My reflections on the papacy of Pope Francis, who died at the age of 88 in Rome on Monday, April 21 — less than a day after delivering brief Easter Sunday greetings to worshippers in St. Peter’s Basilica — are intertwined with experiences of prayer.
When Pope Benedict XVI announced on Feb. 11, 2013, that he would resign the papacy effective at the end of that month, I remembered that Benedict had prayed for me — in the sense that during a private audience with joint delegations to a meeting in Rome of the ecumenical dialogue between the Baptist World Alliance and the Catholic Church in December 2007, I and my family were included in his pledge of prayer for us during his words of greeting: “Dear friends, I offer you my cordial good wishes and the assurance of my prayers for the important work which you have undertaken. Upon your conversations, and upon each of you and your loved ones, I gladly invoke the Holy Spirit’s gifts of wisdom, understanding, strength and peace.”
Steven Harmon greets Pope Francis in 2022.
When I learned of Benedict’s announced retirement, I remembered with gratitude my encounter with Benedict and his pledge of prayers, and I resolved to remember him and his post-pontifical ministry in prayer. I also invited others in my circles to join me in praying for the conclave of the College of Cardinals that would select his successor, whose ministry would have implications for all Christians and the world they inhabit.
The next month, I delivered the Robert K. Campbell Memorial Lectures on Christian Unity sponsored by the Lehigh County Conferences of Churches at DeSales University in Center Valley, Pa. My lectures were on March 12, the day the conclave began, and I began the first lecture by voicing a prayer for the conclave already under way in Rome.
I flew home the next morning, and on the drive home to Boiling Springs, N.C., from the airport in Charlotte later in the day, I heard on NPR the news of the billowing of white smoke in St. Peter’s Square. I made it to my office at Gardner-Webb University just in time to watch coverage online of the announcement of the conclave’s election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio and his presentation as Pope Francis.
Over the next few days, I read everything I could find about the new pope’s previous ministry, and I began to be encouraged that some of the things for which I had personally hoped in a future pope as I prayed for the conclave might come to pass. A week after his election, I shared some of these things with Baptist News Global.
Early encouragement
I was encouraged immediately by the admiration Pope Francis had for Walter Cardinal Kasper, who played a key role in making possible and encouraging the second series of conversations between the Baptist World Alliance and the Catholic Church from 2006 through 2010. In his first public “Angelus” address in St. Peter’s Square on March 17, Pope Francis had said:
In these days, I have been able to read a book by a cardinal — Cardinal Kasper, a talented theologian, a good theologian — on mercy. And it did me such good, that book, but don’t think that I’m publicizing the books of my cardinals. That is not the case! But it did me such good, so much good. … Cardinal Kasper said that hearing the word “mercy” changes everything. It is the best thing that we can hear: it changes the world. A bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just. We need to understand God’s mercy well, this merciful Father who has such patience.
“The appreciation of Francis for this friend of Baptists was an indication of his own ecumenical openness.”
Cardinal Kasper was secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in the years before and during our conversations. When the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the controversial document Dominus Iesus in 2000 that seemed to say many non-Catholic churches, including Baptist churches, should not be really regarded as churches, Cardinal Kasper worked behind the scenes to repair the damage. One thing he did toward that end was to encourage the global leadership of the BWA to respond positively to the invitation for dialogue and to promote its desirability within the Vatican.
The appreciation of Francis for this friend of Baptists was an indication of his own ecumenical openness that some of us would later experience firsthand as Baptists, and the decision to highlight Kasper’s theology of mercy anticipated a papal ministry that would endeavor to extend the mercy of God to the world.
Mentioning MLK
Martin Luther King delivers a sermon on May 13, 1956, in Montgomery, Ala. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Two years into his papacy, Francis would address a joint session of the U.S. Congress and would mention a Baptist saint, Martin Luther King Jr., along with Catholics Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, as models for seeking the justice God seeks for the world. His commendation of a Baptist as an example of the lived Christian life was remarkable for a pope, but it was also instructive for Baptists, who can recognize non-Baptist Christians as saintly models for our living of the Christian life too — as indeed many Baptists already have been doing.
