It would be too much to expect that the moving funeral of Pope Francis — who believed himself to be no greater than the lowest of the faithful, even as he took on the responsibility of leading a billion and a half souls in search of meaning in a modern wilderness of secularism and materialism — will bring about a symbolic reconcilement.
It may already be too late. Yesterday’s ceremony, marked as it was by a profound synthesis of simplicity and spectacle, remains all the same a solemn representation of what has been lost.
Human beings need ritual and tradition to give shape to our lives. Through no fault of their own, too many in this country were cruelly excluded from the light in the darkness offered by faith. Its absence in their lives is a continuing grief.
By definition, the death of every Pope marks the end of an era. The next Pope, whoever is chosen in the days to come, will put his own stamp on the institution. What is needed is a renewal of the radical humility that Francis brought to the role.
Mocking his foes, communist dictator Joseph Stalin once infamously asked: “How many divisions does the Pope have?” An atheist, he could only see the world through that brutal lens.
Pope Francis’s life reminds us that power does not lie simply in political or military might, or economic strength — vital as they are on an ever more insecure planet — but in moral authority.
The funeral homily delivered by Cardinal Re was markedly more political than those for the Holy Father’s predecessors, Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II, which focused on the message of the Gospel rather than more worldly affairs. That speaks to the fraught times we are in.
Yesterday, there was a pointed remembrance of Francis’s very first visit as Pontiff to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, to which thousands of desperate migrants had arrived in the months before, and where he decried the “culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people”. His words have only grown more urgent since.
Striking too was the reference to his journey to the Mexican border in 2016, where he celebrated mass within a few weeks of President Trump taking office for the first time on a promise to build a wall to keep out those seeking a better life.
It will always be a Pope’s sacred duty to exhort world leaders to show compassion and mercy to the most needy.
They are tools which should be applied to every political problem, even if they are not solutions in and of themselves.
The US president’s seeming indifference to either of those qualities remains a terrifying danger to all our hopes for a better world.
One can only pray that the image of President Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky quietly talking with one another in St Peter’s Basilica will be the impetus to revitalise the peace negotiations from which the US keeps threatening to walk away.
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