3 | AD PERPETUAM MEMORIAM
3
AD PERPETUAM MEMORIAM
“I am not choosing a man. I am interpreting a silence that stretches back two thousand years. The Spirit does not rumble with the soul; it whispers through history. In this man’s face, I must see not only virtue, but vision. Not only gentleness, but the fire of prophets. I have grown old. I no longer walk the marble halls as I once did, nor do I rise in the night as easily to pray. But I remember. Yes, God forgive me, I remember. God help me—God help us all to remember rightly what we are."
He came to us not as a prince, but as a question. We expected a lion—he touched a tiger, and carried a lamb. We looked for a scholar in silk; instead, we received a man who smelled of the streets and looked like he had wept into his hands. We asked for someone saintly to favor the hopeless, but we found a man, also in humility, regularly asking the faithful to pray for him. We expected a preacher and found a profound listener.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
They said he had been a chemist. I think he was more an alchemist of the heart, turning dogma into compassion. He took the name Francis. Inspired to be an embodiment of Saint Francis of Assisi who prayed:
"Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."
Didn't we sang that in the chapel in every eucharist and felt internally disturbed with our pervading and unrelenting egocentricism and unconfessed troubles?
Bergoglio seemed to have wanted to be the embodiment of the capacity to become a medium of peace in fractured social relations. Hegelian in a way. Radical in a sense. If perceived from its structural logic, the prayer is dialogical. It is built on a series of polarities—hatred/love, injury/pardon, doubt/faith—each one implying a broken communication or violated norm, and each corresponding appeal seeks to restore intersubjective harmony. These contrasts reflect precisely what Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher, would describe as distorted communication in need of repair. The prayer does not ask that these conditions be simply removed by the divine, but rather to be empowered to act as a facilitator in healing. In this sense, it embodies a praxis of moral repair. Its a plea reflecting a decentering of one's self; neither on its own recognition first, but rather seeks to participate in a reciprocal structure of empathy and responsibility. As such, Saint Francis of Assisi's prayer is both a spiritual poetry and a pre-discursive moral vision—a proto-discursive ethic in which the individual seeks to align the demands of intersubjective peace, solidarity, and communicative rationality.
Francis of Assisi was not born a saint. No, the saints never are. They are forged—beaten like iron on the anvil of sorrow, confusion, and grace. Giovanni, son of Pietro Bernardone, merchant prince of Assisi, entered the world amid silk and silver, his cradle carved of walnut, his hands soft with the oils of wealth. The townspeople knew him as Francis—a bright, laughing youth with dreams of valor and the songs of troubadours in his head. He was handsome, reckless, and beloved.
Francis of Assisi believed himself destined for glory, but it was not the glory he imagined. He chased after banners and battles, yearning to be a knight, but one day, kneeling in the dust of the broken church of San Damiano, he was disturbed by a voice to "rebuild my church." The Lord—terrible in His mercy, never asks simply. He did not mean building on stones and mortars. He meant the soul of the Church, which had grown confused about power and its utility.
Francis of Assisi obeyed. He renounced his name, his father, his inheritance. He stood naked in the square, clothed only in light, and said he belonged to God. They called him mad. Perhaps, he was. Saints often are. He walked the roads barefoot, slept on the earth, and begged for bread—not because he enjoyed it, but because the poor had no choice. He gathered others to him, men who were tired of the world and longed for something higher. Together they lived as Christ had lived: without coin, without pride, without comfort, and became the Friars Minor in 1209 -- a mendicant Catholic religious order.
Francis of Assisi loved naturalism, as his story went. Birds came to him. Wolves bowed their heads. He spoke to the sun as to a brother, to the moon as to a sister. To him, the world was not dead matter—it was alive with the breath of God. He called even death his friend. And yet, his greatest suffering came not from poverty nor pain, but from within—from the sorrow of watching his simple way be swallowed by structure, by those who came after him wanting rules, order, security. He had never wanted a grand order. He had only wanted to follow Christ with a broken heart and open hands. He died as he had lived—poor, joyful, and in pain. His body was frail, his eyes nearly blind, but his spirit was luminous. And the world, which had mocked him, could not forget him. Kings envied his joy. Popes feared his purity. Centuries later, a pope took his name—not to claim his legacy, but to kneel before it.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis, walked past the throne prepared for him and chose a wooden chair. In choosing the name Francis, he signaled a discursive break with institutional self-referentiality and invoked a counter-tradition rooted in poverty, ecology, and peace. This symbolic act constituted a communicative reorientation of the papal office—away from doctrinal centralism toward dialogical engagement with both the global periphery and the structural wounds of the Church itself.
