April 27, 2025 – Second Sunday of Easter
Matthew 16.13-20
Galatians 3.23-29
Pope Francis’ Legacy of Inclusion
Second Sunday of Easter
On the morning of our first full day in Rome at the start of my 2008 sabbatical, our family did what we always do when we visit a new city: we walked. Even though Rome has a robust city transportation system, I find you can get to know a place much more intimately if you walk it. The subject of my sabbatical that year was the ways that the church’s earliest creeds, like the Apostle’s Creed and Nicene Creed, are expressed in its art. Our apartment was just around the corner from the Colosseum, so we stopped there first, and then continued on to find churches to explore. The first one we visited that day, which was also closest to home, was the Basilica Sta. Maria Maggiore, or St. Mary’s the Great. It was spectacular. The original church was built in the 5th century, and parts of it still remain. The tiled floors were a work of art in themselves, the carvings and icons and chancel and mosaics, the intricately constructed dome overhead commanded the eyes wherever you looked. There is even a relic thought to be a piece of the cradle of Christ. But it was not until I had checked out the variety of art in front of me that I turned around and saw the basilica’s crown jewel, at least to my mind: there, on the rear façade of the entryway, was the rose window. It took my breath away. You can see some of the detail of the window on our bulletin cover this morning: Mary the Great herself holds the infant Jesus, the dove representing the Holy Spirit hovers over them, a menorah stands at her right shoulder and a cross at her left, she is flanked by the ten commandments to one side and a chalice and paten to the other, with the words excelsa filia sion, Exult O Daughter of Zion, inscribed underneath, from Zephaniah 3.14, “Sing aloud O daughter of Zion, rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!” I don’t know how much time we spent in Sta Maria Maggiore, but when we finally walked out I thought to myself that the basilica held such a rich and multifaceted trove of art that I could have wrapped up my research then and there and spent the rest of the month sightseeing.
Yesterday Pope Francis was interred at the Basilica Sta Maria Maggiore. It is typical of the late Pope to buck tradition – nearly all his predecessors are buried within the walls of Vatican City. But the basilica held a special place in Francis’ heart, and if any Pope could be considered an iconoclast, Francis was surely one.
You might say his manner of going against the grain began with his choice of the religious life in the first place. Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, he showed an early gift for science and chemistry, and his family had hoped he would go into medicine. But when he was 16 years old, as he passed by the Basilica of St. Joseph in his native Buenos Aires, he felt as though something was tugging at him, compelling him to go inside. “Right there,” he said, “I knew I had to be a priest.” When he shared his choice of vocation with his family, his parents were clearly disappointed, but he tried to explain to them in terms that would help them understand. “I’m going to study the medicine of the soul,” he told his mother. And so he did.
On his election to the papacy, Bergoglio revealed his intention to be a different kind of Pope with the very selection of his name, Pope Francis. No one had taken the name of St Francis of Assisi before, and his choice was a characteristic one, as his entire papacy was directed at those issues and concerns that were near and dear to the heart of the twelfth century saint: care for creation, and a dedication to the poor and the outcast, to what Jesus called “the least of these, my brothers and sisters.” And he did so from the very outset: Francis shocked and alarmed many of his colleagues when during his first Holy Week as Pope, he washed the feet of a Muslim woman, and not long after, when asked about a gay priest, he replied, “Who am I to judge?” five simple words that ricocheted around the global church and demonstrated this was going to be a different kind of Pope.
And so he was. On his first trip outside the Vatican Francis visited the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, an illicit arrival point for African migrants making the dangerous crossing to Europe. He did this to show compassion to an immigrant population that was being demonized by many European governments, among others. Francis invited laypeople to meetings that had previously been open only to the priesthood. He included women in those gatherings as well. He permitted Roman Catholic priests to bless same-gender marriages, although he maintained the ban on their actually marrying gay couples. He welcomed transgender persons to serve as godparents at baptism, indeed he permitted them to have their own children baptized in the church. Friends, there are churches in our own neighborhoods that would not permit this to take place, and it is not just in the Catholic fellowship. Pope Francis was a tradition-busting leader for the global church of Jesus Christ.
