Pope Francis: A Nonviolent Revolutionary
We’ve been hearing a lot about how he was the first non-European pope in centuries, the first Jesuit pope, the first pope from Latin America, the first pope trained after Vatican II, the first pope who was not a Vatican insider and the first to take the name of St. Francis (which was a bold and daring thing to do). But perhaps best of all: He was the first pope who worked as a bouncer at a pub before entering the seminary.
Francis wrote great books and greats encyclicals like “Fratelli Tutti,” where he called for a global fraternity rooted in love, solidarity, and respect for all people, where everyone moves beyond divisions and tries to work together to build a more just and compassionate world
Francis lived and proclaimed the Beatitudes. We Americans always think of ourselves in a kind of collective narcissism, but he always had a universal perspective. He looked at the whole human race and all of creation through the eyes of Jesus, one of the original nonviolent revolutionaries. As such, Francis spoke boldly about universal love, universal compassion, universal justice, and universal peace.
With this in mind, it’s worth focusing on the great themes of his papacy, and what they mean for us.
1. His Commitment to the Poor
Francis began his papacy saying he envisioned a church that is poor and for the poor. Yes, do charity work, he said, and serve the poor and marginalized, but have real relationships with poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised people. Get involved in their lives personally and join their struggle to end injustice and the systemic violence of poverty—and do it through love for actual suffering people. I loved that he opened a homeless shelter in the Vatican, visited prisoners, and met with and defended migrants and refugees, even bringing some to live at the Vatican.
2. His Commitment to Mother Earth.
Francis wrote great books and greats encyclicals like “Fratelli Tutti,” where he called for a global fraternity rooted in love, solidarity, and respect for all people, where everyone moves beyond divisions and tries to work together to build a more just and compassionate world. But his encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si,” might be one of the great documents in history. Not only does he denounce our destruction of the planet and its creatures, as well as the poor, but he denounces capitalism, corporate greed, and war as root causes of climate change.
The Earth “is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” he wrote. He called climate change a spiritual and moral crisis and denounced what he called “an economy that kills”—a system that discards both people and creation in pursuit of profit. He denounced what he called our throwaway culture as moral failure, and named indifference itself as one of the greatest threats to our future. He insisted that “we can no longer turn our backs on reality,” and called everyone to take action for justice, compassion, and Mother Earth, our common home.
3. His Commitment to Mercy.
Over and over again, Francis called us to show mercy and clemency; to let go of grudges and put down our swords, guns, and weapons; to forgive to one another, reconcile, and seek peace. In particular, he changed canon law so there is not one sentence of support for the death penalty in church teaching. No Catholic, no Christian, can support the death penalty, he said. On many occasions, he tried to stop impending executions.
4. His Commitment to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion
When a reporter asked him about LGBT folks, he responded, “Who am I to judge?” That’s precisely why the right hated him so much, because unlike U.S. President Donald Trump and so many others, he refused to make scapegoats of anyone or judge anyone, which, by the way, is a commandment in the Sermon on the Mount. However, he did judge and vehemently condemn hatred, prejudice, racism, war, corporate greed, capitalism, nuclear weapons, and, really, the U.S. itself for its imperial domination.
5. His Commitment to the Reformation of the Church
Francis tried to make many changes in the church, the Vatican, the Curia, and especially through the synod process, which has the potential to make the global church more egalitarian. If priests are good shepherds like Jesus, they need to “smell like the sheep,” he said. “The church is like a field hospital after a battle,” where people go for healing, recovery, and comfort—so it is messy and stressful because it is a place that welcomes and serves the suffering.
Could he have done more? Of course. I wish he had ordained women as deacons and declared that priests could marry. I wish he had placed women at the head of many, if not all, decision-making bodies within the Curia. As Joan Chittister just wrote, he really failed women. I wish he had made a much stronger response to the horrific sex abuse scandal, but I liked that he tried to get bishops and priests to stop acting like aristocrats—to let go of power and be of humble service to everyone.
6. His Commitment to Peace and Active Nonviolence
Everything Francis did was a form of Gospel peacemaking. Like Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and St. Francis, he was against war, all wars, no matter what the reason—and that’s the leap that few people make. One of his last books is called Against War. If you study the tributes in the mainstream press, you will notice that few mention his consistent stand against war, his opposition to nuclear weapons, and his efforts to end the wars in Africa and the Russian war on Ukraine. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he went to the Russian embassy and violated protocol by dramatically begging for an end to the war.
Most of all, he denounced the horrific Hamas attack, killings, and kidnappings, and from then on, he denounced the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza that has killed over 51,000 people. Nearly every night since the war began, at 7:00 pm, he called the one Catholic church in Gaza, right up through Holy Saturday, to see how they were holding up. His last public words on Easter were a call for a lasting cease-fire in Gaza. I hope we can all speak out publicly like he did until the day we die calling for an end to all wars and all nuclear weapons.
