I know that the news of Pope Francis’ passing has, for anyone who reads my blog, hit with great force. As I’m sitting here, both with and without deep emotion, as the moments move from one to the next, I can’t help but coming back to how much the Holy Father had strengthened me. He taught me a lot of new things. But he also just made me confident in what I had grown in, rather without support, and gave an integrated emotional foundation to it all. So, I’ll write a little on that. That’s where I am today. It’s something I need to do.

Pope Francis really was a pontiff of Christian contemplation. I can’t overstate this. He was a master of spiritual theology and insisted tirelessly, including in the highest papal documents, on the centrality of contemplating Christ in others and the goodness, the beauty, and the truth of other people. He put contemplation “on the roads”—to use an expression of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain—and promoted a “mysticism with open eyes,” to use the expression that he himself adopted. He suggested having eyes to contemplate the dust—the dust-covered people—blowing in our streets. It is, according to the late pontiff, the beauty of Christ in them that summons us into those streets. I have often said that Francis did more fundamental work for the contemplative life than perhaps any predecessor since Gregory the Great. And I really stand by that.

One of the main pathways that Pope Francis took to contemplation was as a devoted disciple of Charles de Foucauld, whom he got to canonize and about whom he spoke in detail, often at length, in each of the three encyclical letters that he himself undertook to write. Br. Charles of Jesus was at the root of the Holy Father’s declaration that the parable of the Sheep and the Goats must be accepted sine glossa, without ifs or buts.

In the Foucauldian approach to Christian life, which Francis characterized as an antidote to Pelagianism, the Pope had a spiritual family to draw on. One of the interpreters that helped him along was René Voillaume—and it was deeply reassuring for me to find that the Bishop of Rome, of all people, was being guided in interpretation and life-framing by the books of the same Little Brother of Jesus that I had been. If you know the common threads, you can see them all over the place, even in the little things like how Francis echoed language of prioritizing fruitfulness over results. More tangibly, the Holy Father gave a Fr. Voillaume book to the priests of the Diocese of Rome a few Holy Thursdays ago. What Br. Charles and Fr. Voillaume gifted the Pope with is a spirituality centred on Nazareth—as the Holy Father stressed at his last Holy Thursday Chrism Mass. As I learned, too, it was through the Little Sisters of Jesus that trans people came to visit the Pope at the weekly audiences and communicate with him through email. This was only confirmed when he met with the Little Sisters during their General Chapter time in Rome. The beautiful influence of the spiritual family of Br. Charles was undeniable, too, when the Holy Father gave a catechesis on the saint himself and visited the Little Sisters in Ostia.

Pope Francis was insistent that Christian contemplation and the experience of beauty go together. There is one God-given contemplative and aesthetic sense. For me, this was a bit of a revelation. It was such a concise way of framing things. This Bergoglian approach might have been developed by combining the transcendentals that he liked to reference in Hans Urs von Balthasar and the definition of prayer that Br. Charles gives via Fr. Voillaume. Of course, the Holy Father insisted that the human contemplative dimension itself is not yet prayer. But it is focused at the same convergence of truth and love, that is, beauty. This teaching is profoundly different from “aestheticism” or “aesthetic relativism,” which the Pope ceaselessly attacked. In other words, like Little Brother of Jesus Arturo Paoli before him, whom the Pope knew and learned from, Francis diagnosed a crisis in our aesthetic sense. And his solution was that we have a single contemplative and aesthetic sense gifted by God. This connection between contemplation and beauty came through, too, in the bull of indiction for the present Jubilee Year, where contemplation was discussed primarily in terms of contemplative rest, patience, and the beauty of God’s creation.

