Pope Francis was a reformer when his church needed one

Pope Francis, who died yesterday aged 88, is to be laid to rest in a simple wooden coffin under the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore.

So what? He will be the first pope in more than a century to be buried outside the Vatican, and he was unique in other ways as well.

• So far, 23 popes have taken the name John.
• Sixteen have gone for either Gregory or Benedict and 14 for Clement.
• Despite the fact that he has been arguably the best-loved saint on earth for almost a thousand years, only one has named himself after Francis of Assisi.

The name carries a challenge, even a confrontation. St Francis’s first vision – in 1203 – was of a church teetering on the brink of collapse and a voice begging him to save it. ​When Jorge Bergoglio stepped out of the Chamber of Tears and onto the balcony as the 266th pope, the Catholic Church was teetering again.

Wracked by sexual and financial scandal, the Curia seemed too sclerotic to save itself. Benedict XVI’s resignation was such a dazzling twist in the tale that it briefly obscured the enormity of the task that provoked it.

Did Francis I perform miracles? There is a list of solid achievements that will endure. He worked to make sure the College of Cardinals more fully represents the southern hemisphere. Through the synod he drew lay people into the governance of the church for the first time in its history, and in the process opened the door to more participation by women.

He also kept the spotlight on the two great issues of our time – the environment and the impact of mass migration – when other world leaders have avoided or dismissed them.

Clerical abuse. Faced with the scale of the clerical abuse scandal he took the unprecedented step of holding a world summit on the protection of minors. Some – including some victims – took this as an encouraging sign that the church was finally taking the issue seriously. Others were disappointed that its brief was narrow and its outcomes lacked transparency.

One of its harshest critics was Carlo Viganò, a former Vatican diplomat, who accused the Pope personally of covering up for Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, a serial sexual predator. A subsequent report cleared Francis but didn’t stop Viganò going on to call the Pope a “servant of Satan” for allowing the blessing of same-sex marriages.

The Pope who shrugged. Viganò became a key player in American culture wars by adding a twist of Francis to a cocktail of conspiracy theories – the Great Reset, the Plandemic, Gay Globalism and so on. Viganò has since been excommunicated as a schismatic but for a long time Pope Francis simply allowed this story to play out. When faced with these accusations by the press, he shrugged: you’re journalists, do your jobs. In an age of fury and division there was something refreshing and important about that shrug.

St Francis. The name Francis is a challenge not just to the institutions but to the individual who takes it on. Clearly St Francis of Assisi did not remould the Catholic Church in his own image. Visitors to St Maria degli Angeli can see the tiny church in which he died contained inside a great baroque church – a vivid and explicit image of the struggle between individual spiritual striving and institutional containment. But the stories of St Francis – his cheerful embracing of poverty, his love of the natural world – continue to charm and inspire and more importantly to hold out the possibility of how joyful a life can be.

Pope Francis. There is every chance that stories of Francis’s papacy will have a similar currency. The pope who lived not in the Vatican but in a room in the St Marta – a fairly basic guest house. Who drove himself around Rome in a little Fiat. Who washed the feet of prisoners and brought asylum seekers to the Vatican. And who was so upfront about his own failings that when he was supposed to be hearing confessions in St Peter’s, he joined the queue to have his own confession heard first.

What’s more… He was a pope who put love and mercy in first place. Rules and regulations came further down the list.

Photo credit: Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images