In the shadow of St Peter’s Basilica, the Catholic Church remains locked in a quiet but fierce contest. It is not one of swords or schisms, but of emphasis, tone, and memory. At its heart lies a dispute over the meaning of Vatican II: was it a rupture or a renewal? For many conservatives, the council’s spirit was tamed and safely contained by the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Both reasserted tradition, doctrine, and liturgical order. The balance was comfortable. The boundaries, clear.
Then came Francis. An Argentine Jesuit, a son of immigrants, a pastor rather than a professor. He did not seek to overturn doctrine, but he did shift the centre of gravity. Mercy, accompaniment, discernment, these became the watchwords of his papacy. Traditionalists bristled. To them, he seemed to muddy moral waters, to blur lines where the catechism had once etched them with confidence. What they read as confusion, however, was something else entirely: a deeper kind of certainty.
It was the certainty that Christ is not an idea but a living force. That love is not a sentiment but an act. Francis believed there was one truth that towered above the shifting scaffolds of dogma and debate: that to follow Christ was to love as he loved—rigorously, vulnerably, without ego. Judgement, Francis insisted, was a trap: a projection of the self that blocks communion. The true spiritual task was to stop projecting, to see clearly, and in doing so, disarm the ego that keeps us from God and from one another.
He lived what he preached. He resided in the Casa Santa Marta, not the Apostolic Palace. He wore plain black shoes, not red velvet slippers. He spoke of the “smell of the sheep,” reminding clergy that their role is not to lord over, but to walk among. These were not symbolic flourishes. They were incarnations of a Stoic Christianity—one forged not in abstraction, but in lived simplicity.
One unforgettable moment captured his openness to the spiritual dignity of others: the day a group of Buddhist monks chanted before him in the Vatican. Their deep, sonorous voices rising in prayer—a prayer not of the same creed, but of the same spirit. It was not mere tolerance. It was reverence. A sign of something deeper than diplomacy—a shared pursuit of the sacred. The gesture scandalised some conservatives, who saw it as syncretism, a betrayal of purity. But for Francis, the encounter was gospel. It was what love looks like when stripped of anxiety and steeped in courage.
Francis wasn’t perfect. While he made strides in addressing the Church’s abuse crisis, some survivors and advocates felt his efforts fell short of the institutional reckoning required. Yet even in these failings, there appeared to be something genuine at work in Francis, a recognition that nothing could ever truly right the grave wrongs committed. It wasn’t posturing. One could see in his face, in moments of silence and solemnity, a man overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all. He looked not like an architect of resolution, but like a witness to pain too great to be resolved.
Opposition to Francis within the Church was unrelenting. Cardinals challenged him. Critics accused him of diluting doctrine. Some accused him of ambiguity, of saying too much between the lines and not enough in the lines themselves. His preference for nuance, for inviting reflection over issuing edicts, led others to feel adrift. Yet, like a Stoic philosopher enduring the jeers of the forum, Francis absorbed the blows without losing composure. “I am not afraid of schisms,” he once remarked, and there was no bravado in it. He simply knew that love—real love—costs something. It doesn’t flinch at complexity. It persists.
His encyclicals revealed this moral stamina. Laudato Si’—his meditation on ecological care—was less an academic treatise than a spiritual examination of conscience. Fratelli Tutti, his manifesto for universal fraternity, read like a homily written to the fractured heart of the world. They were not abstract theological arguments. They were calls to action. Appeals to love as an ethic, not an emotion.
In one of his most unforgettable gestures, Francis embraced a man with neurofibromatosis—a condition that had left him disfigured and shunned. There was no gloved hand, no stagecraft. Just one human being recognising another. The Stoics taught that virtue alone was good. Francis taught—by action, not theory—that love alone is divine.
Pope Francis’s funeral took place on 26 April 2025, with more than 250,000 mourners gathered in St. Peter’s Square. He was laid to rest in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, not far from the people he so often championed. He became the first pope in over a century not to be buried in St. Peter’s itself—a final, quiet nod to the humility that defined him. Amusingly, some conservative commentators attempted to downplay the scale of the event, insisting it “wasn’t as large as John Paul II’s.” Even the official Vatican figures failed to include the tens of thousands who lined the surrounding streets and the route to the burial site. Many held homemade signs or prayed silently as the procession passed. The sheer number of mourners—both counted and uncounted—stood as a quiet rebuke to the narrative that his legacy was divisive or diminished
His death marks more than the close of a papacy. It signals a moment of decision. With the College of Cardinals soon to gather, one wonders which vision of the Church will emerge. Will they affirm the Franciscan legacy of radical mercy? Or will they retreat to the fortress of certainty, rules and doctrine.
As the conclave looms, these questions rise like incense over the dome of St Peter’s. It is possible the cardinals will retreat to the familiar, to certainty and control, to the safety of old forms. But even if they do, Francis has altered the Church’s moral vocabulary. He reminded us that love is not a refuge from complexity but a call to meet it. The next pope may not share his shoes or his sympathies—but the bar has been set. In the silence after the bells have stopped tolling, the question lingers: will the Church remember the lesson Francis embodied, that the true power of faith lies not in its certainties, but in its courage to love without conditions?
Consilium 
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