He was far from perfect of course, as he was first to admit. Francis took office in the wake of the sex-abuse scandal that was rocking the Catholic church, and in the early years of his papacy, he was timid about taking on the issue full-bore. He was reluctant to discipline priests who were accused of abuse or cover-up, and appeared inattentive to the plight of the victims. Eventually, he rose to the task, realized the hurt he had caused by minimizing the extent of the church’s problem, and responded by pressing guilty priests and bishops into retirement, and reached out the victims he had previously ignored. It was a learning moment for Francis, and he righted the church’s direction when he took forceful action against the abusers and those who protected them. He took a good deal of heat for this as well, because there remained bishops in the curate whose hard-line traditionalism meant the protection of the institution at any cost, but Francis, once he recognized his earlier errors, held firm.
The Vatican was not the only source of push-back against the Pope. American Catholicism has been trending more to the right in recent decades, like much of our culture, and resented the Pope’s focus on the least and the lost, as they put it. While his predecessor Pope Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was a champion for conservative traditionalism and thus a welcome voice among many US churches, Francis’ election was cause for alarm. Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American canon lawyer, saw Francis’ new direction as a heretical break from doctrine, and suggested the Pope’s ministry was therefore illegitimate. Francis, in his firm but gentle way, quietly removed Burke from the Congregation of Bishops.
I selected our two Bible readings this morning with an eye toward the Pope’s legacy. Many Catholic faithful turn to this morning’s story from Matthew’s gospel as the foundation of the office of Pope. Simon Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ, or Messiah, is a pivotal moment in Jesus’ ministry. “You are the Messiah,” Peter said, “the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah! For flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but [rather] God who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” As most of us remember, the words Peter and rock come from the same Greek root, Petros and petra. Jesus is engaging in a bit of wordplay here, making Peter, Petros, the cornerstone, petra, of the nascent church. The office of Pope, the Roman Catholic church would maintain, was established by Jesus in this encounter, making Peter the first Pope, or head of the church.
And the passage that Diane read from Galatians could well serve as Pope Francis’ touchstone. As Paul wrote to the Galatian Christians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” This spirit of ecclesial egalitarianism suffused his papacy.
In his very first apostolic exhortation, Francis declared he wanted a church “with doors always wide open,” and I think this is a fitting legacy for his career. In addition to what we’ve already mentioned, he appointed the first Black Cardinal, encouraged and gave a stronger voice to Hispanic Catholics around the world, made it easier for divorced and remarried Catholics to participate in church life, became less concerned about the preservation of doctrine and more concerned about a moral focus toward things like poverty, immigration, refugees, income inequality and climate change. In fact his 2015 encyclical Laudate Deum, or Praise to God, took on this last issue with moral force. “With the passage of time,” he wrote, “It is indubitable that the impact of climate change will increasingly prejudice the lives and families of many persons… [whose] effects are borne by the most vulnerable people, at home and around the world.” It is perhaps in this respect that Pope Francis most honors his namesake St Francis, who is considered the patron saint of the environment as a whole, and its most vulnerable inhabitants in particular.
If you have ever visited Assisi, you will understand St. Francis’ appreciation for the environment. Situated high on a hill, the view in every direction is spectacular. Deep verdant valleys to the south, undulant hills to the north. It is appropriate that the Basilica di San Francesco, or church of St Francis, is built into the side of one of those hills, as if to say, it is part of the very earth itself. It is truly a pastoral community. I have a photo of both my daughters with one of those verdant valleys stretched out behind them, and when I show the picture to friends, the first thing they say is, “That’s Italy isn’t it?” You can understand how, living in such a special place in creation, St Francis would take for his vocation its care and preservation. As it was for the Pope who took his name.
And today, after all the pomp and ceremony of the past week, Francis rests in his beloved Basilica Sta Maria Maggiore. May the preservation of the earth and the care of earth’s most vulnerable that were the core missions of both Francises continue to be the mission of the church, whether high in the Umbrian hills, in the streets and alleyways of Buenos Aires, in the heart of the Holy See, and among the small towns and villages along the undulant hills and valleys of our own Connecticut River.