Pope Francis smiled a lot, easily and broadly. He thrived on direct, informal encounters: phone calls, penned notes, hugs, audiences with small groups. He was impatient with protocol: he carried his own overnight bag, bused his own tray at the cafeteria, and answered reporters’ questions in his own words, extemporaneously. He was attentive, determined, testy, mercurial, sometimes deliberate, sometimes in a hurry, hard to read, and hard to pin down. Elected to the papacy at the age of seventy-six, Francis brought those character traits to the office for twelve years, until his death on Monday, and over time they were more sharpened than altered. That seems the most significant aspect of his time as Pope. Through sheer personableness, he took Roman Catholicism back to street level and brought the papacy down to earth, much the way that John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council, had done six decades ago. In spite of Church scandals involving clerical sexual abuse and Vatican finances and open resistance from doctrinal and liturgical traditionalists, he remained a man who wasn’t defined by his role.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that Benedict XVI resigned unexpectedly—the first Pope to do so in six centuries—and Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected Pope. That was March, 2013, and the images from Francis’s first weeks in office are still fresh in mind: returning to the hotel where he’d stayed prior to his election to pay his bill, setting up residence in a plain modern guesthouse rather than the Apostolic Palace, trading the papal Mercedes-Benz for a Fiat. This Pope was new in many respects: the first Jesuit Pope, the first Pope from the Americas, the first to take the name Francis, after the Italian saint known for his embrace of poverty and his care for the natural world.
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With thanks to The New Yorker and Paul Elie, where this article originally appeared.
