The Death of a Father

I am initially writing these words on February 19, 2025, and the Holy Father, Pope Francis, has pneumonia in both lungs. He is of advanced age and has not been in good health. He likely is dying, and now, in early April, we know this was his final illness.

The near approach of death is a solemn thing. I prayed earnestly that Francis would recover in body and mind, praying for him, as a fellow human being, and as our spiritual father. Twice have I been present at someone’s death. I will speak here of the first. 

It was in 1991, when my father, fully conscious, and aware that he would die on that day, took his leave of his family with open eyes, whispering his last words to my mother, “I love you.” We knew he could not live through the day. He could no longer take any water, and his cancer-ridden liver could no longer clear away the poisons. My father knew it too. Several people came earlier in the day to bid him goodbye, and that was why he gave me and my brother the last command of his: to clear the driveway of snow that had fallen the night before.

My father was a profoundly good man, a devout son of the Church, faithful to my mother, brave in his physical suffering, a favorite uncle to many of our cousins, and proud of all of us four children. He did not talk about his feelings, but I never doubted that he loved me, not once. What it may be like to see your father die when you are not sure of that, or when through much of your life you were not sure of it, I have since learned by observation. Such a death may feel even more solemn, and the son who prays by his father’s side may find himself clearing away all the confusion and disappointment, and only knowing, “This is my father, whom I love.”

I do not wish to prognosticate. When Pope Francis dies, the politicking begins: the speculations on who is papabile, the alliances, the compromises, the brokering, the canvassing, the prayers, the fits of shrewdness and folly, of plain dealing and guile.  Forgive me, but I find it nauseating. To say that the Holy Spirit is responsible for all of it is blasphemy. But we believe that He works in and through the Church, whose type in the Old Testament is Rahab, the prostitute in Jericho who assisted Joshua’s spies. The Holy Spirit builds with the clay of mankind.

When Francis was raised to the highest office in the Church, a dear friend of mine was in Rome with his family, there among the crowds at St. Peter’s when the new pope came down and made his way through the piazza. One of my friend’s children is paraplegic from birth. Though he understands everything, he will never walk, and he cannot speak. He was only a small boy at that time. When Francis passed by, he saw the boy, went over to him, held him for a moment, and kissed him. I saw it on a video. It will remain always in my mind. It should not be controversial to note that some of the affection he [Francis] receives is attributable not so much to his person but to political positions; so, too, some of the disaffection. Tweet This

On what Francis has done as pope, there is little I want to say here now, good or bad. It should not be controversial to note that some of the affection he receives is attributable not so much to his person but to political positions; so, too, some of the disaffection. That is just a feature of the human condition. I will try to filter that out. I know that many will feel they have lost a powerful advocate for action against climate change, to use the vague term now in place instead of “global warming,” and this they view as the central moral issue of our time. I do not see that. I am not a meteorologist, a geologist, or an agronomist. 

I do know that if all threats to the physical environment were removed, we would still be living amid a collapsing civilization, whose collapse can be gauged by specific terms of measurement, sad and painful to behold. Fair winds will not bring men and women together in marriage. Clean air cannot beget children. Temperate summers do not sing the love songs of old. Solar panels might heat a building, but they will not fill a church.

What will? Love will—but we do not reliably know what love is, and we do not know how to love. We are apt to reduce it to affectionate feelings, or sexual desire, or a gnawing need in the midst of a general loneliness for which I find no precedent in the history of the world. The poets and novelists of our tradition, who so often disagree with one another, speak with one voice in telling us that when it comes to love, we grope in the dark. We get love wrong. All Christians understand that love is the beating heart of human life and the very essence of God. But perhaps what we need now is a reminder that truth exists: for God is light, and light illuminates what is true and irradiates the soul to behold that truth.

Truth exists. It is not to be limited to scientific experiment and mathematical reduction. Truth embraces all that can be spoken, thought, and beheld; it is the ground of all that is. We can penetrate more deeply into the truth, or rather it opens itself out to us, but that development, that unfolding, is never a passage from opinion to opinion or expedient to expedient. Development is not denial, reversal, supplantation, or contradiction. It cannot be. The Holy Spirit is not a liar. 

What Shakespeare says about love we must say also of truth, that it “alters not with [Time’s] spare hours and weeks, / But bears it out unto the edge of doom.” We are now like people on a tempest-tossed ship without a compass or a sextant or a tiller, unable to steer and no longer aware that there is anything heavenly to steer by. That would be bad enough, but we have also passengers who insist that there never were such things and that it is good to be flung here and there. Those people often have some personal motive to shun the harbors where truth would take us.

Love embraces the prodigal son who returns home. It does not join the prodigal in defiance and in heaping abuse on the elder son. I long for a father who will give me some encouragement—I speak of what he says to the world—in the thankless and often unpleasant task of building up, patiently and with many disappointments, something like a human culture, one whose springs well up from the Faith. 

Is that to be a “culture warrior,” the term of insult used by some Catholics against those who are doing such work? Perhaps. But in one area after another, people who suffer that insult did not pick the fight. The aggressors were doing all the fighting and all the vandalizing. 

This has been particularly true in all matters relating to sex, marriage, and the raising and education of children. The ghastly manufacture of embryos; wombs for hire; the murder of children in the womb; the exposure of school children to the vile, unnatural, brutish, and obscene; the coarsening of public morals; the sowing of confusion in innocent and vulnerable minds; the grotesquerie of gelding boys and spaying girls; the resurgence of polygamy, all in the name of love; why, even the warping of foreign policy and the use of national charity as leverage against “backward” nations that do not want to go along—all these are acts of aggression. And for the sake of humanity, let alone the Church, they must be resisted, defeated, and put to rout.

Yet that, culturally, is not the most important thing. Many once healthy institutions have been destroyed or so corrupted as to be beyond reclaiming. Here I seek a father who understands what cultural work of rebuilding must be done, who has a keen sense that beauty is objectively real, and who does not dismiss the longing for beauty as an indulgence in arbitrary taste. For the things I have described above have this in common: they are ugly. But to see that they are ugly, when everyone around you is celebrating them, you need a soul formed by the experience of the beautiful. 

Every Catholic school in the world, every Catholic parish, should foster that sense. And that cannot be done unless we try to remember the thousand things we have forgotten, in all the arts and letters and, particularly, in sacred art and music and poetry. Every artistic and literary renaissance I know of has come about when people brought back the forgotten. If Donatello could get a shovel and dig up ancient statuary buried under hills of rubble in Rome, we can, for starters, open old books and read.

All of this we needed when Pope Francis was elected in 2013. Francis has warned us, correctly, against becoming a club, a self-enclosed haven of supposed righteousness. Man can turn anything into an idol, good things and bad. All are welcome in a Church thronging with sinners. The sin is not welcome, no more than disease and debility are welcomed by doctors who take their patients most to heart. 

Jesus did not engage in love’s impostor, permissiveness, the easiest thing in the world. Nor did He spare the characteristic sins of reformers and rebuilders, the sins of the righteous, dangerous to themselves and to the rebuilding they wish to accomplish. Then even if we do not feel the father’s love, we ought to take his rebukes to heart.

The work continues, as do my prayers for Pope Francis.

[Image Credit: VATICAN MEDIA Divisione Foto]