Today, Pope Francis becomes only the seventh Holy Father to be laid to rest at the Papal Basilica of St Mary Major in Rome.
Built over seven centuries ago, the basilica was the first of the Roman shrines to be built in honour of the Virgin Mary. It is considered the first Marian Church and Papal basilica in the world.
This choice of resting place has been said to be significant because of its relatively humble status, as contrasted with the traditional papal resting grounds at the Vatican City, where the majority of past popes have been laid to rest.
Others who have been interred here include Pope Honorius III (1150–1227), Nicholas IV (1227–1292), St Pius V (1504–1572), Sixtus V (1521–1590), Clement VIII (1536–1605), and Clement IX (1600–1669).
In death as in life, the departed 266th head of the Roman Catholic Church elected simplicity. His was always a simple life, dedicated to prayer and service to humankind.
In the fullness of time, Pope Francis will be remembered as a modest man of God who loved and served humanity with utmost humility. His abiding concern has been about the people and social justice; the critical tenets of the Society of Jesuits that he belonged to from his youth.
His life was his message. It told the world that the beautiful things of life are often found not in machinery and concrete, or in other psychedelic stuff. Nor do they rise in burdensome velvet and jewellery, but in simple living.
This was the lesson that Pope Francis metaphorically taught by the example of his own life. He taught that relationships, peace, and quiet contentment in minimalist spaces can be more fulfilling than the commotion of material excess. Hence, both in Argentina and at the Vatican, he chose simple abodes, rather than the more ornate leisurely lodgings that were placed at his disposal.
Born and raised in the deprived global South, the young man who would become the 266th heir to the throne of St Peter was witness to the harsh realities of life among some of the least privileged peoples of the world.
An encounter with pneumonia in early adulthood led him to join the down-to-earth Society of Jesuits. This accounts for many things about him and his ended papacy. They range from his choice of the name Francis, when he was elected Pope in March 2013, to the humble life he led throughout his earthly pilgrimage.
The abiding concerns that informed his papacy and overall ecclesiastical tour of duty, all have their foundation in Jesuit principles and thrust.
Who are the Jesuits and what is their philosophical link with St Francis of Assisi, the Catholic friar, for whom the Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio named himself when he became the pope?
The Society of the Jesuits was established by Ignatius of Loyola, in Spain in 1534. With him were Peter Ferber and Francis Xavier (later St Francis Xavier).
Loyola’s early days and later life closely mirrored that of Francis of Assisi (1181–1226).
Pope Francis would subsequently pattern his own life against their later and more outstanding lifestyle. For, Francis of Assisi distinguished himself early in life as an irresponsible, dissipatand libertine youth. His confessional narratives speak of the tormented soul of an individual who was at odds with his earlier self. He was a youth of fine looks, beloved of members of the fair sex, and endowed with monies that he splashed on the finer things of life. He would later abandon that path, following a stint in the military, and a strange vision that made him turn his back on lascivious living.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio mirrored the transformed life of both Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola. All the three were deeply concerned about the natural environment, and embraced life of self-denial and austerity.
Ignatius, whose Society of the Jesuits was approved in 1540 by Pope Paul III, was deeply concerned about the plight of the poor. The Society of the Jesuits closely mirrors the Franciscans whom Assisi founded. Both are friars, dedicated to the poor and peace. To these concerns, Pope Francis would add interreligious dialogue as the triple pillars of his Christian stewardship.
The Jesuits of the 16th Century traversed Europe, establishing schools and hospitals for the poor. Jorge Mario Bergoglio (the late Pope Francis) joined this order at age 22, in 1958. He would embrace the same concerns about the poor and the environment, as did Loyola and St. Francis before him. St Francis is considered the patron saint of the environment and ecology.
Within the Catholic fraternity, October 4 is celebrated as the Feast of St Francis of Assisi. At the heart of it are environmental concerns. Hence, it is of little wonder that in May 2015 Pope Francis issued the papal letter (encyclical) titled Laudato Si.
Encyclicals are formal papal letters or circulars, addressed to Catholic bishops.
But, often too, they address the entire Catholic faithful. They will usually focus on a burning question of the day, and are normally named after the opening words. Hence, Laudato Si, translates into Praise Be.
Like most things about Pope Francis, Laudato takes from the invocation of Francis of Assisi, 800 years earlier, “Praise be to you, Lord.” Francis was writing a psalm of praise to God, because of creation of life, and especially creating animals and their natural environment.
Our planet Earth “is like a sister with whom we share our life, and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us,” he wrote.