He walked in disaster-stricken regions to bring hope. Traveled in nations where Catholics are in the margins, to model a life of interreligious and interfaith dialogues. He was not in the war zones but his mind was immersed to the stories of the wounded, homeless, who've died, and survived. “I am a sinner,” he once said, a confession that resonates with all mortals. And so, too, was Saint Peter. Some said he was naïve. He embraced the rabble, the marginalized, the inconvenient. They reported he kissed the feet of female prisoners and dined with beggars. They were right. The Lord did the same—and that those who follow Him will never look tidy.
Pope Francis remembered something we had forgotten in our Roman comfort: that Christ was never safe. Christ shattered assumptions, overturned tables, and spoke to those whom we, in our lace and incense, too often ignore. This pope dared remember that. And so he made uncomfortable disagreements. Not of the world, but of the respectable. Calmly. But forthright. When he spoke, it is not always doctrinally pristine. But it is human—and I have come to believe that this, too, is holiness. Not the purity of stone, but the purity of the wounded heart that still bleeds for others. They say he is shaking the foundations. No, I say—he is remembering them. Beneath the marble, beneath the centuries, beneath the politics and pretense, there was once a Man who healed on the Sabbath and died between thieves. And this pope—this Francis—has not forgotten Him.
Pope Francis’s early formation within the Society of Jesus, as specially as provincial superior in Argentina from 1973 to 1979, occurred under conditions of profound sociopolitical instability. The military dictatorship that emerged after the 1976 coup initiated the so-called Dirty War, a period characterized by state-sanctioned violence, enforced disappearances, and the systemic erosion of civil liberties. It is within this complex historical constellation—where institutions, including the Church, were morally compromised—that Bergoglio's leadership would later become a subject of critical scrutiny. His cautious and often ambiguous posture during the dictatorship illustrates a larger institutional dilemma: the tension between ecclesial survival and prophetic witness under authoritarian rule.
Concurrently, the Jesuit order itself, underwent a paradigmatic shift—a reorientation on the preferential option for the poor. This internal transformation constituted a form of religious attempt to re-anchor the order's theological praxis in the context of global structural inequality inspired by a vision of ecclesial life grounded in solidarity and ethical responsibility, though it may take some time for these convictions to fully mature.
History narrated that Pope Francis's marginalization in the 1990s, spent largely in contemplative obscurity in Córdoba, reflected not merely a biographical interlude, but a phase of reflexive ecclesial silence and introspection. He underwent a normative reflection and recalibration, increasingly emphasizing humility and direct service as counterweights to hierarchical processes. His subsequent rise through the Church's hierarchy was marked not by clerical triumphalism, but by an ethic of simplicity—demonstrated in concrete gestures such as rejecting limousine transport in favor of public transit and re-establishing communicative proximity with the laity and marginalized.
His election to the papacy in 2013 marked a pivotal moment challenging the post-secular landscape. Pope Francis assumed leadership at a time when the Catholic Church’s moral authority was deeply undermined by the internal issues. His response—a combination of public apologies, structural reforms, and personal gestures of penance—must be seen as part of a broader attempt to re-establish discursive legitimacy through moral transparency. His 2022 penitential pilgrimage to Canada, during which he engaged survivors of indigenous residential schools, represented an effort to reconstruct communicative solidarity by acknowledging historical guilt and the Church’s complicity in systems of cultural violence.
At the level of institutional reform, Pope Francis pursued a decentralization of authority and an overhaul of the Vatican’s opaque financial structures. These efforts reflect not just managerial concerns but a normative commitment to deliberative governance within the Church. His December 2023 recognition of LGBTQ+—illustrates a tensioned but significant shift: an attempt to harmonize tradition with the ethical demands of an evolving public moral, invoking the faith of a person over gender concerns, as primordial.
Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ (2015) exemplified his effort to re-insert the Church into the global moral conversation, particularly on ecological and social justice issues. By framing climate change as a moral and spiritual crisis, and by affirming the rights of Indigenous peoples, Pope Francis moved beyond doctrinal instruction to a form of normative world disclosure that seeks common ground with secular discourses of human rights and planetary stewardship.
The papacy of Francis can be understood as an exercise in post-traditional authority, wherein the legitimacy of the Church is no longer assumed, but must be continually earned through communicative action, moral responsiveness, and symbolic openness. His leadership style—marked by humility, global inclusivity, and ethical transparency—represents a complex negotiation between tradition and modernity, dogma and dialogue, continuity and reform.
