For me Pope Francis’ legacy could be summed up in a phrase I found particularly attractive. He called for a “revolution of tenderness.” When he made a surprise appearance at the 2017 TED conference, he cited the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of the tenderness he was talking about. He pointed out how the insensitivity of contemporary technological and consumerist culture leaves behind “thousands of human beings, or entire populations, on the side of the road.” In one of those bon mots for which he was justly so famous, he exclaimed, “How wonderful would it be, while we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters orbiting around us.” Tenderness, he reminded his generally elite and influential hearers, “is not weakness, it is fortitude.”
Earlier, in an equally gutsy moment, he had spoken of tenderness while addressing priests, religious and seminarians at Havana’s Catedral de San Cristóbal, where, without mentioning the Cuban revolution explicitly, he exhorted all present to join in a new revolution, a revolution of tenderness, of person-to-person care in witness to the tenderness of Jesus revealed in the Gospels. “And what is tenderness?” he asked his TED audience. “It is the love that comes close and becomes real. It is a movement that starts from our heart and reaches the eyes, the ears and the hands.”
Last year, in his last encyclical, Dilexit Nos, on the Sacred Heart, Francis tied the idea of a revolution of tenderness directly to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, observing how our own hardness of heart “can prevent the heart of Christ from spreading the ‘waves of his infinite tenderness’ in this world.” He added that,
The heart of Christ is ‘ecstasy,’ openness, gift and encounter. In that heart, we learn to relate to one another in wholesome and happy ways, and to build up in this world God’s kingdom of love and justice. Our hearts, united with the heart of Christ, are capable of working this social miracle.
Commentators often noticed Francis’ dedication to social concerns, but they almost never noticed how he connected social concern with a fervent dedication to traditional devotions such as the devotion to the Sacred Heart. He understood and taught that social ills are above all manifestations of a spiritual pathology for which the only true and lasting remedy was spiritual, and he liked to use the language of the heart when speaking of it, as here:
In the presence of the heart of Christ, I once more ask the Lord to have mercy on this suffering world in which he chose to dwell as one of us. May he pour out the treasures of his light and love, so that our world, which presses forward despite wars, socioeconomic disparities and uses of technology that threaten our humanity, may regain the most important and necessary thing of all: its heart.
“Progressive” churchmen have generally been discouraging if not downright disparaging of Eucharistic adoration, but that is another devotion that Francis zealously promoted. He thought of it as a devotion to divine tenderness. He believed it was a privileged opportunity for contemplative immersion in Jesus’ healing tenderness. Again, from Dilexit Nos:
While no one should feel obliged to spend an hour in adoration each Thursday, the practice ought surely to be recommended. When we carry it out with devotion, in union with many of our brothers and sisters and discover in the Eucharist the immense love of the heart of Christ, we ‘adore, together with the Church, the sign and manifestation of the divine love that went so far as to love, through the heart of the incarnate Word, the human race.’
Francis told us not to be afraid: “Let Him draw near and sit at your side.” He added, quoting the Gospel of Matthew, “When the Pharisees criticized Him for his closeness to people deemed base or sinful, Jesus replied, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’”
Francis even created “missionaries of mercy” who were intended to be apostles of tenderness sent to evangelize with the healing message of the tenderness of God’s own heart, of the soulfulness of God. Our own Father Joe Corpora, CSC, ’76, ’83M.Div., was so very aptly designated one of these missionaries. But Francis didn’t intend to limit the apostleship of tenderness to these exemplars; rather he wanted to inspire an army of such missionaries out of all baptized Christians — Eucharistic missionaries of the “the love that comes close and becomes real.” In this way, for Francis, the Eucharist was the source and summit, not only of the Church’s worship, but of the deep healing of the spiritual pathologies that generate social division, hatred and polarization.
Francis left us many memorable images of his own practice of tenderness to help us understand what he meant and to enroll us in the revolution: breaking protocol at a general audience to reach out to a severely disabled person who could never have thought of approaching him; hugging a child with Down syndrome — a spontaneous outburst of affection and an icon of the affirmation of human dignity. Images, too, of consoling the disaster-stricken on-site, of going to welcome the refugee and the person without a home; of visiting prisoners and washing their feet, of touching people whom many may have considered untouchable; and so many more. “Go and learn the meaning of this phrase: I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” Francis was all this time teaching us by pointing us to Christ.
We also saw images of his own devotion in random visits to the Blessed Sacrament, like the one released just before he died, when he had visited St. Peter’s Basilica in the clothes he was wearing as an invalid. Although he was criticized for it, I think it was especially in these rare but less formal images that we saw a devotion that came from the heart and did not stand on formality.
Francis did not, of course, dismiss formality as irrelevant, but people are not always formal, and it’s important to be with them anyway. He wanted to exemplify the ideal set forth in the Vatican II document on the priesthood, Presbyterorum Ordinis, that the priest is consecrated and “set apart” by his ordination, but set apart “for” the People of God; not “for” himself, not to be aloof, but for communion and community; set apart to accompany, in tenderness, in mercy, in compassion, all who are trying to make their way in our troubled world during troubled times.
Above everything else, I would say that Francis’ pontificate emphasized the personal. He would have said the “real,” because ultimately it is the personal, not the abstract, the person, not the aggregate, the vulnerable, not the self-styled self-sufficient, who will be “first” in the Kingdom of Heaven. A reality to which, as pope, Francis felt called to be the first and most public witness.
Even as we pray that Francis may rest in peace, we may honor him by praying for his successor, Pope Leo XIV, as he begins his pontificate. Certainly, the choice of name, Leo, indicates a desire to continue in the tradition of the social doctrine of the Church first articulated as such by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. But there is also St. Leo I, “the Great,” the fifth-century pope whose writing was the touchstone for precision in Christology, the theology of the Person of Christ, and whose courage and heart for personal encounter was famously handed down in the story of his going out to meet Attila the Hun at the gates of Rome and persuading the warlord to desist in his plans to lay siege to the city.
Further, given our new Holy Father’s formation in the monastic Rule of St. Augustine, it’s timely to remember that the combination of Augustinian theology and Franciscan piety has always been an auspicious one in the Church.
We see this even in the present day, in Laudato Si’, for instance, Pope Francis’ well-known 2015 encyclical. There, he noted, “The poverty and austerity of St. Francis were no mere veneer or asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.” St. Francis found in creation, released from our controlling ambitions and returned, as it were, to its rightful owner, the Creator, a continual source of praise: “Laudato Si’,” he sang. “Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures. . . .”
St. Augustine analyzed the spiritual malaise that besets human beings and their cultures as superbia, or pride. It appears in Laudato Si’ as a “tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures” that acts as though “other creatures are completely subordinated to the good of human beings, as if they have no worth in themselves and can be treated as we wish.” Channeling Augustine, Pope Francis reminds us: “We are not God.” For Augustine, pride is the sin of idolatry, worshipping ourselves in the place of God.
Both saints understood that the healing from this aggressive self-centeredness comes from devotion to the “Poor Crucified,” in St. Francis’s words, or the “humility of God” in Christ in St. Augustine’s; that this devotion refocuses our vision of creation away from ourselves and directs it to praise of God.
Pope Francis often mentioned St. Bonaventure, one of the most famous “Augustinian” Franciscans. If this happy confluence of Francis and Augustine is any indication, then I would say that all pointers indicate we are in good hands, that Francis is well succeeded. And so, to Pope Leo, let us say together: ad multos annos!
John Cavadini is a Notre Dame professor of theology and McGrath-Cavadini Director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life.