Monday

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the man who became Pope Francis, died just after the Roman dawn. The news reached Australia as the evening newscasts began. His death dominated every bulletin. It seemed anomalous, a rent in time, even though rationally expected.

Tuesday

Melbourne’s dawn was a bleak, grey void – almost a relief after Monday’s hectic coverage of the Pope’s death. I was reminded of the opening lines of one of the greatest poems to come out of the crucible of World War One.

The darkness crumbles away. It is the same old druid time as ever…

The poet, Isaac Rosenberg, was a member of Britain’s “Bantam Battalion” (its officers were all under 5ft 3”). His “Break of Day in the Trenches”, captures another “out of time” experience as, from his “druid time” dugout, Rosenberg observes a rat free-lancing between the English and German lines:

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German…

Rosenberg was killed during the German “Spring offensive” of 1918. His poetry lives.

On Melbourne’s Autumn Tuesday, looking for something more than talk or conclave speculation, I joined a small gathering for midday mass at Melbourne’s Newman College. In the tiny Lady Chapel, some young people — Muslim and Hindu — introduced themselves to me, a stranger. The Jesuit celebrant began by reminding us that one of Pope Francis’ early insistences was that, as a people, we should not be “sourpusses”. (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium, The joy of the Gospel, Chapter 2, 84-85).

“Sourpusses” is not conventional papal diction, but it caught, perfectly, the humanity and zest of the man, and its drollery lifted the Passchendaele grey from the morning. Jesus laughed, I kept thinking. And so did Francis. Thank God for that.

Francis aligned “sourpusses” with defeatism, and he was clear about where defeatism leads:

The evil spirit of defeatism is brother to the temptation to separate, before its time, the wheat from the weeds; it is the fruit of an anxious and self-centred lack of trust. (Evangelii gaudium).

You don’t need to read the entire Exhortation to see that the pope was describing a state of world-being too familiar to us now: intractable divisiveness; manipulation and loss of trust between peoples; an impatient turning inward for one’s own defensive advantage, and an anxious closing out of ‘other’ people, in the name of supposed national or personal security.

The green wheat piles up in palaces while the weeds are deported to “another country”. If they wither and die there, we may never know.

Strip away the metaphors and you have the stuff of each day’s news. Tuesday’s evening bulletins were followed by an SBS program on CECOT, the El Salvadoran high-security prison where men have their heads shaved, dressed in ironic white with their tattoos exposed — like brands — and their humanity, perhaps even their criminality, reduced to a category of the unredeemable. They are “there for life”. The SBS journalist, Colombian-born Catalina Florez, fluent in the language of the overseer with whom she toured the prison, allowed the place to speak for itself. Kristi Noem, US Secretary for Homeland Security, also toured CECOT, and declared publicly that, “This facility is one of the tools in our toolkit. We’re going to keep on using it.”

Wednesday

Sunshine today, clear light, and how chastening — and invigorating — it is to be reminded of one’s own insularity. For nigh on three days I’ve been watching crowds milling in St Peter’s Square, so many people, smiling or crying as they walked out of churches, or crowded the streets of Buenos Aires, Manila, Dili, Port Moresby, and Indian and African cities with names I scarcely recognise, all honouring a humble man. I wonder at my own surprise at such a universal outpouring. There has been joy in it too, a heartfelt recognition of a complicated life lived well, in the service of others – the kind of leadership Christians espouse but often don’t practise. And when they do practise it, they are not always thanked. Losers…

There has been so much fog — of disillusionment — hanging over the past three decades of Australian Christian experience that it has been difficult to acknowledge, or even see, humility, simplicity and integrity in clerical authority figures (secular authority figures have experienced an analogous falling away of respect). The scandal of sexual abuse, and the halting, too-often self-defensive formal response has drawn a scrim over what once we took for granted – that there would be people of exemplary courage, virtue and kindness to offer leadership, encouragement and fellowship, men and women who would give embodied meaning to the word “pastoral”.

