The Pope of Firsts – A Hero to Many

Mike Sarafa
Special to the Chaldean News

A little Mercy makes the world less cold and more just

– Pope Francis
March 17, 2013
In his first Angelus address
St. Peter’s Square

Jorge Mario Bergolio was the first Pope from South America; the first to choose the name Francis; the first Jesuit Pope; the first Pope to visit Iraq; the first in modern times to shun the Papal Palace and the other trappings of the Papacy; and many other norm shattering items.

What I loved about the Pope were things a little more subtle—his ability to shake us from our complacency; his irreverent approach to tradition and authority; his willingness to be a little less sure that he and the Church had all the answers.

On his first Holy Thursday as Pope, he traded the traditional ceremony for a visit to a prison where he personally washed the feet of prisoners, including two women and two Muslims. That tradition continued for each Holy Thursday of his Papacy up to and including last month, where he made the visit but was too ill to wash the feet of the prisoners.

At his first World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, he encouraged young people “to make a mess,” to shake things up. But to then be part of “cleaning it up.” In 2013, at the Families Festival in Philadelphia, Francis disregarded his prepared remarks and delivered an extraordinary speech on God’s vision for families. Paraphrasing, Francis told the crowd, “In the greatest expression of love ever in history, where did God send His son? To a palace, to a city, to a nation? No. God sent him to a family, amid a family, a family who had the doors to their hearts open.”

In a somewhat harsh address to the Roman Curia before Christmas in 2014, the Pope delivered what was then described as a blistering critique of clericalism in the Church bureaucracy where he derided spiritual apathy, the pathology of power, the terrorism of gossip, and the ailment of closed circles. Priests, he said, “should have the smell of sheep” and his image for the Church was that of a “field hospital,” where the religious attend to and focus on the walking wounded people of God.

In one of my favorite quotes of his Papacy, he told those gathered in Philadelphia in an amazing crescendo after urging people to take care of children and grandparents that “a people that doesn’t know how to look after children is a people that has no future and a people that does not look after its elderly, those whom transmitted our faith to us, has neither the strength to go forward nor the memory to go forward.”

The Pope was also a savvy politician. Nearly 80 percent of the Cardinals that will elect the next Pope were appointed by Francis. But, over the course of his tenure, he ignored some of the typical Cardinalate Sees in favor of clerics “from the peripheries.” Many small countries and Dioceses had Bishops made Cardinals for the first time and Francis deliberately set out to shift the balance of power in the Curia from Europe to the Global South, Africa, and Asia.

More recently, he switched plans for the appointment of the next Archbishop of Washington D.C after the election of President Trump. After initially thinking of appointing a different person to the vacancy, Pope Francis settled on Bishop Robert McElroy, whose background suggests that he is well positioned to take on the Trump Administration on matters pertaining to immigration and help for the poor.

When the nascent Catholic Vice President J.D. Vance tried to lecture the U.S Conference of Bishops on a Catholic version of “America First,” suggesting that people should take care of their family, community and country before others, the Pope set his sights directly on the Vice President without mentioning his name. “Christian love”, the Pope said, “is not the concentric expansion of interest that little by little extend to other persons and groups.”  Polarization, the Pope believed, is the antithesis of Catholicism.

It would be remiss if I did not mention the Pope’s historic trip to Iraq. In his relatively recent autobiography, the Pope revealed publicly for the first time that British and Iraqi intelligence officials foiled two separate assassination plots against the Pope. The trip’s inherent danger was further complicated by its timing, which was during the Covid pandemic. Many times during his Papacy, Francis held and released doves.

One of the other iconic images of his Papacy is his impromptu and warm embrace of Vincio Riva, who suffered from neurofibromatosis resulting in large growths all over his face and body. The Pope approached Vinicio spontaneously. He laid his hands on his head. He kissed his face in a moment of pure compassion. Summoning comparisons to the Gospel parable of Jesus’s encounters with lepers, this photo, to me, sums up Francis’s message of mercy, dignity, and radical love towards each other— but especially for the marginalized. Among so many great legacies Pope Francis leaves us with, perhaps that is the greatest.

Next Pope

The media, of course is rife with speculation on who might be elected by the Conclave as the next Pope—a dangerous exercise to be sure. The names mostly revolve around the same 8 to 15 Cardinals, but almost every journalist cautions about the possibility of a surprise. Of the names most mentioned, there are three that I like and are real possibilities. These three go against one common strain of thought—that the next Pope will, again, be from outside of Europe. But I think the Cardinals form the “periphery” might be more inclined towards a more traditional approach. So, all three of these are European. They are:

• Cardinal Maria Grech from Malta

• Cardinal Matteo Zuppi from Bologna, Italy

• Cardinal Peter Erdo from Budapest, Hungary

• One longshot: an American and the brother of my good friend, Cardinal Joseph Tobin from Newark, New Jersey, who was a favorite of Pope’s Francis. He is a Redemptorist and served for some time at Holy Redeemer Parish in Detroit.