The pope from the “ends of the earth” arrived at the Vatican carrying his own luggage in March 2013 and left on the back of a Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck twelve years later. From the unpretentious beginning of his papal journey to his burial close by the Salus Populi Romani, an icon that reflects his own Marian piety, he lived into the moniker “the People’s Pope” first bestowed by Time magazine on a global cover four months after his installation.
Francis was “of the people” in his understanding of theology as well. Influenced by teología del pueblo that arose in his native Argentina, he recognized popular religious practices as sources of theological reflection. He took seriously the rituals of joy, lament, celebration, grief, accompaniment, and belonging that emanated from ordinary spaces. He understood how to use motion, stillness, and physical and digital spaces to communicate.
To see this, one need only revisit the powerful moment of prayer and the Urbi et Orbi blessing at which he presided as COVID-19 unnerved the world in spring 2020, or attend to the details he crafted into his funeral plans. The marble he chose for his tomb is described as “the people’s stone,” and it comes from the Italian region of Liguria, the land of his grandparents. His last testament makes clear his wish that his final journey “end precisely in this ancient Marian sanctuary, where I would always stop to pray at the beginning and end of every Apostolic Journey.” In hindsight, his unexpected April 12 visit to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore marked the beginning of his last journey.
For Francis, “expressions of popular piety have much to teach us; for those who are capable of reading them, they are a locus theologicus which demands our attention.” This thread ran consistently throughout his pontificate from his first apostolic exhortation,Evangelii gaudium, issued in November 2013, to his last voyage outside of Italy in December 2024 to address the closing session of “La Religiosité Populaire en Méditerranée” Congress in Ajaccio, Corsica. There, he reminded participants that popular piety is not superstition; it “highlights the values of faith and at the same time expresses the distinctiveness, the history and the culture of this people.”
Francis perceived “the manifestation of a theological life” in the
faith of those mothers tending their sick children who, though perhaps barely familiar with the articles of the creed, cling to a rosary; or of all the hope poured into a candle lighted in a humble home with a prayer for help from Mary, or in the gaze of tender love directed to Christ crucified.
He comprehended the embodied, affective, kinetic, and sensory dynamics of popular practices. Joining Indigenous people as a pilgrim to Lac Ste. Anne in Canada, he admitted to being “struck by the sound of drums that accompanied me wherever I went. This beating of drums seems to echo the beating of so many hearts: hearts that, over the centuries, have beat near these very waters; hearts of the many pilgrims who walked together to reach this ‘lake of God’….in order to experience his work of healing.”
Francis was also cognizant of the susceptibility of lo popular to manipulation. In Corsica, he cautioned, “We must be careful so that popular piety is not used or exploited by groups that seek self-aggrandizement by fueling polemics, narrow-mindedness, divisions and exclusivist attitudes.” One example of such exploitation in the U.S. context is the participation of fringe religious movements bearing the Missionary Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe at the Stop the Steal rally in Washington D.C. on December 12, 2020, in the Jericho March on the same day, and at the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. How does an icon bound up with justice for people who are poor, marginalized, and powerless find herself on the steps of an insurrection?
Pope Francis believed deeply in the transformative potential of popular practices to be catalysts for justice. In his visit to Poland, he accompanied young people on a Via Crucis, which he explained was a means of bringing “God’s own life, his ‘style’…even to the pathways of a society at times divided, unjust and corrupt.” He challenged interpretations of the Way of the Cross as an “exercise in sadomasochism,” offering instead a vision rooted in Christ’s Resurrection that “opens the horizons of a new and fuller life.”
The faiths of the people were theological fontes to Francis, revealing the depth and wealth of local insights into the mystery of the incarnation. Listen to the roll call of his salutations welcoming each of the images of thirteen holy patrons present at a Marian Celebration to Our Lady of the Gate in Peru. In a plaza reconfigured for the occasion as an “open-air shrine,” those gathered responded with applause and shouts of recognition as they heard each sacred name and the place of their belonging. Francis emphasized that the diversity of these invocations and titles of Mary, Jesus, and the saints express the divine desire “to be close to each heart” because “God’s love is always spoken in dialect.” The Incarnation of the Word is an inculturated reality, as are popular religious practices, “born of the incarnation of Christian faith in popular culture.”
