Homily at the Requiem Mass for Pope Francis at St. Paul Parish on April 25, 2025, in Benin

“Condemn the Sin, But Welcome the Sinner.”

1. After several weeks of reports of the Holy Father, Pope Francis’s failing health, somewhat expectedly but not without the pain of a loss, we received the news of his death on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025, at 7:35 a.m. It was a life blessed with longevity. He fought on till the last. He died just a day after appearing on Easter Sunday to bless the faithful at St. Peter Square.

2. Despite having part of his lungs removed at the age of 21, he lived through life with great strength, taking up many demanding responsibilities until his death. We end another pontificate in the Church. But we will not close his chapter so soon without first spending these nine days of mourning to pray for the repose of his soul, just as we thank God for his life and reflect on how his rich pontificate takes us into a new future.

3. Jorge Maria Bergoglio was born as the eldest of five children on December 17, 1936, to an Italian-born Father, Mario José Bergoglio, and an Argentinian-born mother of Italian origin, Regina María Sívori. Seven years before his birth, precisely in 1929, the family of his father emigrated to Argentina to escape the fascist rule of then-Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini. Little wonder that the son of an immigrant parent or of a parent who had ‘jakpad,’ as we say in our Nigerian parlance, was so concerned about the fate of immigrants.

4. In a homily given in May 2013, Pope Francis described how he found his vocation to the priesthood while on his way to a party: “I passed by the parish where I was going, found a priest, whom I did not know, and felt the need to go to confession. This was an experience of encounter: I found that someone was waiting for me.” This act of self-giving of the priest inspired him to become a priest, which eventually saw his entrance into the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, on March 11, 1958. He made his final vows of poverty, chastity and obedience on March 12, 1960. He was ordained a priest on December 13, 1969.

5. Four years after his ordination, at 36, he became the provincial Superior of the Jesuits in Argentina from April 1973 till July 1979. On June 27, 1992, he was appointed the auxiliary bishop of the Buenos Aires Archdiocese of Argentina. Five years later, he became the coadjutor archbishop of the same archdiocese on June 3, 1997, and substantive bishop on February 28, 1998. He was created a cardinal on February 21, 2001, by Pope John Paul II. After the fifth ballot in a conclave called upon the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, he was elected Pope the 265th successor of St. Peter on March 13, 2013. He was a pope of many firsts: the first Latin American Pope, the first Jesuit Pope and the first pope to take the name Francis.

6. His episcopal motto, Miserando atque eligendo, which is transliterated as “by having mercy and by choosing”, is usually translated as “lowly but chosen.” The motto takes its inspiration from St. Bede’s homily on the call of Matthew (Cf. Mt. 9:9-13), where the saint said that God called the tax collector “because he saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him.” This motto explains why, with unrestrained enthusiasm, Jorge Maria Bergoglio has shown great concern for the poor and less privileged. It is the call of a shepherd who must have the smell of the sheep. When he became the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he prioritised caring for the slums and poor areas of the archdiocese and doubled the number of priests sent there. He visited those areas often. His simple lifestyle came from his desire to identify with the poor and less privileged.

7. His care for the poor and simplicity are rooted in his emphasis on God’s mercy. This inspired him to declare the Year of Mercy from December 8, 2015, to November 20, 2016. He strove to show how God’s mercy should essentially define our relationship with God and others. This underlined his pastoral approaches, which led him to his first pastoral visit to the Island of Lampedusa in Italy, where he highlighted the perilous plight of migrants. He made 18 pastoral visits to Italy, 16 pastoral visits to parishes in Rome, 47 international pilgrimages and 59 countries within the twelve years of his pontificate.

