Mercy, hope, and Pope Francis

[Homily for Divine Mercy Sunday 2025 following Pope Francis’s death]

Sisters and brothers, especially those of you experiencing pain and sorrow, your silent cry has been heard and your tears have been counted; not one of them has been lost!

These are not my words: They are from the final message of Pope Francis, his 2025 Easter message to the world. Pope Francis’ words continue:

In the passion and death of Jesus, God has taken upon himself all the evil in this world and in his infinite mercy has defeated it.… The Lamb of God is victorious! That is why, today, we can joyfully cry out: “Christ, my hope, has risen!”

“In his infinite mercy,” he says. The mercy we celebrate today, Divine Mercy Sunday, the octave day of Easter. “Christ, my hope, has risen”: words quoted by Pope Francis from the Easter Sequence that we heard on the first day of the octave—words especially appropriate in this Jubilee Year 2025, the Jubilee of Hope, so designated by Pope Francis more than three years ago when he chose the words Pilgrims of Hope as the motto for this holy year. It was Francis’s pastoral intention that Catholics travel together as “pilgrims of hope,” sanctifying the time though an inward journey toward God. A journey on which our Holy Father has now gone on ahead of us, leaving us to complete this holy year without him.

Without him: not without hope. “Christ, my hope, has risen,” and the “pain and sorrow” felt by many at the loss of Pope Francis is not in vain. Our cry is heard, our tears counted. All the evil of this world has been defeated by divine mercy.

This Sunday of Divine Mercy was instituted exactly a quarter century ago, during the 2000 Jubilee, by Pope St. John Paul II, who died exactly 20 years ago on the eve of this very feast that he himself instituted—now also, of course, the exact day of Pope Francis’ funeral. In case you’re wondering, Pope Benedict XVI died in 2022 during the other great liturgical octave, the Christmas Octave, also on the eve of the octave day: December 31, the eve of Mary, the Mother of God!

The two holiest weeks of the year, then, are when the last three popes left us, in each case within hours of the end of the first day or the beginning of the octave day. As a homilist my general goal, standing in this pulpit, is to try to have no opinions: to proclaim only the teachings of the scriptures and the Church and to apply them as responsibly as I can to the needs to the moment. Forgive me a hopefully rare lapse: While all three of these men—Francis, Benedict XVI, and John Paul II—were definitely sinful men in need of divine mercy, flawed human beings who had blind spots and made mistakes, in my opinion they were all holy men of God and are now with him forever. At least, it’s my opinion regarding Francis and Benedict; John Paul II is in fact a canonized saint! (And I’m very happy that my opinions should remain opinions; I’m not calling for canonizations here!) But I can’t help seeing, in the extraordinary timing of these three departures, a hint of God’s smile, his merciful smile—both to the three of them and also to all of us. To them, a “Well done, good and faithful”; to us, reassurance that God remains with us always. The reassurance part is my opinion; that God remains with us always is not!

Pope Francis often called John Paul II “the pope of mercy”; many more people have applied that title to Francis himself. This year, 2025, is an ordinary jubilee; it would have been a holy year no matter who was pope. But in 2016 Pope Francis unexpectedly declared an Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy—an unscheduled holy year just to emphasize the centrality of mercy!

Mercy is God’s “greatest attribute,” says St. Faustina Kowalska, the Polish nun whose visionary experiences are the reason we have this feast day of Divine Mercy. John Paul II said that God’s mercy is simply another name for divine love as that love is revealed to human beings amid the evils of this world. In other words, God is love, and therefore mercy is not just something God has—mercy is who God is, who he necessarily is, for us. Mercy is “the core of the Gospel message,” says Pope Benedict XVI;

it is the name of God himself, the face with which he revealed himself in the Old Testament and fully in Jesus Christ…. Everything that the Church says and does shows that God has mercy for man.

One of Pope Francis’s favorite images for the Church, as Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re noted in his homily at Pope Francis’s funeral Mass, was “a ‘field hospital’ after a battle in which many were wounded.” The problem with field hospitals is that sometimes bombs are still falling and bullets are still flying. The priority should be caring for the wounded, but many of the wounded—including some of the doctors, who are also wounded—want to keep fighting, keep shooting.

In this world there are aggressors and victims. Mercy doesn’t mean pretending that no one is guilty, or making no distinctions between oppressors and oppressed. It does mean seeing both oppressors and oppressed as brothers and sisters to us and to one another. Fratelli tutti: all brothers and sisters. No exceptions. Yet mercy is not opposed to justice. How can we care for the wounded without taking their side against those wounding them? Mercy includes naming and opposing whatever harms others—whether that’s in our families and our relationships, our churches and communities, or our political life as a nation or in the larger world. This is why Pope Francis continually called us to the margins of society, to “the poor” in the scriptural sense of those in any way disadvantaged or excluded: migrants and refugees; racial, ethnic, and other minorities; people with disabilities and illnesses; the elderly; and so on.

Through his tenderness, Pope Francis became a global pastor and a father figure not only to Catholics, but to countless non-Catholics and even non-Christians. For many who didn’t necessarily share the entirety of his faith, he managed to kindle hope. Now many are fearful and anxious. What will the future bring? Is that “revolution of tenderness” over? Who will lead the Church now? (Okay, another opinion: Some of you may know that in addition to being a deacon, I’m also a film critic. I have not reviewed, but I have seen, the movie Conclave; please don’t take it as a complete and accurate depiction of what goes on behind closed doors at the Vatican!)

To all such worries and concerns, I leave you with the last words of Pope Francis’s Easter homily:

The Jubilee invites us to renew the gift of hope within us, to surrender our sufferings and our concerns to hope, to share it with those whom we meet along our journey and to entrust to hope the future of our lives and the destiny of the human family. And so we cannot settle for the fleeting things of this world or give in to sadness; we must run, filled with joy … As the great theologian Henri de Lubac said, “It should be enough to understand this: Christianity is Christ. No, truly, there is nothing else but this. In Christ we have everything.”…

Sisters, brothers, in the wonder of the Easter faith, carrying in our hearts every expectation of peace and liberation, we can say: with You, O Lord, everything is new. With you, everything begins again.

P.S. Every homily involves many more choices of what not to include than what to include! This was a rare homily in which I couldn’t manage even passing references to the Sunday readings. Happily, my friend

Deacon Tom

has that covered in his homily.

We are all Thomas