Yes—and no.
The passing of Pope Francis caught many of us by surprise. Not because his death was unexpected—his frailty in recent months signaled that he stood at the threshold between life and death—but because of how he went: on Easter Monday, the day of Lazarus the resurrected, after blessing a crowd, delivering an address, offering commitment, and calling for awakening against a long string of wars and the mindset of war as something to resist. It was uncanny. Uncanny, in the Freudian sense, when something is too familiar, too close, and therefore jarring. The uncanniness lies in the force of the leader’s deep truthfulness, his profound mattering in the here and now—and then he was gone.
Francis has been a complex figure—the first Jesuit pope, and Latin American pope. The Company of Jesus (the full name of the Jesuit order) is itself complex. Founded in the early 16th century, the Jesuits were founded as “warriors of the Pope,” a Company forged with a deep sense of solidarity and also readiness to be alone in the world, on a mission for the Church and the Pope.
Francis was on a mission—at the center of the Holy See, more commonly known as the Vatican. Over thirteen years, his pontificate unfolded as a reversal of the centripetal forces of the Church. That is, he relocated the immobile motor of the Church—the heart—not just to the periphery, to those far from power, to those seen as marginal in the literal sense, but through a new dynamic of centrifugal and centripetal movement: locating the heart in a movement by an outside (the periphery) inward (toward the center of the Curia Romana)—rather than a more traditional movement from the inside out. Francis placed the passionate heart of the Church not at the center, but in the centrifugal force of the margins coming back to its institutional center. That is a pretty ‘geo-seismic’ revolution.
Francis challenged the Church’s attachment to the reproduction of clerical power – the problem of clericalism. We can, indeed, trace the co-emergence of global Christianity and global capitalism, particularly through colonialism and slavery. The Jesuits themselves have recently undergone a reckoning with their historical entanglements with slavery in the Caribbean and the so-called New World. And Francis stood against allowing the invisible hand of the Church—financially and evangelically—to mirror the invisible hand of the capitalist market.
This papacy has been historically momentous. Raymond Williams, the British literary critic, reminded us that cultural transformation involves a mix of what is emerging and what is receding. Francis has been a charismatic figure standing precisely in this space between the disappearing and the emerging. He offered tenderness and embrace, a focus on encountering people on their ground, and on the ethical significance of individual relations—while also holding firm private command over the Vatican’s machinery. If Benedict XVI was a theologian pope—intellectual, and to certain extent remote—Francis was radically different: a “gentle” Jesuit warrior. He brought intimacy to leadership, and yet remained forceful—some say even stubborn—in private mastery.
Importantly, he was a person of the people—but not a populist. That distinction is one of his great strengths, and perhaps one of his great challenges. He connected with the periphery, but resisted the antagonistic crowd dynamics that define much of today populist leadership. He addressed capitalism’s inability to truly see. He named the globalization of indifference and called for a refusal of a system that doesn’t just waste things—it wastes people. In Catholic thought, not seeing is a sin: acedia, spiritual sloth. The body that can’t stay awake—like medieval monks who dozed off while transcribing sacred texts—fails to engage in the act of spiritual care. These texts were often the most prized possessions of monasteries and noble houses.
Francis called us all—Catholics and non-Catholics—to awaken. To take a stand. To care for our common home. To step beyond the religious/secular divide. He embodied a charisma of presence, not domination. He drew people close, yet each one never lost their own path of discernment—the Jesuit mode of always dialoguing with God in a process of discernment, yet never being alone—always feeling they were in the “Company of.”
What does it mean to be in the Company of Jesus—not in a brotherhood? It means to be co-responsible. To discern what it means to live in common. To be present without being swallowed by the crowd. Populist crowds are often animated by antagonism or disillusionment with the state—by being with intimate strangers. The crowds Francis foregrounded were something else: people in the company of each other. Attentive to those made marginal, and able to see marginality as central— a future in the present.
If the linguistic root of economy means the management of the household, then Francis, evangelically, insisted that migration is not just a humanitarian concern—it is intrinsic to the management of the world as our home. He affirmed both the right to move and the right to stay. He called us to a world that already exists, but to which we have yet to take full responsibility.
And that responsibility is not for others. It is with others.
Even so, Francis faced limits. There were contradictions he could not—and did not want to—resolve, including the much-needed opening of deaconate/priesthood for women and a more nuanced, encompassing position on abortion and end-of-life care. Yet some felt his stance on the latter was not decisive enough. Disenchantment persisted, especially among parts of the Church more deeply invested in mystery, in hierarchy, in the figure of the Pope as removed thus perceived as sacred. Watchers of The Young Pope, the HBO series starring Jude Law and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, may understand the appeal of a different model: a pope who exercises power through kenosis, divine withdrawal—a presence made visible by absence. Some of Francis most vocal detractors are drawn to this theological force. They seek a pope whose mystery and power lies in his distance, not his nearness.
A new pope will be made. Catholics or not, he will face the task of embodying a charisma of a Church rooted in profound discernment—of being in company with others for our common home—while also moved by the mystery and power of a presence revealed through withdrawal. Not an easy task indeed.