In remembering the pontificate of Pope Francis, it becomes apparent that the most visible and publicly celebrated dimensions of his leadership—apostolic outreach, interreligious engagement, ecological concern, and a pastoral theology of mercy—reflect a decisive move toward realigning the Catholic Church with the normative expectations of a post-secular global society. His symbolic acts and public pronouncements have generated broad resonance precisely because they engaged social topics—climate change, inequality, religious pluralism—which transcended doctrinal boundaries and entered into the arena of shared global concerns, where religious institutions must articulate their relevance in a pluralist communicative space.
Nonetheless, this outward-facing success risks obscuring a significant asymmetry between the Church’s discursive presence in the world and the internal transformation of its governing structures. In several retrospectives—both clerical and secular—there is a conspicuous absence of reference to Pope Francis’s more systemic initiatives, particularly his attempted reform of the Roman Curia and his promotion of synodality as a model of ecclesial governance. The silence is not accidental. It reflects both the institutional inertia of a historically centralized authority and a latent resistance among sectors of the episcopate who perceive synodal processes as a challenge to traditional magisterial hierarchies.
The concept of synodality, which implies a more deliberative, participatory, and dialogical form of ecclesial governance, represents a nascent attempt to apply the procedural norms of communicative rationality—deliberation, mutual understanding, consensus-building—within an ecclesiological framework. If successful, it would amount to a structural transformation of the ecclesial public sphere, granting laity and local churches a more active role in moral and doctrinal discernment. If such development faces opposition from within is unsurprising: institutional traditions resist procedural openness when it threatens long-standing authority.
Pope Francis’s initiatives in interfaith dialogue—particularly his unprecedented visits to Muslim-majority countries and his co-authorship of the Document on Human Fraternity—should be seen as contributions to the post-secular project of translation between religious and secular worldviews. These gestures seek not to impose theological content into the public sphere but to offer religious contributions in a form amenable to public reason, thereby reinforcing religion’s role as a source of moral insight in pluralistic societies.
In the moral-political domain, Francis’s critique of neoliberalism, consumerist excess, and exploitative development models articulate a counter-narrative to the economization of life. His encyclical Laudato si’ can be interpreted as a religiously grounded intervention in the global ecological discourse, translating theological language into a universalizable ethical matter capable of engaging secular environmental movements. Likewise, his diplomatic interventions—such as his facilitation in the normalization of U.S.–Cuba relations—signal the Church’s potential to act as a non-state moral actor in international affairs.
Further, his unprecedented public apologies for the Church’s complicity in historical injustices—including the sexual abuse crisis and the cultural destruction of Indigenous communities—represent a normative shift toward institutional accountability and discursive redemption. These acts, while symbolic, enact a form of institutional self-critique that is rare in religious bodies and essential for rebuilding communicative trust with both internal members and the broader public.
Yet, the enduring question remains: can Pope Francis’s charismatic interventions translate into durable institutional learning? The success of his pontificate must ultimately be measured not only by his global moral appeal, but by the capacity of the Church to internalize communicative practices—synodality, transparency, accountability—which align with the procedural demands of modern ethical life. That many of these structural reforms remain contested or fragile highlights the deep ambivalence between tradition-bound authority and the demands of post-traditional legitimacy.
In the late-modern public sphere—marked by its paradoxical secularization and continued thirst for collective symbols—the funeral of a pope remains one of the few globally resonant rituals capable of momentarily suspending the functional differentiation of modern societies. In St. Peter’s Square, beneath the unseasonable clarity of the spring sun, the mourning unraveled with laypersons, clergy, political leaders— present in a shared horizon of meaning.
The communicative power of this gathering emanated not from institutional authority of the departed, but from the legitimating force of his perceived authenticity—a man of discipleship. People viewed the presence of 220 cardinals, 750 bishops, 4,000 priests seated as ecclesiastical hierarchy who were in juxtaposition of the heads of states, ten sovereign monarchs. It mirrored a structural duality: the Church, though embedded in a world of power, stages its self-understanding in non-political terms, as servant and witness.
Yet the most profound was not numerical, rather, phenomenological. The silent assent of over a quarter-million people were there, present in shared affect. An instant world solidarity of his life, his written yearnings, and the living memories he offered to live by.
Perhaps, without the cameras, no applause, he is likely a tired old man begging the Lord to let him love more perfectly. That is the man the world sees only in fragments.
But neither these will matter. For he did not come to be understood. He came to love. And in that love, we have seen the memory of Christ restored.
"How do you love?"
"We do not ask." ♰
