind their hands together in the wedding rite; with it in hand they prayed that Mary would loosen the knots in their relationship.

Bergoglio brought back a postcard of the painting. And when he became archbishop of Buenos Aires, apparently Argentinians really took to it. In fact, parishioners in one parish in a middle class suburb of Buenos Aires had a full-size copy of the painting made, and it became a pilgrimage site for people from all over. On the feast of the Immaculate Conception alone they average more than 30,000 visitors.

According to Vallely, as archbishop Bergoglio was known to slip in and sit in the pews, praying with them that Mary might loosen the knots of his own life and ministry.

I take a lot of comfort in that image of Francis, sitting before this painting, struggling with the knots inside himself and asking God for help. Maybe that’s part of who he can be for us now, too, someone who knows what it is to be stuck and struggling and helps us.