“Preach the Gospel always. If necessary, with words,” – attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi.

“Every man and every woman must have a window in their life where they can turn their hope and where they can see the dignity of God. And being a homosexual is not a crime. It’s a human condition,” – Pope Francis.

I didn’t know much about Jorge Bergoglio when he first appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s. I didn’t realize he’d been a close runner-up to Josef Ratzinger, who had become Pope Benedict XVI in the 2005 Conclave. But just by his first words, I knew something had shifted. As we waited for his first blessing, he reversed the dynamic:

Let us make, in silence, this prayer: your prayer over me.

He asked us to pray for him. For a very long time — through the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI — the papacy had become a pillar of authority. Our duty as Catholics was to obey and revere the “Supreme Pontiff.” In Benedict’s words: “The faithful must accept not only the infallible magisterium. They are to give the religious submission of intellect and will to the teaching which the Supreme Pontiff or the college of bishops enunciate on faith and morals.”

Now, here was a man who referred to himself as merely a “bishop for the diocesan community of Rome” and who asked us, the faithful, to pray to God for him. He wore simple vestments, eschewing the intricate and fabulous outfits of his predecessor, remarking as he turned them down: “The Carnival is over.” After the flinty Pole and the prissy German, here, at last, was a warm Italian again, like John XXIII — even though he was from Argentina.

His voice was clear but quiet and softly pitched. And then, rather than assert papal authority as Benedict had done so often and so rigidly, he sought a simple moral authority — by embracing the grotesquely disfigured, listening intently to small children, washing the feet of male and female prisoners, eschewing the Papal palace for a simple apartment, and inviting transgender men and women on the streets to lunch with him in the Vatican.

Faith for Francis was not rigidity, it was not always certain, and it was not words. It was a way of life, of giving, of loving, of emptying oneself to listen to God without trying to force a conclusion — of discernment, as the Jesuits like to say. He later told the story of how he accepted the papacy, and it still inspires me as a way of praying:

Before I accepted I asked if I could spend a few minutes in the room next to the one with the balcony overlooking the square. My head was completely empty and I was seized by a great anxiety. To make it go away and relax I closed my eyes and made every thought disappear …

I closed my eyes and I no longer had any anxiety or emotion. At a certain point I was filled with a great light. It lasted a moment, but to me it seemed very long. Then the light faded, I got up suddenly and walked into the room where the cardinals were waiting and the table on which was the act of acceptance. I signed it.

The church needs doctrine, it needs an infallible magisterium, and those who want this to suddenly change are guilty of a category error. Francis didn’t change an iota of doctrine, to some “progressive” dismay. But he did something more important. He reminded us that doctrine without love is what Jesus rejected.

And he insisted that faith without doubt was not faith at all:

In this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If one has the answers to all the questions — that is the proof that God is not with him.

For those who seek in Catholicism a psychological, intellectual, and even political anchor, Francis was maddening. He told them not to be so certain. He told them there was room for dialogue, that the clergy were too full of themselves, and that there were no areas where conversation could not happen. There was divine truth and then there was the mess of human existence, and the church was about where the two meet, denying neither, a field-hospital full of groans and blood, not a pristine, distant, well-kept Cathedral. After the authoritarian papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, it felt as if window had opened and the fetid air banished.

That meant at times an unsatisfying lack of resolution — which some believe is harmful to the faith. On gay men and lesbians, on communion for divorced couples, on transgender people, he did not overturn doctrine, but he removed stigma. He encountered us with love first of all. He was about patiently untying knots, not making them even tighter. “If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing,” he said.

When he emerged as Pope, I was in a sustained crisis of faith. I had discovered in the Church I trusted a depraved evil in the sex abuse crisis that still haunts me. As a gay kid who loved my faith and tried as I grew up to reconcile my own nature with its strictures, I had endured and argued and in good faith tried to understand.

And then I discovered it was all a sham; the pastor of my own parish in DC, Cardinal McCarrick, turned out to be a serial abuser and a closeted gay man, like so many others. Or rather they were not gay men as I knew them, but warped, psychologically stunted pedophiles and pederasts whose internal pain had morphed into patterns of abuse and concealment and astonishing hypocrisy. And after the callousness with which Benedict had treated the AIDS crisis, and his description of me and those I saw dying around me as “intrinsically morally disordered,” I found myself in acute spiritual pain.

Why did I not leave? Simple really. Because I never lost my faith in Jesus or the Gospels or the Church itself, regardless of its all-too-human priesthood. In fact, I had found faith indispensable to surviving the devastating young death I saw all around me in my twenties and thirties and also faced myself. The hierarchy may have wounded me, but I knew and had been guided by many truly good priests, many wonderful lay Catholics, and, well, in the words of Saint Peter, where else would I go?