But how are we shaping the future of our common loving sister and compassionate mother? This is the focus of Laudato Si. It is about caring for this endangered planet, an assignment that Pope Francis recognized as belonging not just to the Catholic faithful, but to the entire global population. Hence, Laudato Si, goes beyond Catholic bishops and faithful, to address “every person living on this planet.”
If it has been the human tradition for people outside the Catholic Church to revere the Catholic Pope as a global unifying figure and symbol of divinity, Laudato Si defines the departed Pope Francis as the unifier per excellence.
His letter to humankind calls for “global dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet through our daily actions and decisions.”
You do not have to be Catholic to recognise that the choices we are making today are destroying the Earth, which the Pope called “our common home.” Whatever affects this home affects all who live in it.
But in the call for global dialogue on the planet, relative to our actions and decisions, the Pope opened up the space for discourse in other areas too.
His letter to the world noted that environmental degradation was a factor of industrialization, technology and human selfishness. While this circular did not condemn the benefits of science and technology, it called for sober all-inclusive discourse and balancing the benefits of innovation with the future of the planet, as our legacy to future generations.
Dialogue is a major defining character in defining the Church under the departed pontifex maximus. For history is replete with regrettable draconian tendencies and practices by the Church and the Holy See itself.
This was the order of things, especially, in the European Middle Ages (5th Century to the 16th Century) all the way to the Renaissance (16th and 17th Centuries) whenever the Church disagreed with current or emerging trends.
The era of the Grand Inquisition is especially recalled with shudders and shivers. King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile are noted for establishing the Tribunal of the Holy Office of Inquisition in 1478. Both were Catholic monarchs who sought the purity of Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms. Their tribunal became a part of a wider Catholic Inquisition, under the Pope. It had variants in the Roman Inquisition and the Portuguese Inquisition.
These institutions had no time for things like “discourses, dialogue and conversations.” Divergent opinion from Catholic orthodoxy was simply heresy. It had to be exorcised and severely punished.
The heretic was given the chance to repent and recant their “satanic beliefs,” or be put to death. And recanting did not necessarily mean that the culprit got off the hook.
In the case of the shepherd girl called Joan of Arc (1412–1431), later St Joan (who claimed to be hearing voices from the angels telling her to liberate French territories from the English during the One hundred years War), the girl initially recanted. Basically to save herself from being burnt at the notorious stake, she agreed with the Inquisition, after a lot of persuasion, that she had been hearing satanic voices, whereupon the verdict was read out to her:
In order to protect her from a repeat of these satanic visitations, she was to spend the rest of her life in isolated imprisonment; to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the water of affliction.
A shocked Joan snatched the paper on which her repentance had been signed. She tore it into pieces and restated her earlier position on her angelic voices. She ordered them to light their fire! Joan went up in flames in 1431, holding not on the normal Christian cross, but the cross of Orleans. But in 1456 the Inquisition did a fresh posthumous trial. The earlier verdict was overturned on account of procedural errors, hatred and deceit. In 1920 Pope Benedict XV canonized Joan.
In all, the Inquisition executed anywhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people. Many others received other forms of incarceration.
Galileo Galilei, for his study in astronomy and invention of the telescope, was “found vehemently suspect for heresy.”
Under Pope Urban VIII, Galilei was, in 1633, sentenced to life imprisonment. The sentence was later reviewed and reduced to house arrest. He lived that way to the end of his life in 1642.
Giordano Bruno, a scientist, philosopher and mathematician was burnt alive at the stake in 1600 for embracing the ideas of Nicolaus Copernicus and rejecting a number of canonical Catholic doctrines, even as he considered himself Christian. Their contentious hypotheses have since been proved scientifically correct.
It is a great leap forward that the Church has had a reformist pontifex maximus in Pope Francis, who embraced and encouraged dialogue on the great questions of the day. The new path of conversations he encouraged traversed many spaces, other than faiths-based issues and environmental issues.
The starting point was, naturally, ecclesiastical. The Earth and all in it has been handed over to humankind where it has been written, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Gen. 1:28.
Within the ecclesiastical space, Pope Francis will be remembered for encouraging dialogue not just within the broad global Christian community, but also across different religions. He went way beyond the coordinates of modern ecumenism (that seek greater cooperation and unity within the Christian faith).
He challenged us to ask ourselves how much of the good earth, our common home, and the benefits it bequeaths us would satisfy us. How much of these benefits do we expect to take with us when we leave for the place where Pope Francis has gone?
Dr Muluka is a communications adviser
