A Requiem for Francis, the Pilgrim of Mercy

By Louis ‘Barok‘ C. Biraogo — April 21, 2025

AT dawn on April 21, 2025, the bells of St. Peter’s toll in dolore, their bronze voices splintering the Roman sky. Between each peal, a silence gathers, heavy as history, as if the Eternal City holds its breath. Jorge Mario Bergoglio—Pope Francis, the shepherd of 1.4 billion souls—has crossed the final threshold, his earthly pilgrimage ended at 7:35 a.m. He was 88, his lungs, scarred by pneumonia, no longer able to bear the oxygen of mercy he so fervently preached. Yet in that silence, his legacy hums: a revolution of tenderness, a Church bruised but breathing, a world invited to see the excluded as its center.

The Saint of the Peripheries

He was the man who washed feet, who knelt before prisoners, refugees, and survivors of abuse, his white zucchetto bowing to the margins. Francis rejected the gilded trappings of the papacy as one might discard a heavy cloak. No papal apartments for him; he chose the spare rooms of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, cooking his own pasta, living among others for his “psychological health.” He rode buses in Buenos Aires, carried his own bags, and shunned the jeweled pectoral crosses of his predecessors for a simple wooden one. “My people are poor, and I am one of them,” he said as Archbishop, a vow he carried into the Vatican.

In Lampedusa, he mourned migrants lost at sea, decrying the “globalization of indifference”; in prisons, he washed the feet of the forgotten, his hands trembling but sure. He was the Saint of the Peripheries, not because he sought the margins, but because he saw them as the heart of the Gospel.

The Fractured Peacemaker

Yet his was no gentle voyage. Francis steered a Church like a battered ship through a storm of its own making—torn between progress and tradition, battered by scandal, and leaking under the weight of expectation. He was the Fractured Peacemaker, his reforms imperfect patches on a vessel creaking with dissent.

Conservatives decried his openness—his “Who am I to judge?” a lightning rod for those who prized doctrine over dialogue. Progressives, meanwhile, chafed at his caution, his slow reckoning with the Church’s sex abuse crisis a wound that bled trust. His 2018 defense of Bishop Juan Barros was a misstep, later met with apologies and resignations, but the scar remained.

Still, he pressed forward, issuing Vos estis lux mundi to hold bishops accountable, restructuring the Curia, and appointing nearly 80% of the cardinal electors who will choose his successor. His was a navigation of contradictions, a tightrope walk between mercy and justice, reform and rupture. “A Church that does not suffer is dead,” he once said, and he bore that suffering in his bones.

The Reluctant Radical

Francis was the Reluctant Radical, his encyclicals quiet revolutions sown in the soil of a warming, warring world. Laudato si’ (2015) named the climate crisis a moral failing, decrying a “structurally perverse” fossil fuel economy and calling for a conversion of lifestyle to protect “our common home.” Fratelli Tutti (2020) wove fraternity into a sacred imperative, urging humanity to dismantle the walls of selfishness.

These were not mere documents but maps, drawn with the precision of a Jesuit and the heart of a pastor, pointing toward a future where love is “the greatest power for the transformation of reality.” His interfaith journeys—to the UAE, where he signed a human fraternity statement with Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb, or to conflict zones like Iraq—were pilgrimages of presence, each step a defiance of division. He did not shout his radicalism; he lived it, his simplicity a louder sermon than any bull.

The Shadowed Healer

The Shadowed Healer, he carried wounds both visible and unseen. The sex abuse crisis haunted his papacy, his initial stumbles—defending accused clergy, underestimating survivors’ pain—drawing fierce critique. Yet he learned, kneeling before survivors, issuing apologies, and making late-night calls to the despairing, his voice a lifeline across oceans. “God never tires of forgiving us,” he taught, “we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy.”

His own body, too, bore scars: a lung partially removed in youth, knees failing, and the double pneumonia of 2025 that nearly claimed him. Yet he rose, frail but defiant, greeting pilgrims at Easter, canonizing Carlo Acutis, his cry of “Avanti!” a refusal to let the flesh dictate the spirit. His ailments were a cruel irony for a man who preached breath—mercy as oxygen, compassion as the pulse of faith. In his frailty, he became a mirror of the Church he loved: wounded, yet stubbornly alive.

The Dying Light

In his final months, Francis was the Dying Light, his presence a flicker against the gathering dark. Hospitalized for five weeks, his lungs laboring, he defied doctors to appear in public, his wheelchair a throne of resilience. He wrote of peace, called for disarmament, and prayed for a world still learning to see the poor as its center.

His death was no defeat but a threshold, his legacy a seed scattered across a fractious globe. The cardinals he appointed—progressive, diverse, drawn from the Global South—carry his vision forward, as do his encyclicals, his interfaith bridges, his insistence that “holiness means giving ourselves in sacrifice every day.” He leaves a Church not whole, but awake; not perfect, but walking.

A Final Invocation

And so, we stand at this threshold, the bells of St. Peter’s now stilled. Francis, the pilgrim pope, has reached the house of the Father, his breath joined to the eternal. Yet his call lingers, soft as a whisper, fierce as a flame: to love the excluded, to heal the fractured, to tend the earth as a sister.

Let us take up his revolution of tenderness, not as a monument, but as a movement—a hymn sung in the streets, a prayer lived in the margins. Avanti, Francis taught us. Forward, with mercy. Forward, with love.

Amen.