8. In his resignation letter as Pope, Pope Benedict XVI said he was resigning because of his failing health of mind and body, which is required for the Supreme Pontiff to address “today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith.” Pope Francis felt called to respond to these challenges and wasted no time delving into moral issues concerning the Church and the faith in the world. Apart from efforts to reform the governance of the Church, address the clerical abuse crisis and seek a more inclusive Church which gave more prominence to women and the marginalised regions of the world, as seen in his creation of cardinals, he was determined to reshape how the Church responds to the divorced and remarried Catholics, issues of homosexuality, LGBT, abortion etc. His obvious guiding principle in all these is to separate the sin from the sinner. While the indissolubility of marriage remains sacrosanct, he will speak about possibilities for communion for divorced and remarried in a way that goes beyond that of his predecessors. He has been firm in condemning the sin of abortion, even calling it a hitman job. Still, he often criticised advocates of pro-life movements for what he considered approaches that did not show sufficient concern for the sinner. He restates the Church’s teaching on the immorality of homosexuality and gender changes, but he has often welcomed homosexuals and transgender people to show them God’s love and compassion.

9. Even while condemning the sin, Pope Francis’s embrace of sinners has not often been viewed positively by many. For some, his pastoral approach seems to blur the line between the sin and the sinner or those whose public lifestyles contradict the Church’s moral doctrines. How can such openness to the LGTB community not be seen as condoning their behaviour? Where is the loving proclamation of conversion to these persons even while they are welcomed? The Holy Father seems to foresee these ambiguities, so he has often spoken about creating a mess. At a youth gathering in Paraguay in 2015, he asked them to make a mess. He spoke about the same in a similar gathering earlier in 2013. A mess is an untidy state of affairs. His call for a mess is a criticism of rigid systems and perspectives that give no room for openness to new ways of doing things. In the same speech where he called the youths to make a mess, he showed awareness of the need to tidy up after making a mess: “Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up.” But did the Holy Father succeed in tidying up the mess often created by his ‘moral surgeries’ and statements which seem to blur the line between sin and the sinner and unsettle clear doctrinal teachings? This question speaks more to the task cut out for his successor.

10. As we wait for that task to begin, we must thank God today for giving us a pope whose exemplary simplicity, pastoral sensitivity and warmth are rooted in a deep awareness of God’s mercy. Anyone who does not see Pope Francis’s differences with his immediate predecessors is as naive as those who see a rupture between him and his immediate predecessors. He refused to live in the apostolic palace, but he canonised three of his immediate predecessors who lived there, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II, and beautified a fourth one, John Paul I. We find one who brought his natural simplicity to the pontificate to show us that not everything is cast in stone. Therefore, those who have made an occupation out of papal criticism or others who have declared that the Church had gone astray do not only show a lack of fair assessment of reality but also undermine the role of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

11. The gospel reading of Easter Friday points us to this role of the Holy Spirit in the symbolic interpretation of the net that was overburdened by the huge catch of fish but was not torn (John 21:11). Just as Peter’s boat cannot sink, the net of Christ, the Church, cannot tear. No human power can destroy the unity of the Church. The Holy Spirit, who continues to enlighten the Church, cannot be confined to one system or a way of doing things. At the same time, the Spirit cannot be contradicted. This impossibility of contradiction precisely made Jesus promise the gift of infallibility to the pope. He told Peter, “Simon, Simon, behold Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed that your own faith may not fail…” (Lk. 31-32). Peter’s faith and that of his successors will never fail because of the promise of Christ. He made the promise to Peter, which remained even after Peter denied him three times. The promise does not confer impeccability on Peter, but it confers infallibility on him. St. John Henry Newman said that if there was no gift of infallibility in the Church, inventing it would be necessary. If Christ’s doctrine is to be preserved for all ages without error, those entrusted with proclaiming this doctrine have to be protected from error, not because they themselves are without error, but is it is precisely because they are capable of erring. The Pope needs the gift of infallibility because he is not impeccable, just as only the one who can be sick would need health insurance or have a spare tyre for a possible failure of the car tyres.

12. We thank God for Pope Francis’s rich pontificate and ask the almighty God to accept the sufferings of his last days and grant him mercy and eternal rest before his throne of grace. Through Mary, Our Mother, and St. Joseph, her Most Chaste Spouse, may God bless Pope Francis and guide the Cardinals to elect a new pope after his own heart.

Fr. Idahosa Amadasu
Seminary of All Saints,
Uhiele, Ekpoma.