Solemn Mass for Pope Francis – 30th April
Just off Dublin’s bustling O’Connell Street, at the top of a busy taxi rank on Cathal Brugha Street, stands a large statue of the Sacred Heart. It’s a traditional image like many found in Catholic Churches across Ireland. Known affectionately as Jesus of the Taxi Drivers, it once graced the foyer of the Gresham Hotel. When it was removed during renovations, the taxi drivers rescued it and placed at the top of their rank to bless their daily journeys. It’s a gentle, worn image of Christ: heart exposed, hands open – watchful, vulnerable, faithfully present.
That image, I would like to suggest, captures something of the spirit of Pope Francis. When he looked at the world, he began with the heart. After a twelve year pontificate facing so many global challenges, he returned yet again to this central dynamic. Looking back, perhaps he knew time was getting short. So, in what became his last letter to the world, Dilexit Nos (2024), written less than a year ago, he repeated: “We need to start speaking once more about the heart” (DN 9).
That letter was based on the theme of the Sacred Heart – like that of the taxi drivers. For Francis, it’s not sentimental; it a summons. A call to love that sees, that suffers, and that stays. In Christ, we see “the heart that has loved so greatly” (DN 45), for in the words of today’s Gospel: “God loved the world so greatly he gave his only Son … not to condemn the world, but to save it” (John 3:16–17).”
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Yet his papacy was marked by many priorities: synodality, pastoral accompaniment, poverty, church reform. Among them three themes beat steadily throughout: (1) Mercy and Encounter, (2) Integral Ecology, and (3) Fraternity and Social Friendship. These are not ideas; they were the shape of his mission. And each was made visible in his actions.
Mercy, for Francis, was never about a concession. It was the form of divine justice. He wanted people to see that no one was beyond the reach of God’s heart. “The thing the Church needs most today,” he famously reflected in 2013, “is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful… I see the Church as a field hospital after battle.”[1] (also EG 49) When he declared the Jubilee Year of Mercy, he opened the Holy Door not only in St Peter’s Basilica, but also in prisons, hospitals, and refugee camps.
A second theme was care for our common home. Laudato Si’ (2015) brought ecological concern to the heart of Catholic teaching – not simply as a political issue, but as a spiritual and moral responsibility. He wrote: “Everything is interconnected, and this invites us to develop a spirituality of that global solidarity which flows from the mystery of the Trinity” (LS, 240). Francis often spoke of the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor as one and the same. His insistence on “integral ecology” reminded us that economic structures, environmental degradation, and social inequality are all interlinked.
The third defining theme was social fraternity. From his first days in office, he called the Church and the world to rediscover our shared humanity – not as an idea, but as a moral and spiritual imperative. In Fratelli Tutti (2020), he wrote: “Let us dream, then, as a single human family... each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice” (FT, 8). The goal was not uniformity, but a culture of encounter. He repeatedly denounced what called “the globalisation of indifference,” a phrase that would continually reuse.
These themes arose from a way of seeing the world – a spirituality. Francis’s Ignatian formation begins with the conviction that God is active in the world and can be found in all things. And that the messiness of the world and the human heart requires discernment and attentiveness to the movements of grace.
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I had the privilege of meeting him once. To be honest, he didn’t have a particularly joyful resting face – if anything, when he was listening and waiting, he always looked a bit grim, face downturned. But when he met people, when he looked into their faces, his own lit up, grinning from ear to ear. Yet the image that will always remain with me is when he stood alone in St Peter’s Square during the pandemic, holding the monstrance over an empty, rain-soaked city of Rome. It was both a cry for the world and a gesture of solidarity.
Pope Francis believed deeply in the power of education – not simply as academic training, but as the formation of the whole person. In 2020, he launched a global initiative for a renewed educational compact, urging educators and students alike to place human dignity, care for our common home, and solidarity at the centre of learning. In address to students, whom he called “pilgrims of knowledge,” he once said: “Have the courage to replace fears with dreams. Do not be managers of fears, but entrepreneurs of dreams.”[2]
So today, we pause not only to mourn but to remember and to give thanks. Pope Francis gave his life as a witness to the heart of Christ – in rain-soaked squares, in refugee camps, in encyclicals, in spiritual conversations, gestures and silences.
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There is a quirk to that Sacred Heart on Cathal Brugha Street. Stop by it the next time you are in the north inner city centre. Beneath that statue, there’s a plaque. It begins: “May God bless the taxi driver’s” and goes on “keep them safe and watch over them on there journey’s”. It wouldn’t pass a grammar test. [3] But I think Pope Francis would have loved it – not despite the mistakes, but because of them. It’s the language of devotion, written in the hand of ordinary people. In that same spirit, we poor sinners make their prayer our own: “May God bless Pope Francis, keep him safe, and watch over him on his final journey home to the Father.”
[1] https://www.americamagazine.or...
[2]https://www.sacru-alliance.net/pope-francis-at-universidade-catolica-meeting-with-university-students/#:~:text=If%20seeds%20were%20preserved%2C%20they,fears%2C%20but%20entrepreneurs%20of%20dreams!
[3] Mistakes are in the original. https://www.excellentstreetima...