Francis’s turn to popular rituals and the stuff of daily living as sources for theologizing made theology accessible and relatable. Unfortunately, this inclination helped fuel much of the dismissive punditry from ecclesiastics, theologians, and media. Too many commentators condescendingly repeated that Francis was an intellectual lightweight, perhaps pastoral but not theological. This tiresome refrain reverberated throughout his pontificate and even beyond his death, typically expressed in comparison with his two immediate predecessors.
One analogy portrayed Francis as favoring the pastoral, the heart; Benedict XVI as emphasizing the intellectual, the head; and John Paul II as reflecting the spiritual, the soul, or in other versions, courage. While benign on the surface, associating the heart with the pastoral subordinates it to the intellect. This harkens back to a dualism that subjugated the heart, with its connections to passion and emotion, to the head, with its privileging of intellect and rationality. When those connections were extended and applied according to gender, race, and colonial status, this subjugation had a detrimental impact on the lives of women, people of color, Indigenous, and colonized peoples.
Another take contrasted the three popes in terms of their respective biographies, identifying Francis as the one who “was not an academic. Actually, he was a failed PhD candidate and he saw the church as a field hospital…where the field hospital is made much more of nurses and of people who stop the bleeding more than doctors and scientists.” Deploying an unsophisticated understanding of field hospitals misses the point of the metaphor. The implication that anything short of a completed dissertation signifies academic inadequacy reeks of elitism. To the contrary, other commentators highlighted the value of Francis’s interdisciplinary perspective nurtured by his studies in the sciences, literature, philosophy, and theology. Likewise, his respect for the social sciences as necessary for analyzing human relations and identifying the signs of the times should not be underestimated.
Another critic confidently asserted, “No one doubts that Pope Francis was rhetorically gifted, not in the academic manner of John Paul II or Benedict XVI to be sure, but in the manner of a parish priest adept at popular homilizing.” This assumption appears to simultaneously disparage Francis both academically and pastorally. “Popular homilizing” is a turn of phrase that damns with faint praise. To Francis, preaching was so important, and so frequent a theme, that he included a section on homiletics in Evangelii gaudium. As he wrote, “The preacher must know the heart of his community, in order to realize where its desire for God is alive and ardent, as well as where that dialogue, once loving, has been thwarted and is now barren.” For the pope, effectively communicating the joy of the gospel called for well-formed preachers who can connect with their congregations, and who are well prepared in their study of the scriptures.
Such reductionist assessments of Francis marginalize and undermine his authority, discredit his teaching, and perhaps send up pre-conclave flares. But Francis gets the last word. Among his final compositions before his death were the meditations and prayers for the Via Crucis held at the Colosseum on Good Friday evening. This text interweaves strands close to his heart throughout the fourteen stations. His reflection on Jesus’ first fall shows how his commitments to the poor and vulnerable never wavered.
Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of Hell. God’s economy, on the other hand, does not kill, discard or crush. It is lowly, faithful to the earth. Your way, Jesus, is the way of the Beatitudes. It does not crush, but cultivates, repairs and protects.
Francis concluded his Via Crucis by referencing the opening lines of each of his three encyclicals, Laudato si’, Fratelli tutti, and Dilexit nos. In this way, they serve as an examination of conscience, inviting those who have traveled the Way of the Cross to contemplate their responsibility to live accordingly: attentive to relationships with our common home, with each other, and with a divine love that will not abandon them. Situated within the poetry and movement of this ancient popular practice, Francis reminds us, “These devotions are fleshy, they have a face. They are capable of fostering relationships.”
In the gift of his last Via Crucis, Francis demonstrated that the fullness of his magisterial teaching is to be found not only in his exhortations, encyclicals, and writings, but in these popular epistemologies of struggle and suffering, these performances of memory and promise, these faiths of the people. As the body of Francis returned to his chosen resting place, beneath the gaze of Salus Populi Romani, those who lined the route confirmed—through their cheers, applause, cries, and farewells—that this pastor and theologian indeed bore the scent of the people and of the streets.
