Pope Francis, “his secret was grace”

This entry is posted on number 19 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 6, 2025

I Think Best, When I Writehas always admitted the theologian and philosopher John Henry Newman. “I think better, when I write”, and that’s how I am going to these lines to understand what happened to strange a Santa Marta from Monday 21 April. What hovers in the air from the early hours of Pope Francis’ death. I warned him immediately, just returned, in a hurry, from Easter holidays in the house where I have lived for ten years, his roommate.

First mutually foreign, imprisoned in our diversity, and then in a joking and amused complicitywhich was one of the most poetic experiences of my life. It was the only one to appreciate the fluorescent sweaters, with which the things that happened could be laughing; What, by lowering the window, gave me a passage by car to work, and which called me the “installment”, that is, the “mouse (library)” because of my work, but specifying “is benevolent, eh, I say it for
affection!”.

Once he did it on the occasion of a official speechafter mentioning Virgil and Maccabees, and explained that it was a way to exorcise the impression of those who dedicate their lives to a culturally very high work.

It is not a void, what is perceived everywhere in the house, nor a simple absenceit is not the very human nostalgia for a unique and unrepeatable person, but the impression of a passage that has been closed. Of an atmosphere that returns to do, if not heavy, austere and formal. Gray and subsiegous. Lifeless.

Ironic was ironic, of course, and then unconventional and informal, direct and frank, humoral and obstinatesometimes exaggerated, all true, yet nothing of this is enough to make reason for this particular impression of claustrophobia. Also because it was not a character question, something attributable to temperament or a particular condition of life, to a family and school education of its own or any other human factor. The secret of his presence was another, the transcendent one of grace. I am increasingly convinced of it.

At the heart of the person, of life and then of the Ministry of Pope Francis there was an episode of gracewhich, as such, has a precise context, a place and a time: the “four of the afternoon” of the first disciples, the Via di Damascus by Paolo, the banks of Manresa for Ignazio di Loyola, the spur of rock in Gaeta for Filippo Neri. All geolocated appointments.

He, his burning encounter with God – because to be precise you should start the series from the Roveto
ardent of Moses, who defines the essence of love: that thing that burns, but does not consume – he had had it On September 21, 1953 in a confessional in Buenos Aires, where he entered he didn’t even know how he is good asand everything was used for the mercy of God, from which he had felt not only washed, but expected and then interpenetrated and renewed. A new, free and oriented person.

When divine grace breaks into a person’s life, it crosses it as a language of fireup to the most hidden folds of his being, leaving you an indelible sign. A seal, an impression that nothing and nobody can remove, or even just medicate.

Some mysticism spoke about it as of a plague – of love – that does not heal. It does not change human nature, but (it is said theologically that) supposes it, for which priests and defects, character traits and family and sentimental education remain, cultural background, traces of life, any obtuseness and the nature, but as innervated by a light that assumes and reoriends them. Makes them bloom. And Pope Francis had, among the folds of his humanity, the clear traits of a radical and freeding vocation. First of all, he did not defend faith, but let himself be defended by the faith.

Those who have known God do not feel the task of supporting a building (theological and spiritual, and then also historical and institutional), but in that he found a home and lives there. You feel free and it is a blessing for others. Needless to accuse him of not assuming the position of the belligerent, not even for the most solid and shareable reasons, for non -negotiable values, because he had received him, not conquered him. He could say his wonders, not to impose the (albeit sacrosanct) authority.

From his spiritual experience came the wonderful anticlericalism. Yes, the Pope was an anticlerical, in the sense that he found every situation intolerable in which someone’s experience mimic her, imitated it or exhibited it. He was crossed by a visceral annoyance every time God was taken as an pretext for something, used, reduced to a human tool.

It was pitiful with everyone, but not with those priests who surrogate the experience of grace: The arrows were from time to time against the trine and lace, the chatter, the rigidity or the carrierism, but the common matrix was hypocrisy. In the evangelical sense of someone who recites a part, simulates a meeting with God he has never had. It builds a vocation, deceiving itself and harming others.

Finally, the irony. Which, in fact, has the most illustrious precedents in the Catholic area, From Tommaso Moro to Filippo Neribecause it also derives, from the fact of having met God. To have grasped its dimensions and depleted scope, on the other hand, making the experience of one’s own smallness. To be something ridiculous in the presence of God. His irony derived from what is released to contact with someone who exceeds us from all sides and in front of which he does not hold one, who is one, of our titles, merits, diplomas, successes, awards, talents … the true Christian feels he feels
Irrimediably small and ridiculous before God, and from that rice of himself comes that for humanity and his claims, and the obligation to bring things back to a more modest and prudent measure, not to take himself too seriously, knowing that the Savior is only one, and it is none of us.

It was sweet to live in the same house, free from roles, Not because they were not there, but because the provisional value took place and in any case overabundant and immersed. Of grace, in fact. And that’s why, during his official funeral, I write these lines.

In a short time I will say put for him, and tonight, when I went to greet him for the last time in the empty basilica, under the black caban (the air changed), I had a fluorescent orange sweatshirt.
The first time he saw me, in the elevator, exploded in one: «This orange is wonderful! Puts in a good mood! “. “From the catalog, the color is” spritz “, holiness!”, I ran it competent, and we burst out laughing like any two people. This is what took place on April 21st. And that now more (I) is missing.

Don Giacomo Cardinali, from April 2, 2025 he is deputy prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, where he has been working since 2015. He has numerous monographs, scientific articles and investments in international conferences.

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