Pope Francis

Pope Francis was a saintly, enlightened religious leader. His death is undoubtedly a loss for humankind.

I started reading his autobiography, Hope, nearly two months back and am still reading it. I could have finished it long ago. But I didn’t want to. Because I loved every page of it. And I wanted this soothing and refreshing feeling, that I got every time I returned to the book, to last as long as it could. So I read the book slowly, one chapter a day, or even slower sometimes.

There are lines in the book that set me thinking for long. There are personal episodes from the Pope’s life that remain etched in my heart. I already wrote two posts based on my reading experience. War is Stupid: Pope Francis & The Pope and a Prostitute. I would have written a lot more. The A-Z challenge I took up in April became a hindrance. But I continued to read the autobiography because I needed the inspiration as well as comfort it offered.

There is compassion on every page of the book. There is a profound understanding of humans, an understanding that transcends all barriers of religion, nationality, language, whatever. Pope Francis was no ordinary human being. 

I was struck by an image of the Pope kneeling down before the leaders of South Sudan and bending down to kiss their shoes in order to show them how sincere he was in his plea for peace in the region. It was not a dramatic gesture as many Indian media reported it. Pope Francis was not an actor. He was driven by the deep compassion he had in his heart, compassion for whole of humanity, not for any one particular religion or region.

His compassion extended to everyone including the LGBTQ+ and prostitutes. He was the only Pope who could write that sinners and prostitutes would go to heaven before priests and other religious people. Dostoevsky was one of the Pope’s favourite novelists because his characters were sinners who grappled with their inner torments. They were highly flawed people, but they confronted their imperfections honestly. Vulnerability can be a bridge to God.

Self-righteousness, on the other hand, takes you farther away from God. Pope Francis was deeply concerned about the self-righteous attitude of his clergy. If the Lord did not forgive everyone, the world would have ended long ago, the Pope says quoting an old woman he had met somewhere. Is the Church as forgiving, as compassionate, as its Lord wants it to be?

Pope Francis wanted to give more importance to the feminine in the Church. “If we clerics don’t understand what a woman is and what a woman’s theology is, we will never understand what the Church is,” he writes in Hope. Masculinisation of the Church is a great sin, according to the Pope. The mystical nature of the feminine deserves a lot more attention in the Church, he goes on to assert.

The sins of the flesh like sex are not the most serious, he says. “They are human sins, of the flesh. The most serious, on the contrary, are the sins that have more ‘angelicity,’ that dress themselves in another guise: pride, hatred, falsehood, fraud, abuse of power.” The Pope implies that our tendency to acclaim and applaud Hitler and Mussolini and scorn the so-called sinners of the world is a “diabolic reversal.” 

Pope Francis was a revolutionary like Jesus. A person who wanted to change the way we see the reality so that we would see better and hence live better. I’m sure he would have done a lot more had his Church allowed him!