Pope Francis is a man of generosity and spirit

“Rejoining with the Universal Shepherd” of Pope Francis in Buenos Aires, Argentina: A Conversation with Bianca Lott

On its website, Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic organization, offered prayers “to the Lord for the soul of our beloved Pope Francis,” adding, “God will have rewarded his generous dedication to the service of the People of God and the whole world.”

Francis died one day after Easter at the age of 88. The papacy ended after the historic resignation of Benedict XVI, the first pontiff to step down in nearly six centuries.

Cardinal Kevin Farrell will preside over a ceremony in the chapel of Casa Santa Marta on Monday night, when the pope’s body will be placed in a coffin. The Dublin-born cardinal is the acting head of the Vatican until a new pope is elected.

Bianca Lott, from Northfield, Minn., is studying abroad in Rome for her spring semester. Given that Francis died on Easter Monday, she said she felt “a strange happiness at the timing,” which she called “poetic.”

The Detroit archbishop shared that he was sad about the loss of a powerful voice in the world. Yet I rejoice in what I pray is a blessed reward of joy beyond all understanding for a truly great and loving Universal Shepherd.”

Francis, the first-ever Latin American pope, once served as archbishop in Buenos Aires. In the Argentine capital, the government declared seven days of mourning and citizens gathered for a special mass at the city’s cathedral, Reuters reports.

The pope made contact with many Hispanics around the world by communicating in Spanish. Hatciri Lopez, a lifelong Catholic from rural Johnston County, N.C., told NPR member station WUNC that Francis grew her faith.

It’s simpler for the message to reach your heart, instead of being heard from a translator. It would strike my heart immediately when I heard him speak. I would just want to cry and just feel a sense of happiness and hope for the future.”

Pope Francis’ last call to Gaza during the papacy: Opening the Gate to the overwhelmingly Muslim World in the Light of His Troubles with Israel and Palestine

“Francis was the first pope to use the word ‘gay,’ so even the way he speaks has been a radical transformation – and some would say a bit of a revolution as well,” the secretary of LGBT Catholics in London told The Associated Press.

In besieged Gaza, where more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in more than 18 months of war with Israel, Christians there were deeply moved by Pope Francis’ nightly phone call to them offering comfort amid the frightening conflict. The Rev. GabrielRomanelli said that the pope made his final call the night before his death.

“We lost a saint who taught us every day how to be brave, how to keep patient and stay strong,” George Antone, at the Holy Family Church in Gaza, told the news agency.

Francis focused on outreach to the overwhelmingly Muslim Arab world during his papacy, making groundbreaking visits to Iraq and the United Arab Emirates.

“His humanitarian stance against war and violence, and his continuous calls for peace and coexistence, will leave an indelible impact on the world,” Rashid wrote.

In one way, at least, he succeeded. The papacy’s power and the way it was a monarchical authority in a democratic age, were lamented for generations by modernizers. In theory Francis shared those concerns, promising a more collegial and horizontally oriented church, more synodal, in the jargon of the Catholic bureaucracy. In practice he often used his power in the same way as his predecessors, to police and suppress deviations from his authority — except that this time the targets were dissenting conservatives and traditionalists instead of progressives and modernizers.

By creating a novel form of conflict in which Catholics became estranged from papal authority, Francis helped to demystify his office’s authority.

My first encounter with Pope John Paul II was in 1983, when I was a budding radio reporter. It was a ceremonial event welcoming journalists. When he walked by me, I pulled out my microphone, broke the no-question protocol and asked, “When will you visit Russia?” — then still the Soviet Union. The pope moved quickly after he replied in Latin. I couldn’t decipher his meaning.

I had much better luck with Pope Francis. I was one of the Vatican reporters on the plane for the papal visit to Cuba and the United States. Shortly after takeoff, Pope Francis came back to the plane’s economy section to greet members of the traveling media individually. Several reporters had photos of family members and asked the pope to bless them. Some of them raised arcane topics of theology. I had no idea what I was going to say until he came to me.

He was about to talk to the next reporter when I blurted out “You and I have something in common.” That grabbed his attention. I went on, “both our parents were Italians, and both were anti-fascists. Both of you left Italy for the U.S.

He told me that a story was not publicized before then. When his grandparents and their only son Mario decided to leave Italy in the 1920s, they bought tickets for passage on a ship to Argentina. But for one reason, they couldn’t go on that trip.

A few months later, Francis told me, the Principessa Mafalda ocean liner that they were ticketed to travel on sank off the coast of Brazil in October 1927, killing hundreds.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Francis’s Twelve Years in Papal Service to Refugees and the Dispossessed

In his 12 years in the papacy, Francis spoke out loudly for immigrants, refugees and the dispossessed. He was one of their offspring.