A Few Words About Pope Francis

A rare religious dispatch. Plus: "The Wedding Banquet" and other recommendations.

Hi friends,

One thing about me is that I grew up Catholic. My family was not particularly religious, but as residents of suburban Chicago, we belonged to a church in our community. It had warm wood interiors and a wooden cross on the wall near the altar. Father Steve, our priest, seemed like a nice guy. He was low-key and genial. One night, I joined my friend Lisa for Wednesday Mass and Father Steve announced that he was going on temporary leave. Specifically, to enter a rehabilitation facility in Minnesota for alcohol addiction. The revelation caught me by surprise and afterward I made a snarky joke. However, Lisa and the congregation overall reacted to his disclosure with a compassion that I could not fully muster at the time. In hindsight, I now see how much courage it took for Father Steve to confess that he was, well, human.

When my parents divorced and remarried my stepparents, they could no longer receive Holy Communion because the church requires the first marriage to be annulled before it will recognize the second. Don’t ask me why this is, but it struck me even in my pre-teen youth as extremely rude and exclusionary. Like many of my friends, I attended weekly Bible study leading up to my First Communion. My grandmother, who was Irish, made my dress: White with lavender ribbon. At 13 or so, I went through Confirmation, a rite of passage among young Catholics, and though I can’t recall what I wore, a part of me enjoyed the solemn pageantry of the ceremony.

We didn’t attend church often. We showed up on Christmas and Easter, for weddings and funerals and other rites of passage. At my younger brother’s Confirmation, Father Steve wasn’t there. Instead, an unfamiliar archbishop presided over the event. He was blustery and intimidating, with a big, booming voice and a flashy robe. He’d ascended the ranks and represented the entire Midwest on the Vatican’s behalf, and that morning, he stood in front of hundreds of people, including children whose parents had divorced, and used his platform to bloviate for a solid 20 minutes about how divorce is a sin that will leave kids damaged for life.

My brother, a star athlete with a loving and unconventional family structure, had to sit there and listen to this BS.

Congregants lodged complaints following that Confirmation. I’m not sure the archbishop ever returned to our church. Neither did we, except for the time that I attended a high school friend’s wedding there.

Like many “bad Catholics” with Irish heritage, I’ve made plenty of snarky jokes at the church’s expense. The rigid hierarchy, scandals, hypocrisy and retrograde rules … I mean, the punchlines write themselves!

Pope Francis in 2015. (Source.)

Then Pope Francis came along, seemingly out of nowhere. He was the opposite of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, and pushed the church to become more inclusive and welcoming. Per The New York Times, “Francis reached out to migrants, the poor and the destitute, to victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy members, and to alienated gay Catholics.”

Francis, whom bad Catholics dubbed “Cool Pope,” became the first pontiff to open “influential meetings of bishops to laypeople, including women, allowed priests to bless same-sex couples and made clear that transgender people could be godparents and that their children could be baptized,” the Times said, reporting:

Francis signaled his humble style from the outset. He paid his own bill at the Vatican hotel where he stayed during the conclave that elected him, rode about town in a modest Ford Focus, lived in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the ornate papal apartments and, in a Holy Week ritual performed at a youth prison, washed the feet of a young Muslim woman. Later, in his ailing years, he referred to his own frailty in demanding dignity for the aged.

His humility could be disarming. When asked about a priest who was said to be gay, he responded, “Who am I to judge?”

As his health declined in recent weeks, I found myself constantly checking the news for updates on his condition. I even walked into Saints Peter and Paul Church, around the corner from me in San Francisco, and lit a prayer candle.

Francis’ death on Monday at the age of 88 was felt all over the world, by believers and non-believers alike. Whomever is elected the next Pope will have big shoes to fill, and ideally follow in the footsteps of his dynamic leadership and help the church loosen up, get with the times, and give everyone a seat at the table.

During the conclave in Rome, the cardinals must ask themselves, What would Jesus do?

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END CREDITS

• I saw The Wedding Banquet at my local AMC last weekend and LOVED IT. I happily chugged my orange-flavored Icee and killed 90 minutes with Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran, Lily Gladstone and Han Gi-chan. They make wonderful company.

• On Substack, I’m loving

  Beth Lisogorsky
  on her secret pop-culture crushes, Saul Austerlitz on The Studio,
  Will Leitch
  on “The Current Political Situation” and historian
  Lucy Worsley
  on everything from Anne Boleyn’s coronation to the rebuilding of Notre Dame to the history of … the fork!

• Many thanks to SFGate’s Amanda Bartlett for including me in her excellent piece on the underrated romantic comedy Just Like Heaven, and to

  Jo Piazza
  for inviting me on her podcast Under the Influence to talk Bridget Jones, real lady necks and the golden age of rom-coms. Jo anointed me “the queen of rom-coms.” I SHALL HENCEFORTH DECREE THAT BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY SHALL BE RELEASED IN MOVIE THEATERS IN LIEU OF BEING STREAMED ON PEACOCK.

• Happiest pub week to Emily Henry (Great Big Beautiful Life) and Annie B. Jones (Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put). Auto-buys, both.

Bookish Bay Area pals: I’ll be in conversation with The Other Lata novelist

Kirthana Ramisetti

at the Ferry Building on Monday, April 28, 5:30 p.m. Come over and say hello!

Warmly,

Erin