I thought the fact that Pope Francis belonged to the Jesuit order was auspicious for those who hoped for new developments of reform in the life of the Catholic Church, for historically the Jesuits have sometimes been on the outs with the Vatican and have themselves tended to be critical of the Curia. This gave me hope this would be a pope who would not shrink from seeking to lead the church to be more fully a church of the people and for the people.
He did this in significant ways as a teacher of the church. While Pope Benedict XVI has been remembered as the theologian who became pope, Francis has played an important role in his exercise of the Catholic Church’s papal teaching authority. Not everything the pope teaches has the degree of authority of an ex cathedra definition of Catholic doctrine — the “extraordinary magisterium,” never exercised by Benedict or Francis — but papal encyclicals as expressions of the “ordinary magisterium” are important sources of Catholic theological instruction, and not only for Catholics. I’ve required my divinity students to read some of the encyclicals of Francis.
The writings of Pope Francis
In the first year of his papacy, Francis finished an encyclical begun by Benedict: “On Faith” (Lumen Fidei). While it reflects the interests of his predecessor in the theological sources of authority for the church’s faith, Francis emphasized the faith they authorize as what helps the church discern and attend to the sufferings that mark the present order of this world.
Francis’ first solo-authored encyclical, “On Care for Our Common Home” (Laudato Si’), may be the most enduringly influential of the trio of encyclicals written in full by Francis. Each year students in my Christian ethics course read it as one of the texts assigned for our unit on ecological ethics. My first reading of Laudato Si was on the morning of its public release online on June 18, 2015. I was attending the General Assembly of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in Dallas, devoted to the theme “Building Bridges,” with bridges crossing racial divides among the principal applications. We had just learned of the murder of nine African American members of Mother Emmanuel A.M.E Church in Charleston, S.C., by white supremacist Dylann Roof the previous evening.
I read quickly through Laudato Si over breakfast with that weighing on my mind, and I was struck by the applicability of its theological framework for ecological justice to the pursuit of racial justice. Its analysis of the human roots of the ecological crisis was nothing less than a theological anthropology — an account of God’s intentions for humanity as the image of God. It was an account of God’s creation of humanity for relationship, for relationship with God, fellow humanity and the rest of the created order. It described how the sinful turn away from the other and toward the self was at the heart of the modern alienated relationship between humanity and creation, with the violence that marks human relationships seen as an expression of this alienation.
A distorted anthropology accounts for both violence toward creation and violence toward people, and a restorative anthropological vision of the interconnectedness of humanity and of the whole of creation offers the hope of reconciliation and healing both for humanity and for the whole created order to which humanity belongs.
Francis’ second encyclical, “On Fraternity and Social Friendship” (Fratelli Tutti), was issued in October 2020 in the midst of the social isolation experienced during that first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It made extensive reference to Laudato Si’ and developed its theological anthropology more fully as a theology of human fraternity that answers to the aversion to the “other” that marks many expressions of contemporary American culture.
“To be fully human is to be in relationship with people who aren’t like us.”
The other who is other than us is inseparable from our identity as human: to be fully human is to be in relationship with people who aren’t like us. When we are in relationship only with those who are like us, we are less than the fulness of the creation of humanity in the image of God.
Francis also in this connection offered the Baptist Martin Luther King Jr. as an embodied example of a more fully relational theological anthropology with the potential for including diverse others within the bond of human fraternity, formed by the experience of being “othered” by an exclusionary society in the Southern United States. Francis lists King first among the “brothers and sisters who are not Catholics” who particularly inspired him in this connection.
Although he doesn’t cite it, Francis may have been inspired by King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. In it, King wrote: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Pope Francis issued a third and final encyclical that may have been missed by many Americans preoccupied with their intensifying presidential election cycle, as it was published on Oct. 24, 2024: “On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ” (Dilexit Nos).
