Pope Francis, the 265th successor of Saint Peter and lead artist on the very confusing but absolutely real 2015 combination prog rock/spoken word album Wake Up! that Pitchfork gave a 5.0, died early on April 21st. Official reports confirm a stroke as the cause of death, apparently eliminating JD Vance as a suspect.
Throughout the course of this project, I have been very complimentary of many things Pope Francis did and said, and very critical of other things he did and said. Whoever the next guy is (and I am not the kind of person who has any insight into who the next guy could be), I will probably be complimentary of some of the things he does and critical of other things he does. At this moment, I would like to remember one of the things Pope Francis was best at, which was being on the world stage and telling us that we were allowed to imagine and ultimately have a better world than the one we have right now. In particular, if you remember back to the early days of the COVID pandemic when I was still rubbing all of my groceries with Clorox wipes, at a time when every single other world leader was going with the approach of “we will try to get you back to 2019 as quickly as we possibly can and we’ll just all pretend this never happened”, Pope Francis - in avenues like his book Let Us Dream, his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, and his April address from a famously empty St. Peter’s Square - told us that:
“The crisis has called forth in some a new courage and compassion. Some have been sifted and have responded with the desire to reimagine our world; others have come to the aid of those in need in concrete ways that can transform our neighbor’s suffering. That fills me with hope that we might come out of this crisis better. But we have to see clearly, choose well, and act right."
And:
“Today we have to avoid falling back into the individual and institutional patterns that have led to Covid and the various crises that surround it: the hyperinflation of the individual combined with weak institutions and the despotic control of the economy by a very few...This crisis has called forth the sense that we need each other, that the people still exists...The feeling of being part of a people can only be recovered in the same way as it was forged: in shared struggle and hardship...Unless we accept the principle of solidarity among the peoples, we will not come out of this crisis better.”
When everyone else said “we need to get past this as quick as we can, just keep your head down and we will try to make everything feel normal”, when politicians keep telling us “we are going to go back to a time when we imagine that everything was great”, Pope Francis said that this does not feel normal at all, it’s not supposed to, we do not need to go back, going back was just going to cause more problems, and that there can be something even better than what we've had before out on the other side of this, a world where we take better care of the most vulnerable among us, where we show more compassion and mercy to each other. In his final encyclical, Dilexit Nos, he told us that “the world can change, beginning with the heart”. He tells us that the world can change. That makes him a singular figure among world leaders in my adult life. Perhaps I am just saying this to myself, but: do not forget, even in times of crisis, that the world can change, and that we are constantly called to change our hearts so that the world can change as a result.
The other thing that makes Pope Francis a singular figure among world leaders is that, again, he released a combination prog rock/spoken world album in 2015. Many remembrances of Pope Frances have already popped up across Catholic media; far as I can tell, I'm the only guy that actually remembers this album. More writers should have brought it up. This track does honestly kind of slap: