The Pope of the Peripheries

Thoughts on the passing of Pope Francis (1936-2025)

I once saw him live, in person. It was on Copacabana beach in Rio, World Youth Day, 2013, a few weeks after he had become pope. Somewhat out of the blue, I had been invited to speak at a panel on “Jesus and the Environment” as part of the week’s festivities. (Perhaps an early rumbling of the spirit and interest behind the famous Laudato Si’ encyclical, still two years yet to come.)

Have you ever stood in a milling crowd of over one million people? A daunting idea but, in this case, a happy crowd of mostly young people, jubilant, expectant, singing and chanting at times, as though awaiting the arrival of the greatest soccer star of all time.

He eventually arrived late afternoon in the Popemobile after a drive through the streets of Rio. Given the traffic, our cab couldn’t quite make it to the beachfront so we had to exit several blocks early and walk the rest of the way. As we got out, our cab driver smiled at us and shrugged. “Papa” he said, gesturing toward the crowds filling the streets.

It was clear right away something was very different about Francis, especially his frequent exhortations to comfortable Catholics of the global North to “go out to the peripheries.” As an Argentinian, he was himself from the peripheries, a country which had known an economic crash, a seven-year “dirty war” in which 30,000 people were disappeared, and many thousands living in favelas near great wealth.

He spoke of wanting a “poor church,” just as his namesake St. Francis of Assisi came to symbolize. This idea did not sit easily with many American Catholics, especially those still in a triumphal mood after the fall of the Soviet Union, given Pope John Paul II’s role in those events.

A few friends and I noticed this disconnect with the U.S. Church and undertook to publish a collection of essays in 2015 called “Radically Catholic in the Age of Francis,” with contributions by laypeople MT Davila, Tony Annett, Mark Gordon, Sam Rocha, Nicholas Lund-Molfese, Matthew Cooper, Michel Bauwens, John Medaille, Matthew Tan, and Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, among others.

That same year, Francis visited the U.S., speaking to Congress and holding up the legacies of four exemplary Americans: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day.

Of the four, Dorothy was surely the least known, even to me at that point. Solidarity Hall went on to publish an anthology of articles about her in 2016 called “Dorothy Day and the Church”, based on a conference at the University of St. Francis in Ft. Wayne Indiana.

My podcast co-host Pete Davis and I next did an interview with Rosalie Riegle, an historian of the Catholic Worker movement, in which we talked about Dorothy’s impact on American culture.

And for our new podcast, Lost Prophets, we spoke with historian Kelly Johnson about Dorothy’s co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Peter Maurin. (Recommended also: our conversation with theologian Mike Budde on Catholic social teachings and American empire.)

Such was the influence and impact of Francis, not only on the Church’s membership but on the world at large, that an excellent doc film made by Toronto’s Salt and Light Media in 2019 was called “The Francis Effect”.

With so much more to say on all this, I want to end for now with a small memory, related to the Francis effect and the way it took hold right away in his papacy.

At World Youth Day, young “pilgrims” were arriving at Rio’s airport from all over the world, an estimated three million in all. Many were from Central and South America but there were flag-brandishing delegations, as I noticed on Rio’s beach, from seemingly everywhere. Even including, say, Iraq.

A kind of quiet fervor was noticeable in the way groups would stroll the city, singing, talking to local people, praying together publicly.

Here’s an example. A new friend I met during that Rio week recounted an incident which I dearly wish I could have witnessed in person. Among the ocean of arriving visitors to the Rio airport was a delegation of young people from (I believe) Canada. They were crossing the airport to reach public transportation downtown when they noticed a delegation from Iraq and immediately stopped to speak with them.

Within seconds, the Canadians seized this moment to drop to their knees and to ask the Iraqis for forgiveness for their part in destroying the country in the Iraq War.

The name of God, as the title of one of Francis’ books suggests, is mercy.

And as Francis said in his Message for the Fiftieth World Day of Peace in 2017, “May we dedicate ourselves prayerfully and actively to banishing violence from our hearts, words, and deeds, and to becoming nonviolent people and to building nonviolent communities that care for our common home…Everyone can be an artisan of peace.”

And may his memory be a blessing.

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See you next time—peace.