IN A tribute in The Times this week (“I’m an atheist — but I saw Pope Francis as a good guy”), the journalist Andrew Billen praised his subject for having been “more concerned with lives in the here and now than their post-mortem destinations”. He explained: “Saving souls is a noble cause — diehards would say it is a priest’s one job — but less impressive to those of us who find the term ‘soul’ meaningless.” It is a well-established binary, often deployed as a criticism of those so fixated on life after death that they fail to fulfil the gospel commands to care for those in need during this one. “We believe in life before death,” runs the Christian Aid slogan.
The obituaries published this week are full of examples of the ways in which the late Pope exemplified this belief. This was a man who ordered that free showers for the destitute be opened in Vatican City, and whose first visit as Pope was to the tiny island of Lampedusa, where he prayed for migrants desperate to reach Europe. “It is no longer possible to claim that religion should be restricted to the private sphere and that it exists only to prepare souls for heaven,” he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium. “We know that God wants his children to be happy in this world too, even though they are called to fulfilment in eternity.”
But the suggestion that the life of faith necessitates a choice between the life here and now and that to come, or that eternity remained an afterthought for the 266th occupant of the throne of St Peter — the disciple entrusted with the keys to heaven — is faulty. The apostolic exhortation quoted, a beautiful meditation on the joy of evangelism, is about spreading the good news about “The joy of the Father who desires that none of his little ones be lost.” The sensitive answer that the Pope gave in 2018 to a young Italian boy wanting to know whether his atheist father was in heaven — a question that most clergy have no doubt faced — was the work of a priest cognisant that the life to come is a pressing pastoral concern for many. Not every sorrow can be remedied this side of eternity.
In the preface to a new book on ageing by Cardinal Angelo Scola, released by the Vatican this week, Pope Francis observed that death was “not the end of everything but the beginning of something. . . [E]ternal life, which those who love already begin to experience on earth within the daily tasks of life — is beginning something that will never end”. Heaven was not “pie in the sky”, but something that it was possible to taste on earth, God’s Kingdom already at hand.
In his final address, read aloud for him in St Peter’s Square on Easter Day, the Pope turned his attention to the catalogue of ills plaguing the world that he was about to depart, urging greater human efforts towards their resolution. But he concluded by reassuring his audience of “the certainty that we, too, are called to share in the life that knows no end, when the clash of arms and the rumble of death will be heard no more”. As Christians worldwide mourn his death, they do so with these words of faith hanging in the air.
