Why Pope Francis Was So Important

Why Pope Francis Was So Important

Damon Silvers

I met Pope Francis twice at the Vatican, and saw him at a great distance in Washington DC once. The day he died, I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City to light a candle and say a prayer for him, though I am Jewish, and not Catholic. When I was there I ran into a reporter for the New York Times, who asked me what I thought of Francis. I told her among other things, that Pope Francis was the greatest person of our time. Later a friend of mine questioned whether this was an exaggeration. It was not.

Why? Four reasons. But first, let me be clear what I mean by our time. I mean the years following the financial crisis of 2008, and in particular the years of his Papacy. I mean no comparison with such extraordinary figures of earlier years like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King.

These four points are not in order of importance. I wouldn’t know how to rank them.

First, Pope Francis had a clear understanding of the crisis of our contemporary world—the world financial capitalism created—clearer than any other world leader and clearer than almost all aspirants to the title of public intellectual. He saw how climate change, inequality, and dehumanization were intertwined. He explained this connection to the world in his early encyclical Laudato Si, and he never stopped his ministry on this point. And he was not a mere theorist—he took action—for example using the convening power of the Papacy to bring together global investors and fossil fuel companies in private meetings to seek solutions—plans of action for decarbonizing the world’s economy. And pushing relentlessly for debt relief for the worlds poorest countries. He challenged the social complacency of wealthy environmentalists, the greed of investors and corporate executives, the two-dimensional vision of economists, the narrow minded ambitions of politicians and trade unionists. He never ceased to demand that political economy be founded in a recognition of the dignity of the human being and our relationship with God and Nature. He was an absolutely unique, powerful and benevolent voice in the political economy debates of our time.

Second, Pope Francis took seriously as a guide to living what Jesus said about the priority God places on the poor, the outcast, the least among us. Practically with his dying breath he forced himself to be with the poor and the imprisoned in Rome, the refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean, powerless victims of the war in Gaza. He telephoned the Catholic Archbishop in Gaza every day of the war to make clear to him and to his parishioners and fellow Gazans they were not forgotten, that their suffering mattered. He said in a voice so faint it could barely be heard as he made his way to Rome’s jail on the last Maundy Thursday of his life, “Every time I go to the jail, I ask myself, “why them and not me?” https://www.usccb.org/news/2025/why-them-and-not-me-pope-asks-after-holy-thursday-visit-jail#:~:text=Pope%20Francis%20continued%20his%20custom,Mass%2C%20he%20prayed%20with%20detainees.

Third, Pope Francis was THE Pope of solidarity. He believed in the dignity of work and the value of working people, and he was deeply in sympathy with working people’s need to act collectively to ensure their lives had dignity—that they were not reduced to mere means to the ends of the wealthy and powerful. At the same time, Pope Francis took working people and their unions seriously—he demanded of working people the same self examination, the same commitment to prophetic values—that he demanded of the wealthy and powerful. His Address to the Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions remains in my view the most thoughtful discussion of the challenges unions face in our time—and yet it is obvious the starting point of that discussion is absolute support for the rights and dignity of workers and of work. In that address Pope Francis said,

“(u)nions are an expression of the prophetic profile of society. Unions are born and reborn each time that, like the biblical prophets, they give a voice to those who have none, denounce those who would “sell the needy for a pair of sandals” (cf. Amos 2:6), unmask the powerful who trample the rights of the most vulnerable workers, defend the cause of foreigners, the least, the rejected.” (https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2017/june/documents/papa-francesco_20170628_delegati-cisl.html)

His peers among the powerful of our time in this respect are the politicians that were union leaders—President Lula of Brazil and President Ramaphoza of South Africa—and they do not approach the way Pope Francis both stood in solidarity with working people and challenged their leaders and institutions to be more than self interested actors.

Fourth, Pope Francis in everything he did, in his very being, exuded the qualities Jesus himself and St. Francis preached—mercy, empathy, forgiveness, appreciation for other people, ALL other people. In some ways, I found his most moving statement as Pope to be his response to a question about LGBTQ Catholics lives, “who am I to judge?” In word and physical being he projected a sense of his own imperfection, his own moral and spiritual frailty. While in the context of the culture of Catholicism this could be seen as a kind of theater, that is not what I witnessed in his presence. My sense was that in the course of his life, as a Jesuit in Argentina during the time of the junta’s murderous violence, as a bishop and Cardinal, he had both done and not done things that haunted him. He knew moral failure, had seen it when he looked in the mirror. And he had converted that into a deep empathy for others—ALL others—as he said, “why them, and not me?”

He tried his best I think to embed this attitude in the institutional life of the Catholic Church, in the face of centuries when something quite different was all too common among the powerful in the Church—censoriousness, shame, righteousness as a tool for wielding power over others, and looking away when that power led to horrific abuses. Many have criticized him for not doing enough to attack patriarchy and homophobia in the Church. Those criticisms are substantively valid—he probably would agree with them in some sense now that it is done. But as a veteran of several slow moving institutions, it seems to me those criticisms miss how hard change is in Catholic Church, and how impressive titles like Pope or Prime Minister or President disguise decidedly limited powers.

No other leader in our time embodies just one of these four qualities as Pope Francis did. Let alone all four. And in the presence of the man himself, I at least felt, as I have felt only when watching films of the last days of Martin Luther King, or reading the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel or Primo Levi, that I was in the presence of holiness. That as the writer Annie Dillard said, holiness is available in our time just as much as it was in the time of Abraham, or Jesus, or Mohammed. In Pope Francis’ physical presence I felt the truth of that statement as in no other moment of my life.