A year ago, on Easter Monday morning, Pope Francis left this earth. And it is in these very days that Donald Trump’s attack on Leo XIV has delivered to the world a sharp image: a President who, unable to contain a moral voice, insults it on his social-media feed, going so far as to post himself as a messiah dispensing cures.
To call the pope “weak” for pleading for peace is to confess that the grammar of power no longer knows what to do with the Gospel, except to press it cunningly into its own service, twisted to fit.
And it is precisely on this battlefield — political, mediatic, spiritual — that two of Francis’s intuitions ring out: the Church as a “field hospital” and the “third world war fought piecemeal.” Together, they are a diagnosis of our age and a proposed cure, and at this juncture, they must be held in the same breath.
The image of the field hospital was born in August 2013, when I interviewed him for La Civiltà Cattolica. When asked what the Church most needed, he replied, “I see her as a field hospital after a battle. The wounds must be tended.”
It was a dramatic diagnosis: modern men and women wounded by an economy of exclusion, by the imperilment of our common home, and by a distinctly digital loneliness. The Church had to give up the pretense of being a dogmatic fortress and become a movable tent, ready to get itself muddy in the mire of history.
The other prophetic intuition — the “third world war fought piecemeal,” pronounced in August 2014 on the flight back from Korea — has proved tragically apt. 2025 saw the highest number of armed conflicts since the Second World War; the trend has not reversed in 2026. International law is under siege.
The pieces of the war are welding themselves together, Francis warned before he died. The piecemeal war is the diagnosis; the field hospital is the cure. If the world is a battlefield, the answer is not to retreat into the sacristy but to go out, pitch a tent where the fighting is, tend the wounded without first asking for their papers, and welcome everyone, everyone, everyone. This bond has a name: fraternity. Not a vague feeling but a radical political category in which the other is recognized as a brother, always and without qualification.
Francis’s legacy is also made of his body turned into a message: the silence at Auschwitz, the altar at Ciudad Juárez, eighty meters from the wall, the feet of South Sudan’s politicians kissed in the Vatican.
For him, touch was the most religious of the senses. The world of 2026, shaken by warlords who think of rearmament rather than of hunger, needs that holy folly, now embodied in Leo’s courage.
With thanks to Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA) and Antonio Spadaro SJ, where this article originally appeared.
