For the past 18 months, my mornings have been consumed by headlines about the brutal treatment of Gaza’s people and the ongoing abuse of migrants and refugees in the United States. Upon receiving the news of Pope Francis’s passing on Monday morning, however, tears, accompanied by deep fears of the future of the Roman Catholic Church, overwhelmed me. Grieving his death has stirred memories of a faith journey shaped by his commitment to the marginalized. Through his bold diplomacy with Cuba, compassionate stance on migration, nuanced approach to homosexuality, and unwavering solidarity with Gaza, Francis embodied a Catholicism rooted in mercy, justice, and the dignity of every person.
When His Holiness was elected, I joined Latines worldwide in a common feeling—the Pope was finally one of us. More importantly for me, he helped negotiate a landmark agreement to restore diplomatic ties between the United States and my homeland of Cuba, ending decades of Cold War tensions. Francis’s actions drew me to a Church that could live out the gospel for the marginalized and downtrodden. The summer before my senior year of undergrad, I enrolled in the local Catholic Church’s Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA) to receive my first communion and become confirmed. This process brought much joy into a life that had been consumed by despair about the world.
We were assigned readings from the Catechism or videos central to Catholic formation each week. I was probably the only catechumen who treated OCIA like a grad seminar—completing every assignment and even doing the theological equivalent of extra credit by reading Laudato Si’. I found the writing poetic and even more uplifting than the Catechism. I fell in love with Francis’s acknowledgment of the tragic increase in environmental migrants and his call for global action to address the issue. Francis added complexity to migration by linking the issues of climate change, poverty and migration, writing, “There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation.” I longed to discuss these issues with my peers growing in the faith, but other doctrinal matters were prioritized. I was considering the medical profession at the time, but Francis’s insistence that caring for our common home required a new way of thinking, policies and spirituality that resisted the technocratic paradigm pushed me elsewhere. So I went to divinity school.
While on my spiritual journey through Catholicism, I began to heal from recent tragedies that had robbed me of my sense of purpose. I saw Christ in Pope Francis’s words. I saw a recognition of my own traumas of displacement as an immigrant and a vocational call to peace and theology when I read Francis confess, in Evangelii Gaudium, how “Migrants present a particular challenge for me, since I am the pastor of a Church without frontiers, a Church which considers herself mother to all,” and urge countries to embrace a “generous openness” that would create diverse societies. Amid the heartless anti-immigration laws and the deprivation of human rights within our borders in this country, I was comforted by Francis. He inspired my pursuit of a theological degree and activism.
About a month before the Easter Vigil, and after months of being moved by Francis’s emphasis on the marginalized, I encountered the most challenging day of my faith formation—the instruction on the sacrament of marriage. Though I had grown up around Catholics and been exposed to Church doctrine, I never paid much attention to its hurtful teaching on homosexuality. According to the Catechism, “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law.” My usual smile at our weekly discussions turned into a sorrowful visage. As I thought of gay family members and the marginalization they experienced from loved ones and society, I realized how the Church’s teaching predominantly fueled that marginalization. For weeks, I asked God why an institution founded on passion would prevent people from loving each other. Why would God even create LGBTQ+ people only to deny their love? Are we not all made in God’s image?
As I struggled in my faith, I replayed countless times news clips from July of 2013 of Francis responding, “Who am I to judge?” to a question about a purportedly gay priest. After weeks of discernment, I decided to go through with receiving the sacraments on Easter. It was, in great part, my admiration and love for Francis, who introduced me to a God deeply connected with the marginalized and disadvantaged, that inspired me to reenter the Catholic Church.
My Catholic faith has never divorced prayer from action because of the mandate of love that Pope Francis followed, reflected in his constant advocacy for the dehumanized people of Gaza. During the final 18 months of his life, he maintained a ritual: each evening at 7 p.m., he called a priest at Holy Family Church—the only Catholic parish in Gaza—to receive updates on the nearly 600 people taking refuge there amid ongoing war. In his final public appearance, he renewed his plea for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. In his Easter message, Francis voiced solidarity with those suffering, expressing closeness to “the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people,” especially those in Gaza.
In his final address, he urged: “I appeal to the warring parties: Call on a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of starving people who long for a future of peace.” Throughout the war, Francis became more outspoken in condemning the Israeli military’s tactics. A month into the conflict, he called for an investigation into whether Israel’s actions could constitute genocide. In December, he lamented, “the cruelty, the machine-gunning of children, the bombing of schools and hospitals … How much cruelty.” By January, he described the humanitarian catastrophe as “very serious and shameful.”
When I did not see the gospel reflected in our own Catholic university, I saw it in the actions of our pope, actions that ultimately got me arrested for peacefully calling for peace in Gaza. In Pope Francis’s pontificate, I found a faithful follower of Christ and pastor to all who aspire to follow Christ’s command to love the least of these, the marginalized of society. Pope Francis’s loving leadership of a broken Church in a broken world is the reason I’m still Catholic today. May he rest in peace, and may his soul guide our Church to continued healing and conversion toward the oppressed.
Joryán Hernández
Doctoral student in peace studies and theology
Apr. 24
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.