Adieu, Papa Mirabilis! Pope Francis, a pontiff in the spirit of Kazantzakis's God's Pauper
The world mourns the passing of Pope Francis, a shepherd who walked among wolves and lambs alike, his life echoing the radical humility that Nikos Kazantzakis immortalized in God’s Pauper: St. Francis of Assisi. In that novel, the saint is not plaster icon but a tempest of contradictions — a mystic who starves his body to feed his soul, a lover of Christ who defies the Church’s opulence, a man who kisses lepers not as pious performance but as rebellion against a world that worships power.
Pope Francis, too, was a paradox: a reformist rooted in tradition, a prophet of mercy in a fractured age, a pope who stripped the papacy of its imperial trappings to reclaim its ragged, revolutionary core. Like Kazantzakis’s Francis, he clawed at the walls of dogma not to destroy them but to let in the light.
Embracing the outcast: The sacrament of scars
Kazantzakis's Francis clings to lepers, not despite their wounds but because of them. In the novel, his embrace of outcasts becomes a sacrament, a defiance of a world that equates purity with exclusion. "Your sores are my jewels," he whispers to a beggar, his hands trembling with reverence.
Pope Francis inherited this visceral theology. His now-legendary "Who am I to judge?" response to a question about homosexuality in 2013 shifted the tectonic plates of Catholic discourse. While the doctrine on marriage remained unchanged, his insistence that LGBTQIA+ individuals "must not be marginalized" marked a pastoral revolution. "If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?" he asked, framing the issue not in terms of sin but of human dignity.
This was no mere rhetoric. In 2023, he met with transgender Catholics at the Vatican, listening to their stories of rejection by parishes. He later approved blessings for same-sex couples, a move that sparked fury among traditionalists but offered solace to millions. Critics accused him of sowing confusion; supporters saw a shepherd refusing to let perfect doctrine become the enemy of grace. Like Kazantzakis's Francis, who battles a Church obsessed with hierarchy, Pope Francis faced pushback from within the Curia. Yet he persisted, declaring, "The Church is a mother, not a customs house." His synodal reforms, emphasizing "listening" over decree, sought to decentralize power — a radical notion in an institution built on papal supremacy.
Sultan and saint: The bridge-builder’s risky pilgrimage
In God’s Pauper, Francis's dialogue with Sultan al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade is a feverish dance of mutual awe. The saint enters the heart of the Muslim camp not as a conqueror but a beggar, disarming hostility with vulnerability. "I come unarmed," he declares, offering not conversion but friendship.
Pope Francis inherited this script. In 2016, he washed the feet of Muslim refugees in Rome, kneeling before a young woman from Mali as she wept. A year later, he kissed the shoes of South Sudan's warring leaders, begging them to make peace. His 2019 Abu Dhabi declaration, co-signed with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, affirmed pluralism as divine will: "God wills the encounter of religions, not their mutual annihilation."
These acts were not without peril. After Abu Dhabi, Saudi hardliners condemned the Imam; Catholic traditionalists accused Francis of heresy. Yet the Pope, like his namesake, understood that peace begins in shared poverty of spirit. In 2021, he became the first pope to visit Iraq, praying in the ruins of Mosul, where ISIS had slaughtered Christians. Standing beside Ayatollah al-Sistani, he declared, "Fraternity is more durable than fratricide." For Kazantzakis's Francis, who sees Christ in the Sultan's face, such encounters were mystical unions. For Pope Francis, they were geopolitical necessities — and a rebuke to the clash of civilizations narrative.
The cosmic dance: Science, faith, and the cry of the Earth
Kazantzakis's Francis roars at the moon, "Brother! Sister!" — a mystic drunk on the unity of life. The Pope, a Jesuit trained in chemistry, married this cosmic piety to reason. In 2014, he reconciled evolution and the Big Bang with Catholic theology, dismissing creationists with a quip: "God is not a magician with a magic wand." His encyclical Laudato Si' (a direct nod to St. Francis's Canticle of the Sun) framed climate justice as a moral imperative, weaving science, faith, and ethics into an urgent call to "hear the cry of the Earth."
The document, released ahead of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, became a manifesto for activists. Greta Thunberg cited it; oil lobbyists reviled it. At the UN, Francis blasted the "green economy" as a façade for exploitation, demanding action for the global poor, "who bear the brunt of storms and droughts they did not create." Here, both Francises converged: one howling psalms to the stars, the other citing data on carbon emissions — each insisting creation is a communion, not a commodity.