But the crowds all around the world were not listing church faults or failures. Young and old, of all religious denominations and none, they were acknowledging a man, and a kind of principled, intelligent, down-to-earth leadership that included them, that exemplified a fellowship of exhilaration, of human strength and frailty, companionship in celebration and in trouble, in doubt, uncertainty and in hope.

Thursday

The Australian federal election grinds on. Our leaders and aspirant leaders are boxed in by demands for certainty. Journalists require guarantees: “Will you promise the Australian people that you will (or you will not) do this (add your own desiderata).” There is never room for truth in its complexity, or the startling impact of honesty. Witless questions produce witless, defensive answers. I am not discounting the value of rigorous, probing journalism — it’s essential for democracy — or the bracing impact of penetrating political rhetoric. But what politician would risk it now, even if they could find the words?

I thought about Bergoglio’s experience, as a relatively young man, of being placed in a position of power (as a Jesuit Provincial, or leader) in Argentina during very fraught political times. He had to learn the hard way that one’s best intentions do not always lead to right decisions, and the consequences of getting things wrong can haunt you. For him, the experience led to a period of isolation and reflection, and honed what was possibly innate in him – the humility to admit that you have been wrong, and the heart, the strength to go on.  Try to imagine Vladimir Putin admitting he has been wrong.

We live in an era of increasing abuse of power by increasingly authoritarian rulers. We’ve been here before and seen the consequences, then and now – the horror and human waste of our 20th-century’s wars, and the chronic instability and suffering of whole populations in this century. Rosenberg lived it:

…the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens…

I believe some of the worldwide response to the death of Pope Francis has been a kind of venting, a universal cry of relief at the recognition that there are other, viable ways of wielding power, ways that embrace all of humanity and which recognise the sacredness of the natural world in which we all live.

Friday

Easter and Anzac Day folded into one another. We mourned and celebrated. And remembered.

“The church is a field hospital, in which many have been wounded,” Pope Francis said. I thought again of Rosenberg and his poet’s vision of a no-man’s land of temporary peace in which a rat could roam free. And of Pope Francis, who dared to imagine a world in which human beings of different races, nationalities and beliefs could be reconciled. Fraternity.

Saturday

The funeral of Francis, again from 6pm Australian time, and strangely welcoming – like the culmination of a holiday, or in the word’s original meaning, a holy day. Yes, there was pageantry and splendour, and the world’s powerful people came. But they were subsumed in the geometry of ritual and security, just one dark, largely undifferentiated block (including the man who broke the dress code by wearing a blue suit, not the prescribed black). All were upstaged by the cardinals’ scarlet. Some bishops wore beanies. Everyone took photos on their phones, not even furtively.

The Dean of the College of Cardinals, 91-year-old Giovanni Battista Re, read his homily in an ascending crescendo. He described  the pope as “a resolute personality”. (The Murdoch press in Australia have a different take on what “resolute” might mean: they have disparaged Francis as “a disruptor”. Yes, he was. Like Jesus.) The Cardinal’s own oratory was resolute, and pointed: “Mercy is at the heart of the Gospel,” he declared. And “Build bridges not walls”. While he preached, the pages of the gospel placed on Francis’ casket blew gently in the wind. The symbolism, unintentional, was nonetheless irresistible: the gospel is never a closed book.

There were so many men assembled there. But the first reader to step up to the lectern was a woman. And then another. The voices of the (all lay) readers were a multilingual wonder: women and men speaking in their own tongues. And then came the Ecumenical Patriarchs and a plangent Greek chant.

Change in the Catholic church comes in many forms, some small, some subtle, some “disruptive”, all slow. Were these indicative signs? I hope so.

Finally, the coffin, called “simple”. It was plain, unornamented, as Francis insisted. But what is the “simplicity” of wood? I wondered as the cameras played across its honeyed surface, its knots and rippling grain, the careful, dovetail joints, the tensile and compressive strength of wood. How fitting that Francis should rest in a carpenter’s handiwork.

Above, the pines of Rome made a green frieze around the ritual farewell of a good man. And all the while, a fresh breeze blew.