Dr Gearóid Barry, a native of Barryroe and a lecturer in the Department of History, University of Galway, offers his reflections on the late pontiff.
The woman interviewed on RTÉ television on her way into Galway Cathedral put it pretty well as she reacted to news that Pope Francis had died in the early morning hours in Rome.
We had watched him on the TV yesterday, appearing in St Peter’s Square for Easter Sunday, she said.
She paused and then landed on a pithy summary of the 88-year-old’s manner of leaving: ‘an Easter blessing, and then a resurrection.’
Many of us were indeed shocked at the Easter Monday news but neither could we be surprised.
Sitting here in Galway this Easter week, as an historian interested in religious affairs who also happens to be Catholic, I wonder what we can sift from the coverage of the passing of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Jesuit bishop who, as he ruefully put it, was made to swap diocese – from teeming, tangoing Buenos Aires for eternal Rome – at the tender age of 76 some twelve years ago.
For Pope Francis, doctrine did matter but it should serve the people of God as an anchor rather than as a straightjacket.
Gay Catholics - who have always been part of the church - breathe more easily in the church thanks to him.
There were, and are, legitimate disappointments for progressives; the hesitation over women deacons is an obvious one.
There were also, and remain, conservative critics of Francis with legitimate points.
When he deemed it necessary, this ex-bouncer and lab chemist was also a steely character, ‘a storm pilot’ as he had been known in Argentina, sometimes quite a tough one.
It was surely during the Covid-19 storm that he was at his most compelling, though. On March 27th 2020 a solitary pope led prayers from a deserted, dark and rainy St Peter’s Square as an invisible virus shrouded the city and the world in fear, the moments of silence broken only by the sirens of emergency services.
By the time Francis presided over the funeral of his ‘wise grandfather’ and predecessor Pope Benedict XVI in January 2023, time was beginning to catch up with Francis himself.
Presented with much wit and affection as an archetypal odd couple (played brilliantly by Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce) in the hit movie The Two Popes in 2019, the two men had much more in common than stereotypes allowed.
After all, it was Joseph Ratzinger who told La Reppublica newspaper in 2004 (months before his own election as pope) that beyond any rules ‘the true essence of Christianity is a love story between God and human beings. If one could understand this in the language of today, everything else would follow.’ What Benedict sincerely meant, Francis could communicate instinctively.
I count myself lucky to have seen the man a small number of times, once in Dublin in 2018 and more recently in the Vatican on New Year’s Eve 2023.
At the end of the papal Vespers, a wheelchair-bound pope was wheeled past my coral inside the basilica prompting an unholy scrum as sharp-elbowed pilgrims clambered onto plastic chairs, smartphone in hand, to get proof for social media they had seen the pope!
Thirty minutes later, outside in the Square, I saw a less comical and more touching encounter with the faithful.
Having put on a sensible white coat for the night air, Francis visited the open-air Nativity scene which was complete with extra characters – St Francis of Assisi and his companions – to acknowledge the 800 years since Francis first installed a ‘live crib’ in the poor mountain village of Greccio in 1223 for the people to see God’s closeness in a baby.
From their watery graves in the Mediterranean to the hospitals, refugee camps, prisons and dung-heaps, Pope Francis brought the lost and the forgotten, the disfigured and the troubled, the innocent victims of the modern King Herods, the haughty Caesers and their robber-baron friends, he brought them all to the altar of the world where he raised them up for us all to see.
Just as the priest does when he holds up the Body and Blood of Jesus in the humble elements of bread and wine.
May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
