A true leader is one who serves. For those who seek to follow in the footsteps of Christ, this mandate is all the clearer, for the Gospel has Jesus saying that anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
But few leaders, even amongst those who succeeded St. Peter, have embodied that ideal. The late Pope Francis, who passed away last month, was one of those few.
The man born as Jorge Mario Bergoglio was not someone that most expected to become pope, at least not after his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, was elected. And when he became the pope – the first ever to take on the name Francis, from St. Francis of Assisi, famous for his care for the poor and nature – he was likely not the kind of pope many had expected or were used to.
The number of “firsts” that characterized the papacy of Pope Francis did not stop with his name. Pope Francis was the first pope from Latin America (and indeed from anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere), the first from the Jesuit order, the first who became a priest after the Second Vatican Council, the first to visit the Arabian Peninsula, the first to truly engage with social media and the first from outside Europe in over a thousand years.
Pope Francis made great efforts to do away with some of the more public ostentatious trappings of his office, declining the traditional red mozzetta or cape on the night of his election, and remaining in the Casa Santa Marta residence instead of the gilded papal apartment. By all accounts he answered his own phone, preferred walking (before his body failed him), and using buses or simple transport if needed. He kept wearing the same simple black shoes and cheap plastic watches he had always used.
But more than the humility he sought to display with his lifestyle, it was the willingness of Pope Francis to hear out different points of view – to admit the possibility of error in the behavior of the Church or at least the possibility of better or alternative methods – that showed a lack of the sort of pride that made many previous popes, and the Catholic Church itself, so difficult to relate to. A religion that had been built on a foundation of love and kindness had, in many ways, become a monolith that made it unapproachable and unrelatable.
While in the end, many aspects of the Church remained entrenched in tradition, Pope Francis almost always seemed open to dialogue, speaking frankly with the press and with empathy regarding controversial issues – homosexuality, divorce, married priests – where the Church’s traditional stance seemed at odds with the lived experience of many of its members. In spite of his exalted position, one doctrinally protected by the assumption of infallibility, Pope Francis was able to project an earnestness and kindness that allowed many to refer to him as the world’s parish priest. Even as a pope, he did not seem divorced from our needs and problems. He seemed to be working with us and amongst us.
The work that Pope Francis devoted himself to also gave that impression, of someone whose heart and sympathies lay with the poor and dispossessed. He traveled to remote places to speak with migrants and rail against global indifference to their plight; he amplified warnings about climate change, which he knew would disproportionately affect the poor and vulnerable; he criticized the capitalist system and global inequalities, and against the death penalty and nuclear weapons. He sought to mend fences with other religious groups, and with indigenous people who suffered injustice under the Church.
Pope Francis was not perfect. The Church was always going to be too big for a single man to change, even the pope. But Pope Francis succeeded in making those who sought that change feel like they were still part of the Church – that the Church still loved them and was willing to hear them out.
As we join the rest of the Church in welcoming and praying for the papacy of Pope Leo XIV, it is important that we remember Pope Francis and how he embodied the ideal of servant leadership. This is of particular importance to us here in the Philippines, not only as a predominantly Catholic nation, but as one coming off the national elections last month. We cannot pray to our God and seek to follow the example of his Son without evaluating our leaders using the lens of servant leadership. Pope Francis’ life is a constant reminder of what that means – to live simply, to side with the oppressed, to meet criticism with empathy and never to be too proud to seek apology and redress.
Those among us who seek to be first must be last.
May the life and words of Pope Francis serve as a beacon for what we seek from our leaders, in the same way that, during the earliest days of the COVID quarantines, the sight of Pope Francis raising a gold monstrance in a deserted St. Peter’s Square was a beacon of hope and solidarity in the darkest of times.