But the anger at the institution was so intense I found myself shaking at times in the pews, unable to focus. So I took some time away (I remember Christopher Hitchens’ delight when he found out). And when I returned, I went into a side-chapel at the Cathedral at Mass to square the circle somehow, to put a little physical distance between the faith and the morally tattered institution that nonetheless I believed and still believe is the authentic harbor of Christianity for 2,000 years.

The chapel was dedicated to Saint Francis, and I prayed to him every Sunday to help me. And so the very name Bergoglio chose as Pope spoke instantly to me, like a voice reminding me that I still belonged here. And then Francis’ transparent love for all of us, including homosexuals, disarmed me. Or more accurately, on a few occasions, it prompted me to break down and weep. If I was sincerely trying to follow Christ, Francis told me, he was not going to throw me out. It is hard to express what those simple words of human recognition and love did to me, after so many years. It was like a dam breaking in my soul.

I never expected the doctrine to change, because I’m a smart fellow, had read my theology, and was not entirely sure how it could. But I knew that in the long history of the church, gay men and lesbians had been always present, often central, to its liturgies, its monasteries and convents, its education and art and music and intellectual rigor. The more I learned about the past, the more the modern church’s fixation on sex and gay people seemed the exception and not the rule. There was a better, healthier way forward, Francis seemed to suggest. So yes, as I wrote over a decade ago: How to describe the debut of Pope Francis and not immediately think of grace?

I’m not claiming to be a good Catholic. I’m far from it. I’m a terrible one in many ways. I honestly, sincerely believe the church is wrong in some — but by no means all — of its teachings on sexuality. Lust has undoubtedly mastered me at times the way it has many men, and always will. But I also know my soul has far deeper problems than my love for other men, however muddied with desire; and that the world has lost its way so much more profoundly in other parts of life: in our materialism, our selfishness, our wealth and comfort, our smugness and distraction, and our abuse of our sacred planet.

Francis’ Laudato Si — the great encyclical on climate change — will, in my view, be seen in the future as the work of a true prophet, a damning indictment of our human arrogance and abuse of nature. No previous generation of humans has ever done this much damage to our precious inheritance. And Francis’ moral clarity on this is an enduring legacy, and such a profound rebuke to the predatory, soulless, money-grubbing world of Trump and Xi.

But I loved Francis in the end for nothing more than himself. “We need to remember that all religious teaching ultimately has to be reflected in the teacher’s way of life, which awakens the assent of the heart, by its nearness, love and witness,” he wrote. Francis lived that way. No, of course he wasn’t perfect. He stirred things up a bit, he had a temper, he could be a little too off-the cuff at times, and his campaign against the Latin Mass was unworthily paranoid of him.

But he was not without some reason to be paranoid. The Latin Mass, for example, has been co-opted by reactionaries who are to Catholicism what MAGA is to conservatism. And the ones who dominate the American hierarchy, and have very deep pockets (that whole “eye of a needle” thing is a teaching they conveniently ignore) really did behave contemptibly toward him. And yes, some of them well deserved to be lampooned as ministers of frociaggine or “faggotry”, with their prissy outfits, sense of entitlement, and incensed meta-camp. I wasn’t offended by Francis’ remark. I found it hilarious and all-too accurate about a certain rightwing homo-subculture in the church.

Who knows what follows? Francis himself didn’t pretend to know, because at some deep level, he trusted the Holy Spirit, and he knew the hubris of predicting anything in the messy human world that Godness permeates. Because, as he put it,

God’s word is unpredictable in its power. The Gospel speaks of a seed which, once sown, grows by itself, even as the farmer sleeps. The Church has to accept this unruly freedom of the word, which accomplishes what it wills in ways that surpass our calculations and ways of thinking.

In these days, as I observe more people in the pews, and a growing sense among many that what modernity offers us is empty, that what materialism promises is false, and that what human beings need is something beyond ourselves, I feel the Holy Spirit at work.

Faith needs doctrine, of course. But it also needs doctrinal perspective — and the obsessive focus on relatively minor issues, like communion for faithful but divorced Catholics rather than, say, the far harder commands to love one’s enemy or to renounce all wealth, is more neurosis than religion. In fact, for faith to live in and respond with new language to modernity, it needs the space Francis has created to breathe again, to get away from petty certainties and doctrinal spats, to discern and embrace the unruly freedom of wherever God seems to be leading us.

And the very person of Francis showed to many, far beyond the ranks of Catholics, that in seeking meaning, the weird, strange figure of Jesus of Nazareth still beckons us, is still essential, still there. Francis showed us this meaning, as Jesus did, not by what he said so much as how he lived. Religion, as Oakeshott put it,

is not, as some would persuade us, an interest attached to life, a subsidiary activity; nor is it a power which governs life from the outside with a, no doubt divine, but certainly incomprehensible, sanction for its authority. It is simply life itself.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Amen.

New On The Dishcast: Frances Lee & Steve Macedo