Tribute to Pope Francis No. 3: “LET US NOT FORGET THE POOR”.

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Ramon Ibeas Larrañaga

Theologian

Member of BKA-Pax Romana – Basque Country

Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s papacy did not begin in Rome, he was elected there. From the balcony of St. Peter’s he greeted the world, asked to be simply the Bishop of Rome and that we pray for him. It was March 2013. The world was immersed in the despondency of an economic crisis produced by the real estate bubble that burst in 2008 with the bankruptcy of Leman Brothers. Shortly afterwards, in 2011, the Syrian war began and with it the refugee crisis. It was in this context that Francis arrived in Lampedusa in July 2013, his first trip, and that same year, in November, on the 24th he published “Evangelii gaudiun”. In the midst of despair, war and suffering, the Pope announces, exhorts, the joy of the Gospel. This is, in my opinion, the beginning of Francis’ pontificate, in a line very dear to the Church: to see, judge and act in favor of the poor.

We are not in “an epoch of change but in a change of epoch”. These words of his have guided him in his work both in the Church and in the world. A “joy” therefore situated, and with which he wanted to introduce changes in the Catholic community as well as in international and interreligious relations. He probably fell short, but he did not stand still.

As we have already said, the first was “Evangelii Gaudium”. A programmatic exhortation in which the principles and values that concern the Pope are announced and enunciated as well as those elements that we need to transform, with an attitude that is necessary in the work for the Kingdom of God, which is the object of that joy that we announce. A world in which men and women can live and develop in full dignity.

There was a risk of ethnocentrism in this era that scientists are beginning to call the Anthropocene. The Pope contributes in this line the encyclical “Laudato Si”. The representation of the world is understood as that space shared by all human beings. That place in which we live and which we have to take care of because it is our “common home”. Francis reads the expression “to have dominion over the earth” (Gen 1:28) as the responsibility to take care of God’s work and to take care of it so that all beings, human or not, can fit in. This is why he is involved in the negotiations of the successive climate summits and especially with the COP 28 in Dubai which he attended by video conference. His meetings with popular movements, insisting on the need to defend the land, the roof and the work, have constituted the axis of the “care of the common home”.

This house is the earth, and in it also the Church in which there is room for everyone. “In the Church there is room for everyone”. Jesus “never closes the door, but invites everyone to enter. Come in and see, Jesus receives, Jesus welcomes. These days, each one of us transmits Jesus’ language of love. God loves you; God calls you. How beautiful that is. God loves me, God calls me. He wants me to be close to Him” (WYD Lisbon 2023).

That closeness that arises when we feel that we are brothers. Let us now quote the third text that we want to highlight, “Fratelli tutti”. An invitation to be able to welcome the stranger, the poor, the refugees, those who do not think like us or those who believe or do not believe the same as us, those who are widowed by war. Because if we are all brothers there is no place for violence. How many times has the Pope said: Stop the war! In Ukraine, in Gaza, in Congo… in so many places, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by others, as in the case of the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb.

But for solitude I am left with an image. That of Francis in St. Peter’s Square at the height of the Covid pandemic. Everyone lacked a compass and he appears walking towards the Father’s house, towards the door of the Basilica. Allow me to reproduce the photograph, it is worth more than a thousand words.

 

Francis has been a gift for the Church. He has not been able to carry out all the necessary reforms, but as Chirtoph Teobald, a French-German Jesuit, affirms “he has transformed the papacy by introducing the peripheries into it”. He has confronted pederasty, but has not found all the necessary support, he himself denounced the “spiritual alzheimar” of the Vatican Curia that is extensible to some Episcopal Conferences. He was conservative in some important issues such as the ordination of women, although he has opened spaces for them; we have not advanced in the priesthood of married people and although he has accepted the dignity of homosexuals and other groups, he has remained there.

There are and should be, as in the case of any human being, but ultimately, a Pope who has often made us smile, who has made us believe that we can do things better and that we can do so by speaking of God, without renouncing who we are.

He may not have been able to go further, but he has helped the Church to find its own way to meet the world, a synodal way, by the way. May the Church not forget him in the future! It would be to forget the poor.

Irun, April 26, 2025