Editor’s note: Following the death of Pope Francis on April 21, 2025, the editors of Where Peter Is received many tributes to his life and reflections on his influence from past and current contributors, as well as podcast guests and friends of the site from all over the world. We will publish a few of these reflections every day leading up to the conclave. —ML
The New Language of Pope Francis: Solidarity
By Steven Millies
My students in Introduction to Catholic Social Teaching surely are tired of hearing about it by now, but I never fail to become excited when I talk about Pope Francis’s Copernican revolution in Catholic social teaching. Constantly throughout his pontificate, Francis set solidarity at the heart of what our call to missionary discipleship means in the world. With Fratelli tutti (about which I still am delighted to say I was an early analyst for WPI) he gave that revolution real shape. He transformed what is the newest and by some lights the most “nebulous” and “ambigu[ous]” principle in Catholic social teaching into the heart of all Catholic social teaching.
Solidarity expresses what our anthropological understanding of the human person demands from us. Solidarity exhibits why and how community, not individualism, is the heart of a Catholic social understanding. Solidarity tells us why labor that expresses our personhood and contributes to the world has real dignity. In concert with Laudato Si’, the dual principles that ‘everything is connected’ and ‘everyone is connected’ tell us why our common home matters in the light of we all who share this home together. Not surprisingly, even the vision of a synodal church is compatible with this revolution too. Synodality is ecclesial solidarity–“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other,” as he said in his fifth from final Urbi et Orbi message.
Today, to talk about Catholic social teaching at all, we should begin with solidarity and end with solidarity. Francis gave us a new language, a clear teaching, and a way forward. In the church and in the world, God has given us one another for our good. We must be grateful for it and behave gratefully. Let gratitude be the word then, as we embark on receiving the wisdom of this remarkable and now completed papal ministry.
“Having mercy, He called him.” Thanks be to God for this grace of mercy that was shown to all of us. Thanks be to God for Francis our pope.
He was one of the good ones
By Angela Rasmussen
“Realities are greater than ideas. This calls for rejecting the various means of masking reality: angelic forms of purity, dictatorships of relativism, empty rhetoric, objectives more ideal than real, brands of ahistorical fundamentalism, ethical systems bereft of kindness, intellectual discourse bereft of wisdom.
“Ideas – conceptual elaborations – are at the service of communication, understanding, and praxis. Ideas disconnected from realities give rise to ineffectual forms of idealism and nominalism, capable at most of classifying and defining, but certainly not calling to action. … We have politicians – and even religious leaders – who wonder why people do not understand and follow them, since their proposals are so clear and logical. Perhaps it is because they are stuck in the realm of pure ideas and end up reducing politics or faith to rhetoric.” Evangelii Gaudium 231-232
A guiding light of Francis’s papacy — that realities are more important than ideas — is at odds with our (American) constant pull toward partisanship and culture wars. While political opportunists and influencers pressure us to take sides over ideas left largely undefined (such as DEI or being “woke”), Pope Francis gained admirers of all backgrounds, including people with no interest in religion, because of his authentic interactions with real people and his down-to-earth habits. People who never read a word Francis wrote were moved by his embrace of the man afflicted by tumors and were amused when a little boy clung to his leg and sat in his chair as he gave an address. Francis was unafraid to do things differently to stay accessible to people and maintain a humble position. He referred to himself as simply the bishop of Rome, opted against living in the papal apartment, rode in the Pope mobile without protective glass, and chose not to be buried inside the Vatican, all to be more accessible to the people. He easily abandoned things that were only important to the idea of being Pope, which in turn allowed him to stay connected to the realities of the Catholics he led around the world.
There is a tendency to focus on doctrinal continuity or change in Francis’s papacy or, worse, how much he moved the needle on progressive or conservative causes. As I’ve been reflecting on the accomplishments and limitations of his time as Pope, I come back to his message: realities are more important than ideas. To me, the measure of his papacy isn’t found in doctrinal concepts (important as they may be) or how many progressive points he scored. The impact of Pope Francis was his accessible and humble leadership, his encouragement of sharing differing opinions, his Ms. Frizzle-like enthusiasm for making mistakes and getting messy, his moral courage against clericalism and corruption, and his deep connection to and advocacy for the poor and vulnerable. His legacy isn’t in ideas alone, but rather in the love of God, joy of the Gospel, and care for the poor that he inspired and will continue to inspire in normal people, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, across the globe. He was one of the good ones. May he rest in peace.
Editor’s note: Following the death of Pope Francis on April 21, 2025, the editors of Where Peter Is received many tributes to his life and reflections on his influence from past and current contributors, as well as podcast guests and friends of the site from all over the world. We will publish a few of these reflections every day leading up to the conclave. —ML
Steven P. Millies is the author of Good Intentions: A History of Catholic Voters’ Road from Roe to Trump (Liturgical Press, 2018) and his most recent book, A Consistent Ethic of Life: Navigating Catholic Engagement with U.S. Politics (Paulist Press, 2024)
Angela Rasmussen has a Ph.D. in biblical studies. She teaches at Georgetown University and The Catholic University of America. She is married with three daughters.
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