He went to many places that few visit to fulfill Jesus’ commandment to make peace and practice the universal, compassionate love of God. He went to Iraq, Myanmar, North Macedonia, Bahrain, Mongolia, the Congo, South Korea, and Morocco. When he was in Palestine, he touched the shameful Israeli wall of occupation and prayed there, just as he had prayed at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. In the United Arab Emirates, he had a historic meeting with Muslim leaders. In Canada, he apologized for the church’s treatment of Indigenous people over the centuries and tore up the Doctrine of Discovery.
Francis learned, as we all have to learn, that the only way forward, our only hope, is if every human being tries to practice, teach, and promote nonviolence.
In Greece, he made a surprise visit to a refugee camp and then brought three Muslim families back to Rome with him. In the Central African Republic, he went right into the warzone, and could easily have been killed. He literally placed himself in harm’s way. In Hiroshima, he denounced all nuclear weapons, and begged the world’s leaders to abolish all nuclear weapons. He said that the mere possession of them, the threat of using them as a deterrent, was immoral. No Catholic can support, build, maintain, threaten, or profit from nuclear weapons, he said.
Perhaps the most dramatic of all was in April 2019 when he brought the president of South Sudan and the rebel leaders together at the Vatican for a two day retreat. At the end, after pleading for negotiations and urging them to end the killing, he went around the room, got down on his knees, and begged each one of them for peace, and then kissed each person’s feet.
Francis consistently rebuked Trump and the Republican Party, as well as the many U.S. Catholic bishops and priests who support them. He even asked an associate to read JD Vance a long statement on the fundamentals of compassion and welcoming immigrants.
At the same time, Francis consistently met with leaders of popular movements from the Global South, encouraging them and all grassroots movements. Being from the Global South himself, he was determined to listen to their voices, not ours.
He called former U.S. President Joe Biden last December and made a personal appeal to release Leonard Peltier, and that, along with the grassroots movement, is why Leonard was released from prison. When Julian Assange was in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, Pope Francis had called him and talked for an hour, which I learned (first hand) really helped him. No one knows that.
Of all the stances he took, it was his growing commitment to nonviolence that gave me the most hope. Francis learned, as we all have to learn, that the only way forward, our only hope, is if every human being tries to practice, teach, and promote nonviolence.
My friends and I went to the Vatican many times over the years asking for an encyclical on Jesus and nonviolence, to make this the official teaching, position, and law of the church. We never got that, but Francis did much to turn the church back to its roots in Gospel nonviolence. In April 2016, he welcomed the first ever conference on nonviolence at the Vatican, and at the end we issued a strong joint statement saying there was no such thing as a just war, calling on everyone to practice nonviolence.
It was there that Cardinal Peter Turkson asked me to draft the Pope’s next World Day of Peace message, which came out on January 1, 2017, called “ Nonviolence, a Style of Politics for Peace.” I call it the first ever statement on nonviolence in the history of the church since the Sermon on the Mount.
Francis continued to speak about nonviolence over the years, saying “I think of nonviolence as a perspective and way of understanding the world, to which theology must look as one of its constitutive elements.” He also called nonviolence a “universal value that finds fulfilment in the Gospel of Christ” and called for a “nonviolent lifestyle,” noting “how nonviolence, embraced with conviction and practiced consistently, can yield significant results… This is the path to pursue now and in the future. This is the way of peace.”
To the Anti-Defamation League, he said, “Faced with so much violence spreading throughout the world, we are called to a greater nonviolence, which does not mean passivity, but active promotion of the good.” Elsewhere, he wrote, “Let us remember that, even in cases of self-defense, peace is the ultimate goal, and that a lasting peace can exist only without weapons. Let us make nonviolence a guide for our actions, both in daily life and in international relations. And let us pray for a more widespread culture of nonviolence, that will progress when countries and citizens alike resort less and less to the use of arms.” In his last statement on Easter, he prayed for an end to all violence, everywhere. That was his prayer, his hope, his message, his life’s work.
A good way to honor Pope Francis’s peacemaking life and his death at Easter is to rise to the occasion as he did, to claim our power as public peacemakers; reclaim our collective power in global grassroots movements of nonviolence; speak out; march in the streets; take public action; and resist war, injustice, poverty, racism, corporate greed, fascism, authoritarianism, genocide in Gaza, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction. He urged us to be “pilgrims of hope.”
I invite us, in the face of so much despair, to rise up, reclaim, and promote nonviolence as he did, see the world through the eyes of the nonviolent Jesus as he did, and do what we can publicly as peacemakers to welcome God’s reign of peace on Earth. As Francis demonstrated, that’s the best thing we can do with our lives. That is the spiritual life, the fullness of life, the life of the peacemaker.