Two Popes, two visions: Benedict's fortress and Francis's piazza
The Netflix film The Two Popes crystallized their contrasts: Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins), the erudite traditionalist, and Francis (Jonathan Pryce), the tango-dancing reformer. Where Benedict, in life and art, fortified doctrine like a medieval citadel — reviving the Latin Mass, penning theological tomes — Francis flung open the Vatican's windows, declaring, "This Church is a field hospital."
Their 2013 meeting at Castel Gandolfo, dramatized in the film, symbolized a seismic shift: Benedict, the "professor pope", resigned, acknowledging the Church's need for a pastor who "walks in the streets". Francis, in turn, eschewed papal finery, opting for a Ford Focus over the limousine, and choosing to live in the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse rather than the Apostolic Palace.
Their differences sharpened in public discourse. Benedict's 2006 Regensburg speech, which framed Islam as inherently violent, haunted interfaith relations; Francis, in his interview with atheist journalist Eugenio Scalfari, shrugged off dogma, insisting even atheists could be "redeemed by conscience". Scalfari, a nonbeliever, became an unlikely confidant — a relationship unthinkable under Benedict, who saw secularism as a "dictatorship of relativism". Traditionalist groups like the Society of St. Pius X seethed at Francis's inclusivity, while progressives grew impatient with his caution on women's ordination and clerical celibacy.
Liberation’s son: The Latin American legacy
Born in the villas miseria of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio carried the DNA of Latin America's struggle into the Vatican. His papacy bore the fingerprints of liberation theology, once condemned by Rome but resurrected in his vision of a "poor Church for the poor". He denounced the "globalization of indifference" with the fervor of Óscar Romero and Gustavo Gutiérrez, theologians martyred and marginalized for siding with the oppressed. In Evangelii Gaudium, he lambasted unfettered capitalism as "a new tyranny", echoing the movement's insistence that Christ's Gospel cannot be divorced from justice for the disenfranchised.
Yet, like Kazantzakis's Francis, who wrestles with the institutional Church's complicity in power, Pope Francis balanced revolution with pragmatism. He canonized Romero, a hero of liberation theology, but also reined in radical priests. He opened the Vatican's doors to street activists yet maintained diplomatic ties with autocrats. Critics accused him of ambiguity; supporters saw a shepherd threading a needle between prophecy and survival. "I cannot do everything," he once admitted, "but I must not do nothing."
Legacy: "Francis, just Francis"
Kazantzakis ends his novel with Francis's corpse bleeding stigmata, a testament to sanctity's agony. Pope Francis's reign, too, bore wounds — criticized by traditionalists for laxity and progressives for caution. When asked if he would be called "Francis I," he replied, "Francis, just Francis", rejecting the imperial weight of a numeral to embrace the simplicity of his namesake. Like the saint who stripped naked in Assisi's square, this pope shed the pomp of the papacy, choosing a name that needed no crown.
In his final years, beset by illness and resistance, he pressed on: reforming Vatican finances, demoting powerful conservatives, and appointing reformers to key posts. His decision to allow women to vote at the Synod of Bishops in 2023 cracked an age-old glass ceiling. Yet his greatest legacy may be his refusal to let the Church retreat into nostalgia. "We cannot be obsessed with defending the past," he insisted. "The Gospel is a dangerous memory; it provokes us to go forth."
Let the birds preach his eulogy
Adieu, Papa Mirabilis: a pope who, in the spirit of Assisi's pauper, taught that holiness lies not in perfection but in the dust of the road, the grime of the marginalized, and the fragile truce between faith and doubt. His legacy, like liberation theology itself, is a fire lit in the peripheries — a reminder that the Church's future, if it has one, must be written not in palaces but in the streets.
As night falls over Rome, imagine the saints welcoming him: St. Francis with his wolf, Romero with his martyrs, Kazantzakis's tormented hero with his lepers. And somewhere, a beggar whispers, "Your sores were his jewels." Let the poor canonize his memory. Let the birds, those unsung theologians, preach his eulogy. For he believed, as the Canticle says, that even Sister Death, when she comes, is but a gateway to the sunlit meadows where all creatures — saints and skeptics, popes and paupers — dance in the unending dawn.
Requiescat in pace, Francesco! The road goes on.
(The author is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala)
