RIP Pope Francis

A convert's thoughts on Francis and the future.

Photo by Coronel Gonorrea on Unsplash

We have come to know and to believe that God loves us. God is love, and whoever lives in love lives in God and God lives in him.
- John 4:16

Pope Francis died today on Easter Monday.

I cannot think of a more fitting way for a beloved pope to die than on Easter Monday—after blessing the faithful and offering his message to the city and the world on Easter Sunday while celebrating the Lord’s resurrection.

I find myself unexpectedly emotional this morning and I’ve spent a good part of the morning trying to figure out why.

While I converted to Catholicism under Francis, he wasn’t the primary motivator, and I had ambivalent feelings about some of his teachings. Dispositionally, I lean toward traditionalism and am ambivalent about Vatican II.

But the more I’ve grown in my own faith, the more I found myself aligned with Francis’ approach, if not always his execution.

And more recently I’ve come to believe his example is absolutely crucial for the future of the Church.

That’s because I have deep concerns about a particular kind of Catholic (including my fellow convert J.D. Vance, who converted the same year I did) who has become increasingly powerful in American politics, if not globally.

I see the Cardinals’ upcoming decision as carrying existential weight - at the very least for my future in the Church but perhaps even for the Church itself.

So I suppose my emotional reaction to the news of Francis’ passing is a combination of sorrow, gratitude, and, to be honest, fear about what comes next.

But let me preface all of this with a disclaimer. I am the last person who should be gatekeeping Catholicism. I offer what follows through the eyes of an outsider who has relatively recently come to love the Church in a profound way and who is also deeply concerned for its future.

An Unlikely Convert

And in many ways, I am still very much an outsider in the Church. My conversion to Catholicism in 2019 was unexpected, perhaps most of all to me.

I grew up in a Zen Buddhist household and went to Zen Sunday school (yes, we had it and yes, it was a bit weird). My father was a founding member of the Rochester Zen Center back in the 1970s; my mom is a Zen practitioner who would probably call herself agnostic, if she called herself anything.

My cousins were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (my uncle even an LDS bishop), and the rest of my family is a mix of atheist, agnostic, or noncommittal.

I didn’t know any Catholics, growing up in a predominantly Jewish and Protestant town. My first Catholic mass was a funeral mass for my husband’s grandfather, well into my 30s.

Yet starting with my adolescent love of Evelyn Waugh and continuing with my affinity for natural law teachings in grad school, I developed a deep connection and longing for what the Catholic Church represented—an entry point and a pathway (however imperfect) to a relationship with God.

In part, I fell in love with the Church because of its intellectual tradition. But what ultimately drew me in was an emotional and spiritual need—not just an intellectual attraction.

And of course that’s consistent with the Catholic tradition. You can’t reason yourself into faith. But you can make faith compatible with reason, which the best of Catholic tradition does.

In the end, I became Catholic not because of natural law or tradition, but because of the deep spiritual pull of the New Testament—because of the intellectual tradition it spawned and because of its profoundly radical message of love, justice, truth, and mercy.

Having had extremely damaging interactions with Christians my entire life, most notably with the evangelical extremism of my maternal grandmother, I always hesitated to call myself Christian and still struggle a bit to use that word.

But I could identify with the God in the Gospel of John, who calls on us to love because God Himself is Love: "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love". This God of Love is the God I defend to my children and the God I have grown increasingly close to over the past six years.

That love was the gift of Jesus, God’s greatest sacrifice and the embodiment of God’s love for us. As Catholics we remember his love for us at every mass.

On Good Friday and Easter we walk with God through His pain and sorrow as He allows his Son to be sacrificed for our sins. Because He loves us, a love that is freely given and also undeserved.

This message of undeserved love and mercy is at the heart of Christian and Catholic teaching. The idea that none of us deserve God’s love (freely given) but that we can and should work to live up to it serves as the guidepost for Christian life.

Catholicism at a Crossroads

I’ll admit I have not been a very good Catholic recently. There are a lot of reasons for this, human frailty being one of them, but I will also admit that the political climate has interfered with my faith.

I have complicated feelings about Catholicism right now. I’ve been wounded (and I don’t use that phrase lightly) by the silence of the Church—and of Catholics I once saw as beacons - in the face of wanton cruelty and seeming disregard of all of Jesus’ most fundamental teachings.

It’s spiritually brutal to watch fellow Catholics align themselves with power, greed, and selfishness, when Jesus called us so clearly to orient our lives around mercy, justice, and love for the marginalized, the stranger, and, yes, even sinners.

On an intellectual and spiritual level, I simply cannot process how someone can claim to be Catholic - or any kind of Christian - and disregard Jesus’ words in the New Testament. If you don’t understand your duty to care for those who need us most, your duty to protect truth, goodness, and beauty, and your duty to love the neighbor and the stranger, I don’t know how you can call yourself Catholic.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets.”
- Matthew 22: 35-40).

Again, I’m emphatically not the right person to judge who is or isn’t Catholic—apart from imperfection, I struggle with labels myself.

My message here is one of intellectual and spiritual bewilderment, not condemnation.

I simply can’t comprehend claiming to follow a faith while rejecting the very words - the Way, the Truth, and the Life - it was founded on.

The early saints and martyrs didn’t sacrifice their lives for a watered-down teaching about bare tradition or self-interested politics. They died out of love for Love itself, found in the message of the New Testament—a message of radical, Godlike love. That’s what we’re called to live by.

No doubt, it’s exceedingly difficult—I feel that struggle every day. But it’s the struggle we’re called upon as Christians to undertake. For most of us it will be a lifelong struggle, but one that we have faith will leave us purified in the end.

And to be clear I’m not trying to twist Church doctrine to fit any specific ideology. I’m desperate to defend the Church against those who would twist and weaponize it in the name of ideology or - perhaps even worse - to justify a particularly cruel kind of selfishness and greed.

Pope Francis’ Legacy

On this Easter Monday, I find I’m surprisingly emotional about Pope Francis’ death.

His life was a beautiful testament to a life devoted to love of God, love of his fellow man, love of the earth we share, and love of the most vulnerable among us. He brought Catholicism out of the somewhat dry legalism of Church doctrine and into the vibrant world of real, imperfect, human love.

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extends to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the 'Good Samaritan,' that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception."
- Pope Francis, in a Feb. 10, 2025 letter to U.S. Bishops

He did it imperfectly, as we all love God and each other imperfectly, but his message was consistent because he saw God’s message as consistent. There’s not a lot of room for error in the call to love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.

As I work to process the Pope’s death, I’m struggling with a jumble of confusing emotions. There’s sorrow at Francis’s passing and gratitude for his devotion to God, his childlike joy and curiosity, his imperfection, and his holiness. I’m feeling comfort that he’s been reunited with his Father and profound concern for the Church’s future.

I am praying that the cardinals, when choosing the next pope, are inspired by God’s love. I don’t see how they can do anything else, but I am worried that the clear message of Jesus might be clouded by human frailty and weakness, as it so often is.

Pope Francis was not why I converted to Catholicism. But his memory and his example are why I will stay. If I do.

Your Turn

As always, let me know what you think! I would love to hear what you’re feeling and thinking as we celebrate Pope Francis’ life. What effect, if any, did he have on you? Where can and should the church go moving forward? Leave a comment and if you haven’t already, please subscribe. And perhaps even more importantly share if you like what you read! Reader shares are still the primary way people find my work.