At the beginning of its concluding section, he wrote: “The present document can help us see that the teaching of the social Encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti is not unrelated to our encounter with the love of Jesus Christ. For it is by drinking of that same love that we become capable of forging bonds of fraternity, of recognizing the dignity of each human being, and of working together to care for our common home.”
The last four brief paragraphs of Dilexit Nos are worth reading in full, for they summarize well the role of the “People’s Pope” as a theological teacher of the church (and not only of Catholic members of the whole church) and what he chose to emphasize in the role:
The present document can help us see that the teaching of the social encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti is not unrelated to our encounter with the love of Jesus Christ. For it is by drinking of that same love that we become capable of forging bonds of fraternity, of recognizing the dignity of each human being, and of working together to care for our common home.
“In a world where everything is bought and sold, people’s sense of their worth appears increasingly to depend on what they can accumulate with the power of money.”
In a world where everything is bought and sold, people’s sense of their worth appears increasingly to depend on what they can accumulate with the power of money. We are constantly being pushed to keep buying, consuming and distracting ourselves, held captive to a demeaning system that prevents us from looking beyond our immediate and petty needs. The love of Christ has no place in this perverse mechanism, yet only that love can set us free from a mad pursuit that no longer has room for a gratuitous love. Christ’s love can give a heart to our world and revive love wherever we think that the ability to love has been definitively lost.
The Church also needs that love, lest the love of Christ be replaced with outdated structures and concerns, excessive attachment to our own ideas and opinions, and fanaticism in any number of forms, which end up taking the place of the gratuitous love of God that liberates, enlivens, brings joy to the heart and builds communities. The wounded side of Christ continues to pour forth that stream which is never exhausted, never passes away, but offers itself time and time again to all those who wish to love as he did. For his love alone can bring about a new humanity.
I ask our Lord Jesus Christ to grant that his Sacred Heart may continue to pour forth the streams of living water that can heal the hurt we have caused, strengthen our ability to love and serve others, and inspire us to journey together toward a just, solidary and fraternal world. Until that day when we will rejoice in celebrating together the banquet of the heavenly kingdom in the presence of the risen Lord, who harmonizes all our differences in the light that radiates perpetually from his open heart. May he be blessed forever.
Pope Francis thus concluded his final encyclical with a prayer to Jesus, that he might heal the harm we have caused to the world and help us do the work of reconciliation and justice that God has called us to do.
A person of prayer
I experienced Pope Francis as a person of prayer who humbly invited people to pray for him in December 2018, when our joint commission for the international ecumenical dialogue between the Baptist World Alliance and the Catholic Church met in Rome. We attended the weekly general audience along with about 2,000 other people, but afterward the members of our joint dialogue commission were brought forward and briefly introduced to Pope Francis. He spoke to us in English and said, “Pray for me!”, and we assured him that we do. He also said, “If we do not find a way to get together, they will eat us raw!” (which we interpreted as meaning, “they will eat us alive”).
In December 2022, our Baptist-Catholic dialogue joint commission again met in Rome, and this time we had a private audience with Pope Francis.
At the beginning of the week, we had been told our private audience with Pope Francis preceding his Wednesday morning general audience likely would be very brief. But after Pope Francis walked into the audience hall and said in Spanish to an Argentinian Catholic theologian on our joint commission whom he recognized, “We did well, didn’t we?” (this was the morning following Argentina’s World Cup semifinal win over Croatia), he spoke to us at length in Italian, translated into English for us. He shared with us earnestly many things that were on his mind and in his heart, from the war in Ukraine, to ecumenical challenges and opportunities, to how he hoped Baptists could help Catholics fight the “dangers of clericalism,” and back to his concerns about Ukraine. He then invited us to join him in praying the Lord’s Prayer, each of us in our own language — a profoundly meaningful experience — before greeting each of us individually on his way out of the hall.
