Pope Francis is Dead

He died on Easter Monday, how appropriate. I was very sad.

I really had liked the man. It seemed to me, from my far-away perch, that he tried very hard to ease us out of our worship of dollar bills and into respecting human life. But he didn’t make it.

I’m in Nairobi today and the sky is overcast and gray. It is humid and sad out there, as if the birds know about the holy father’s failure. There is even a jackdaw (the crows in tuxedos) out on the rooftop cawing his grief.

Jesus may have risen from the dead 2000 years ago, but lord knows we need him again to bring down the evil of Trump, Netayahu, Putin, Orban and Kenya’s own William Ruto. They deserve each other those thugs. But we don’t deserve any of them.

I understand why Pope Francis gave up, its just too hard to try to be compassionate and understanding of the shits who are in power these days. Some people want to blame it on ignorance or racism, I think it has mostly to do with capitalism – and the oligarchs who have taken over our supposedly democratic systems. Francis’ last words were supposed to be ‘but I wanted to stop the war’… So he felt like a failure. Mind you Jesus also felt like a failure when he died. Catholics like to think of the Pope as Christ’s representative on earth now. So Francis did good.

When I was a kid, I went to catholic schools for much of my education. We prayed for the pope everyday but it meant very little to me.

One thing I do remember – from my three years at Nardin Academy in Buffalo NY – grades three through 5 inclusive – was how we started every morning by standing for the pledge of allegiance and then went on to say the “our father”, the “hail Mary” and to confess our sins every morning with “Oh my God I am heartly sorry for having offended thee and I detest all my sins because of they just punishment but most of all because they offend thee my lord, who arte all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of thy grace to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin. Amen”. This struck me as a sinful prayer in itself, because I was promising to do something I knew I couldn’t do.

Ah well – one of the great mysteries of faith, I guess.

I also remember asking the nun when I was in 4^th grade what a virgin was anyway and she responded with “someone who has never sinned”. So, if you had asked me in 5^th grade if I was a virgin I would have said ‘no, or course not”. Live and learn.

I left home to seek my fortune when I was 17 and started university in Montreal. To this day Quebec is a very Catholic place and so they see fit to have a cross on the top of the Mount Royal which is lit up. When I arrived in early Sept 1978, to Montreal the cross was lit yellow and I thought it was very pretty. Then a couple of days later it changed to white, still pretty though. In a couple of weeks, it went purple, and I thought ‘wow how fun’. Then after a month or so it went yellow again and I was happy to see it. When the cross went white again I started to figure out that there was some sort of pattern. I was really enjoying my first autumn as a real university student (as opposed to the child of a teacher as I was used to) and the changing colors of the cross on the hill appealed very much to me. Then the cross stayed white for almost every after.

It turns out that we had changed popes a couple of times that year, quite unbeknownst to me, Pope Paul VI died on August 6th, 1978, and was followed by Pope John Paul I, who died on September 28th, 1978. When Catholic Montreal heard of a pope dying, they changed the cross to purple (in mourning) until they got a new pope to replace him. Once a new pope was found the cross went yellow in celebration and then back to it white. I guess the cross on Mount Royal is purple now.

I didn’t pay much attention to popes after that. The polish pope – John Paul II – was okay for a Catholic (the usual complaints about him: no birth control, no women’s rights etc). I also felt uncomfortable with the extremely nationalist, to my mind quite chauvinistic, worshiping of him at his death in 2005. And then the German pope – Benedict the 16^th – came to power.

We were in Bosnia around that time and spoke to a very angry Serbian Orthodox man who called him ‘the NAZI’ Pope. I guess he had sided with Hitler’s Germany rather than getting himself killed during WWII, which is uncool. The best thing he ever did, and it must have taken great courage to do so, was to step down into retirement with his personal secretary. Everyone knew they were gay lovers, which is supposed to be a sin in the Catholic Church. Though they never spoke of it, he definitely moved public opinion away from ‘kill all gays’ to at least ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ – this is a step in the right direction of tolerance.

That was a hard time for other reasons for me: my adult kids were in Belfast at that time, working with the occupy movement, and living the radical dream (to this day they both have excellent ‘street creds’ as radical activists.)

Upon moving to Belfast, my son had decided that he was much more Catholic than Protestant; though with his father having been baptized in the ‘United Church of Canada’ if at all, and me a ‘fallen Catholic’ he was free to be whoever he wanted.

The Vatican was between popes that Lenten season and Terry decided to give up food all together. He would only eat lentils and rice on Sundays to be like the suffering of Bangladesh (where he had lived between the ages of 8 and 10). He was taking a prescription mood enhancing medicine at that time as well and he refused to take it too.

His family was very worried that he was slipping into a chaotic mindset, something like bipolar disorder, and Sadie called me to warn me that I may need to go and ‘save Terry from himself’. I hopped into a plane the next day and left sunny California for a frost-bitten Northern Ireland with all its ‘troubles’ still simmering. Terry is nothing if not sensitive to political moods and he felt it strongly, which is why he had become so strongly catholic. It was an act of opposition to the Protestant oppressive forces in Belfast. To this day the Belfast Police leave incredible leeway to the ‘unionists’ to be horribly racist and uncivil – but that too is another story.

After I got to Belfast I tried to force feed Terry, and to make him see a psychologist (which after, he walked out of the 1^st session, I kept going to by myself) Terry told me that he wouldn’t eat properly or take his medicine until they had chosen a progressive Franciscan pope from a third world country in Africa or South America.

By the time I had been in Belfast for over a month, moving around to save on rent, and fussing at my children, Terry’s weight was still going down fast, and he got so obviously sick, that we called Lew over for a few days to help…..he flew from California as well.

By this time our son was 6 foot 2 inches tall and he weighed considerably less than I did at a healthy 5 foot 6.5 inches tall. We were scared. I was giving him lentils and rice anytime I could corral him but there was no way I could get him to take his prescription.

So Lew came to help, we got Terry to Sadie’s borrowed flat and the three of us tried for a long time to get him to take his pill. It was said to be very dangerous to go on and off this medicine as he had been doing. …. Finally, Lew and Sadie sat on top of Terry to hold him down and I stuffed his pill into his mouth. You can be sure the neighbors heard an earful that afternoon.

About 4 minutes later, Terry was still laying on the floor complaining about being treated like a baby when the smoke came out of the Vatican enclave in white, rather than gray, meaning that they had chosen a new pope: Pope Francis from Argentina.

My memory is that we all started crying and laughing at the same time over the magic of Terry’s commitment to the cause. Sure, there is such a thing as ‘coincidence’, but this didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt like our crazy son had shifted the karma of the ‘one holy and apostolic church’ to allow for a progressive catholic leader. I instantaneously became a firm believer in ‘good juju’ as we call it to this day.

Since then, Pope Francis has made me proud. He visited this very street in Nairobi and went to a catholic church nearby which has a school and a hospital attached to it, and he talked about equitable opportunity for all. He talked about peace. He talked about tolerance in the name of civilization and he talked about post-colonialism. Maybe he talked about the violence that is committed against the poor by this government every day. The Kenyan ‘democracy’ regularly refuses services and demands bribes and ignores its job of running the country safely and for all its citizens while its leaders steal without shame.

Strangely Terry has just returned to Belfast again, to live there for a bit, first time since Pope Francis was selected. He is healthy and working hard on his next business. We heard the news and I had to write this blog. God Bless us everyone.