When I visited Rome in 2017, I found that the souvenir shops outside my hotel did brisk business selling magnets with a cartoon image of Papa Francesco, which is Pope Francis in Italian.
Those souvenir stands are adjacent to the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore in the Monti neighborhood of Rome, where Francis will be buried. For him to choose that location rather than Saint Peter’s reflects the relative modesty and simplicity he preferred.
I was raised Catholic. To please my mother, I attended St. Paul’s in Minden regularly, served as an altar boy, became the president of the youth group, the head usher, a lector. I literally had the keys to the church as a teenager.
I more than a quarter century after my mother’s passing, I cannot say I consider myself Catholic. In fact, I have been to mass twice in this century: once at the Vatican, mostly as a tourist, and once last Christmas Eve, trying in vain to evoke the nostalgia of midnight mass.
Still, the passing of Pope Francis caught my attention and has held it for more than a day. I am pleased to see the kind words written about him, and I find the outpouring of grief from Catholics around the world appropriate.
Unfortunately, in this country, we are so bitterly divided about everything that even a person’s death draws critical commentary.
For some reason, Facebook’s algorithm decided that I needed to see the Newsmax story announcing the pope’s death.
Even more puzzling, I abandoned my strict policy of not reading comments on social media and glanced at the ones beneath that story. The vitriol, the lack of perspective, the vile claims without evidence and the general nastiness of it is unsurprising and still disappointing.
I do not have strong opinions on the direction of the church, and I have only a casual familiarity with the changes that Francis imposed. I am somewhat more familiar with how his comments about migration have provoked the ire of the current president and his supporters.
What I do have strong feelings about is the idea that there is a time in a place for such criticism and this is not it. Of equal importance, there is a way to go about offering legitimate criticism and promoting delusional conspiracies and uninformed opinions is not it either.
In June of 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was eulogized as “a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” it seems to me that this description fits Papa Francesco as well.
Andrew Countis is a former resident of Minden and an assistant professor of history at Coastal Bend College in Beeville, Texas.