Pope Francis presented with Steven Harmon’s book.
That private audience with Pope Francis in December 2022 was memorable for me for another reason I will always cherish. On behalf of our joint commission, elected BWA President Tomás Mackey, who also is from Argentina, presented Pope Francis with a copy of my book Baptists, Catholics, and the Whole Church: Partners in the Pilgrimage to Unity, signed by each member of the commission. The book was rooted in the work of the joint commissions for Phase II and Phase III of the Baptist-Catholic dialogue, so we thought it a symbolically appropriate gift.
I have prayed for Pope Francis often during his papacy, and I did so with new urgency earlier in February of this year when we learned of his hospitalization and grave condition. In the midst of his illness, he continued to serve God, the church and the world faithfully.
Although diagnosed with acute bronchitis on Feb. 3, on Feb. 10 Francis wrote and published a “Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America” that denounced the Trump administration’s efforts at mass deportation and implicitly but directly rejected the appeal of Catholic Vice President JD Vance to the Augustinian concept of an ordo amoris, a “hierarchy” or “ordering” of loves, as a religious justification for directing one’s energies and resources to meeting the needs of our own nation rather than caring for migrants and refugees from other nations who come to our nation.
He wrote, “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” … that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” Four days later Francis was hospitalized, and I thanked God when he was released from the hospital 38 days later on March 23.
His final message
I most recently prayed for Pope Francis when I learned this past weekend that Vice President Vance was in Rome and seeking to meet with Francis. Vance was granted a very brief meeting with Francis just before Francis appeared in St. Peter’s Basilica to deliver his Easter greetings. While I do not know what Francis said to Vance, we do know what Francis said in his final Easter message, delivered orally on his behalf by Archbishop Diego Ravelli just after Francis delivered his own brief greetings.
It included what became Francis’ final social media post: “Christ is risen! These words capture the whole meaning of our existence, for we were not made for death but for life.”
Francis also said: “On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas! For all of us are children of God!”
“May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions.”
“I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the ‘weapons’ of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death! May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenseless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.”
May we all heed these final preached words of Pope Francis.
Pope Francis has been faithful in fervently praying for God’s world, and I am confident he is continuing to do so. Many of our Catholic brothers and sisters will no doubt ask Francis to pray for them, interceding with God in prayer on their behalf, as they would do during his earthly life.
This “intercession of the saints,” directly asking departed saints to pray for us, is not a feature of my Baptist tradition. But I do believe when I am praying, I am praying along with Francis and all other members of the communion of saints who have departed this earthly life and are praying in their life “with the Lord” (as found in 2 Corinthians 5:8) as they await the resurrection. I am strengthened by the conviction that when I am praying, I am praying along with this particular saint.
I will now be praying for my Catholic brothers and sisters in these days of mourning, and I also will be praying for the members of the College of Cardinals who will soon meet in conclave to select the next pope. I share the worries of many that there may be efforts by some to elect a pope who will turn the Catholic Church in a more rightward direction, away from the openness and concern for social justice that has marked the papacy of Pope Francis. But there were similar worries in 2013 — and look what happened!
While it may seem that a traditionalist movement is gaining ground in some quarters of the Catholic Church, Francis has appointed 80% of the cardinals who will be eligible to vote in this next papal conclave.
I hope readers of Baptist News Global will join me in prayers of thanksgiving for the life of God’s faithful servant Pope Francis, in prayers for ourselves that we may heed his summons to be more faithful followers of Jesus Christ, and in prayers for the College of Cardinals, that they may be led by God’s Spirit in choosing his successor.
Steven R. Harmon serves as professor of historical theology at Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity in Boiling Springs, N.C. His most recent books are Baptists, Catholics, and the Whole Church: Partners in the Pilgrimage to Unity and Seeds of the Church: Towards an Ecumenical Baptist Ecclesiology (co-edited with Teun van der Leer, Henk Bakker and Elizabeth Newman).