How fitting – how Francis! – that the Holy Father’s final day on earth was spent in part meeting with U.S. Vice-President JD Vance to press the case for Christian charity toward migrants and refugees.

The meeting between them was reportedly brief, and apparently more amicable face to face then their sharp exchanges last February over the Trump administration’s mass deportations of asylum seekers and undocumented arrivals.

But though more genial in person, there was no less urgency for Francis to make Vance, the Catholic convert 2IC of the United States, accept that Christ’s commandment to love our neighbour includes those who arrive at the doorstep unannounced and in desperate straits. 

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Along with his fervour for promoting peace in the world’s war-torn Hell holes, caritas toward the globe’s dispossessed can be seen as a cornerstone of the Francis pontificate, featuring in homily after homily and text upon text.

Certainly, the current U.S. administration’s callous and ignoble treatment of El Salvadoran Kilmar Abrego Garcia, illegally deported and now in prison limbo because of Washington’s refusal to correct its error, represents a deeply painful consequence of precisely the attitude Francis constantly preached against. 

It will be for historians, not hourly headline writers, to ultimately evaluate how effective that preaching was in turning hearts and minds toward charity and away from dog-in-the-manger protectionism. That, alas, doesn’t stop the reduction of his papacy to doggerel summaries such as the simple-minded foolishness of the Globe and Mail’s: “Pope Francis spent a lifetime serving the poor and challenging Catholic Church orthodoxy.”

Uh, no, actually from age 28 on, Jorge Mario Bergoglio spent his life, up to its literal last hours, in the priestly service of Jesus Christ, God’s only anointed Son, Lord and Saviour of humankind. Indeed, his frenetic pace since being released from Agostino Gemelli Hospital on March 23 is evidence of the centrality of his belief in such service not only for the papacy but to the lives that we all live as Catholics.

As Adrian Blomfield reported in London’s Daily Telegraph following the Pope’s death “it was simply not in his nature to comply fully” with doctors’ orders that Francis needed an extended period of convalescence with a much-reduced schedule and avoidance of crowds in order to limit risk of infection.

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“There were benedictions to bestow, babies to bless, prisoners to comfort,” Blomfield wrote. “God’s work never stopped – not even (at age) 88 and recovering from a near-fatal bout of double pneumonia.”

 The word “orthodoxy” appears nowhere in the formulation – the Truth – that God’s work never stops. Only in the Manichean world of comfortable pew journalism is it an easy-reach term of vexation to sow division between papacy and prelates, prelates and priests, priests and people. What Francis “challenged” above all was that same slovenly refusal to discern the fullest possible understanding of what “Catholic orthodoxy” actually means.

Of course, over the course of his dozen-year papacy, that challenge created differences, occasionally strenuous, between the Vatican under Francis and his brother bishops in, say, the United States or Germany. Few would dispute he could be among the most authoritarian of pontiffs when he finally wanted a matter put to rest. His internalized drive to move fast at such points could, it’s indisputable, result in unintended reckless consequences.

We at The Catholic Register have been respectfully critical of Francis at those times, most pointedly when he carelessly used the word “genocide” to decry the sufferings of Indigenous children within the Indian Residential School system. 

Yet the whole-earth context in which that deeply unhelpful comment was made actually gives the lie to the kind of slipshod, fatuous, headline-level appraisal that pits a caricature “Francis the global south liberator” against Voldemort upholders of cartoon Catholic “orthodoxy.” 

It would obviously have been better were the comment never made but it was made at the completion of Francis’ extraordinary pilgrimage across Canada for six days in July, 2022. As the Register termed our commemorative magazine, it was a journey of penance and progress, of apology made explicit, charity made manifest, and reconciliation made achievable. It was truly God’s work never stopping, which is a descriptor for earthly busyness but, much more, the essence of Catholic faith itself.

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It is that faith Francis spent his life professing. His personal profession of it is what he leaves as a spiritual bequest for each Catholic, every Christian, all open human hearts. He has surely been welcomed home to Heaven now, crossing the boundary between earthly works and beatific peace. 

How fitting – how Francis – that we should pray thanks for his service, and for the repose of his soul.