For contemplation and the environment, Pope Francis was really important. He specified grateful contemplation of the creation of God as the eighth work of mercy, paired with care for creation as the corresponding active work—that is, the need to both hope and act with creation. Indeed, it is in Laudate Deum, the apostolic exhortation on the climate crisis, that we might find the most consolidated teaching on Christian contemplation: of God in himself and his Persons; of Christ in his historical humanity and in humanity today, especially the poor, whose cry is connected to the cry of the earth; and in gratitude for creation, which cries out, too. I once remarked that this fourfold consolidation is very much in continuity with what we find in mediaeval teaching, though it is also a development, particularly in Foucauldian ways. I think the consolidation is really worth paying attention to. I am so grateful for it.

My gratitude also extends especially to the apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia. For me, it was life-changing. In it, I found first the clearest teaching to date on what Christian contemplation is. That’s where the Holy Father most eloquently spoke of a God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense. But more than this, in that papal document I found a calling to understand Indigenous peoples as our principal dialogue partners. The phrase had been used before, but the way it made itself felt, in concrete ways, throughout the text was a game-changer for me. I also learned to read synodality in an Indigenous key, thanks to the historical connection between the Synod for the Amazon and the Synod on Synodality.

I’m still not quite done thinking through all the impacts of Francis on contemplative life; one thing that can’t be missed is how touch is the most religious sense. This theme appears as early as Lumen Fidei, Francis’ first encyclical, finishing off a work-in-progress of Benedict XVI, and as late as Dilexit Nos, his last encyclical. Although it is incorporated to greater and lesser degrees with his official magisterial teaching role, the prayer phenomenology of touch is nonetheless part of his massive plan of restructuring theological thought about the contemplative life and the Christian life in general. I appreciate that, because it ties in so well with my own experience and reading.

Pope Francis was a leader of vulnerability. We saw this at the end. But he also discoursed on it, especially in the past year or so. He started off his detailed and late reflections on this with a catechesis on changing sadness into joy, a theme dear to Marcel Văn, though the Holy Father seemed to not know the Vietnamese Servant of God (though I daresay he has influenced him from heaven). This was followed by reflections on the connections between spirituality, vulnerability, and abuse, as well as the statement that where the Church has no worldly triumph, there is her greatest beauty. Most interesting, however, is one of the interpretive keys to the Pope’s recent reorganization of the Diocese of Rome: that vulnerability is another expression of beauty. This tied together contemplation, our God-given aesthetic sense, and all the pain and potential of vulnerability. I think it is a theme that we will be seeing more of as this century plays out. And Pope Francis dug deep into it in his late apostolic letter “motu proprio”. It is a really important teaching for me.

There are, of course, so many other contemplative notes that I can’t forget to mention. I’ll just list them: Francis’ apostolic exhortation on Thérèse of Lisieux; his little teaching on the relationships between silence, relationship, and mission in the contemplative life; his instruction on the relationship between silence and listening, i.e., contemplative communication; his address to Carmelite nuns; his “no” to a “dictatorship of doing” and his “yes” to contemplative rest; his stress on mediaeval contemplative women like Lutgarde, Mechtilde, Angela, Julian, and Gertrude in his last encyclical, as well as Hadewijch in his late Holy Saturday homily.

Pope Francis really, really made me feel like I have walked an ecclesial path that is not to be shunned but encouraged. So much of this came through shared influences. Aside from the spiritual family of Charles de Foucauld, other shared influences that I became delighted to know of include Martin Luther King Jr., Marie-Joseph Le Guillou, and Jacques Maritain. I’m sure there are others. But even if not, this is much, and I am truly grateful.

At the beginning of Lent this year, Pope Francis asked us to be “beggars for heaven.” He was invoking, as he himself noted, a phrase of Jacques Maritain. I had missed this usage until a couple of weeks ago. But now, having seen it, I think it is an important word to end with:

Let us learn from prayer to discover our need for God or, as Jacques Maritain put it, that we are “beggars for heaven”, and so foster the hope that beyond our frailties there is a Father waiting for us with open arms at the end of our earthly pilgrimage.

There is, I am certain, just certain, a Father waiting for Jorge Bergoglio with open arms at the end of his earthly pilgrimage.