Pope Francis
Photo by Ashwin Vaswani on Unsplash
Pope Francis is dead.
He said unsettling things: that God was found among the poor, the strange, the unloved. He spoke of mercy as if it were not an asterisk but the headline.
Naturally, he faced resistance at every turn. The Vatican has survived too long to be disturbed by an old man with kind eyes and creaking knees.
Still, there was something about him, a flicker of the original scandal of Christianity: that the divine does not prefer the pure or the powerful, but the broken. That love, not doctrine, is the last word.
Francis was no revolutionary. He was a reminder, a brief reappearance of the thing the Church once claimed to be.
Now he is gone.
There will be another conclave and another pope. The institution will survive, as institutions always do. But something infinitely rarer has gone out of the world with Francis.
Call it faith. Call it decency. Call it what you will.
For a moment, we saw it.
Now the white cassock lies folded, and the world, for all its vaults and choirs and cathedrals, feels strangely silent.
The Rev. Richard Bryant is an elder in the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from his blog, Elevate the Discourse.