Memorial Mass for Pope Francis – 28 April 2025
Homily
Fr David Ranson
By a strange quirk of history, in June 2019 I was privileged to participate in the Australian Bishops Ad Limina visit to Rome. This is the pilgrimage that all bishops are expected to make to the See of Rome every so many years. It was the first and only Ad Limina visit the Australian Bishops enjoyed with Pope Francis. The pilgrimage took us to the four papal basilicas of Rome and, of course, central to the visitation was our encounter with the Holy Father. Pope Francis had introduced a different way for bishops on Ad Limina to meet him. On a stifling hot Roman June morning we met him as a group. Having been greeted by him individually, he then strode through us to take his seat in the circle, making us welcome, apologising for the deficiency of the air-conditioning, and pointing out the location of the bathrooms. For the following two hours, we could ask him any question we wished, and he engaged us in remarkable dialogue. Seated only some 10 feet away from him, it was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. Given the length of time we had with him, many topics were canvassed. But beyond the intensely personal greeting he offered me when I first met him, I recall the time of that June morning in Rome for one simple gesture. About two-thirds of the way through the time he bent to his side to pour water into a glass. There was every expectation he was preparing a glass of water for himself. Yet without any prevarication, having poured the water into the glass, he immediately handed it to his interpreter seated beside him. And he continued on with his answer in which he was engaged. No thought to himself; thought only to the one beside him.
A simple gesture, so unremarkable, but so utterly remarkable. It was the same kind of spirit that underscored the many gestures for which we remember Francis: the washing and kissing of the feet of women prisoners on Holy Thursday; the kiss of a man so incredibly disfigured by the tumours of neurofibromatosis; the embrace of a small boy struggling to make meaning of the death of his father; the kiss of the feet of South Sudan leaders. Each one of these gestures conveyed what was central for Francis – closeness, proximity, nearness, tenderness. As he preached on the occasion of his installation as Bishop of Rome on the feast of St Joseph, 19 March 2013:
In the gospels, Saint Joseph appears as a strong and courageous man, a working man, yet in his heart we see a great tenderness, which is not the virtue of the weak but rather a sign of strength of spirit and a capacity for concern, for compassion, for genuine openness to others, for love. We must not be afraid of goodness, of tenderness.
Francis encapsulated this in his understanding of mercy which he made the focus for the Extraordinary Jubilee of 2015. He was clear, however, that mercy was not simply a feeling of pity. It was for Francis a fourfold action. As he preached to the priests of Rome in 2014
True mercy takes the person into one’s care, listens to them attentively, approaches the situation with respect and truth, and accompanies them on the journey of reconciliation.
It was the pastoral strategy that characterised everything he did, every encounter he extended.
As much as Francis gave demonstration of this heart through dramatic gesture, it would be a mistake, however, to think that Francis simply acted with spontaneous creativity. It took time for us to appreciate his intellectual formation, especially shaped by his time as Jesuit Provincial in Argentina during the 1970s, when he sought “to move beyond the violent dichotomies – on the one side, a brutal military junta, on the other, ruthless revolutionary guerrillas – tearing Argentina apart.” His confreres, themselves, had divided sympathies. Bergoglio struggled to bring about a holding together what seemed logically irreconcilable views – a way of living with apparently contradictory poles in tension.
In this project, Francis was informed by the work of the French Jesuit Gaston Fessard, an associate of the better-known writer, Henri de Lubac. Fessard “use[d] the Spanish word tensionante to describe a way of thinking that recognizes opposite poles and seeks to hold them in tension, rather than to resolve the apparent contradiction between them.” Rather than choosing one or the other, for Fessard the Christian life is found in the unresolved tension between them. And through other writers such as Romano Guardini and the Uruguayan thinker Alberto Methol Ferre, Francis framed his thinking of the Church as a tension of opposites within a unity. As one commentator concluded it was,
the key to understanding this papacy, both the exhilaration it engenders in his supporters and the exasperation of his critics. The inversion of the centre and the peripheries, the unrelenting search for reconciliation, and the holding together of faithfulness to church doctrine with a pastoral approach to individual situations: this is the Pope of tensionante, a way of thinking that seeks to hold opposites in tension.
We see this beautifully depicted in the gift Pope Francis gave to the members of the most recent Synod of Bishops which completed in October of last year. It is the portrait of Pentecost, “The Descent of the Holy Spirit” by Giralomo Muziano in the 16th century and which hangs in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. There the entire Church is presented, in all it is difference and diversity, under the unifying power of the Holy Spirit.
The inversion of the centre and the peripheries, Borgoglio had learnt from the Argentinian Amelia Podetto. As Borghesi writes,
It was from her that the future Pope began to learn that one’s vision of the world changes when it is looked at from the outside – form the margins, from those points of the world that are most fragile and in pain. Those in the ‘centre’, in the heart of the metropolis, fail to grasp the drama of history, its fault lines and points of rupture, and therefore the impending earthquakes. Bergoglio’s entire social and Gospel vision presupposes a ‘peripheral’ perspective – looking at the world from the point of view of those that are discarded and shut out.
Consequently, Francis proclaimed to us all:
. . . come out of yourselves and go forth to the existential peripheries. Go out into all the world: these were the last words which Jesus spoke to his followers and which he continues to address to us. A whole world awaits us: men and women who have lost all hope, families in difficulty, abandoned children, young people without a future, the elderly, sick and abandoned, those who are rich in the world’s goods but impoverished within, men and women looking for a purpose in life, thirsting for the divine . . .
Don’t be closed in on yourselves, don’t be stifled by petty squabbles, don’t remain a hostage to your own problems. These will be resolved if you go forth and help others to resolve their own problem and proclaim the Good News. You will find life by giving life, hope by giving hope, love by giving love.
Francis summoned us then to be audacious, frontier men and women. “Ours is not a ‘lab faith’ but a ‘journey faith,’ an historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths . . . You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”
And then, as he observed, our lives become “wonderfully complicated.” And they are also joyful! As Timothy Radcliffe remarked, “the joy that pervade[d] all that Pope Francis [said] and [did] [was] not just an emotion or a forced jollity. It [was] a sharing in the very being of God.” As Francis himself wrote “The identity card of a Christian is their joy, the joy of the Gospel . . . In the crosses and sufferings of this life, Christians live that joy, expressing it in another way, with the peace that comes from the assurance that Jesus accompanies us, that he is with us . . . We cannot preach the Gospel if we are sourpusses.”
But, for Francis, “our greatest joy is the joy of others. The more we delight in their happiness, the deeper shall be our own.” And this is perhaps the greatest paradox with which Francis engaged: if we have lost our capacity to be touched by the pain of another, so too shrinks our capacity for joy. It is the dead heart, unable to feel anything at all, that cannot show joy. For, as he says, “Our revolution comes about through tenderness, through the joy which always becomes closeness and compassion, and leads us to get involved in, and to serve, the life of others . . .”
As simple as serving his translator a glass of water on a hot Roman June day.