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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Musings on Francis [1]
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Date: 2025-04-24
I haven’t been a practicing Catholic since my late teens, yet I felt a great loss when Pope Francis passed Monday. It called to mind the autumn of my freshman year at Our Lady of Mercy Academy. Just 14 years old. Pope Paul VI was coming to New York and my mother and her sisters along with her parents were going to see him at a Mass. In my memory (and I could be wrong) it was held at the old Shea Stadium.
It was my first meeting at the OLMANAC press club and I was the only freshman who had been accepted onto the staff. The moderator, Sr. Mary Cleaver, was a soft-spoken enchanting presence, in full Mercy regalia such that the only parts of her visible were her hands and some 2/3 of her face. I adored her right off the bat.
The editor of the paper stood in the front of the room giving out assignments and writing them down on the blackboard. Not surprisingly, I was passed over story after story. I don’t know what was worse, not being assigned anything or the anxiety I felt over the idea of having to write something: the older girls were daunting and brimmed with confidence; and I had never written a news story before.
Sr. Cleaver spoke up: We really should include a story about the Pope’s visit to New York. It was historic. She asked for a volunteer to write it and I raised my hand.
I can remember the nervous energy crafting that article. The thin almost transparent onion skin typing paper, the portable typewriter with an “S” key that stuck. Draft after draft after draft. Reading it to my mother. How nervous I was handing it in to Sr. Cleaver. Waiting as she read it and marked it up. Nodded her head. “Good job.”
Today, I am sure that issue of the newspaper is not among those I have buried away somewhere in storage but I do recall my first sentence: “The unexpected has occurred. His Holiness, Pope Paul VI has arrived here in the United States. Here in New York.”
That story marked the beginning of my 4 year career at Mercy’s press club. After my sophomore year, the school sent me and three other girls to Washington to study journalism for the summer. I became feature page editor and columnist my junior year and editor in chief my senior year. Probably the best years of my life.
Bill McKibben wrote yesterday on his substack The Crucial Years Pope Francis and the Sun in which he praised the pope’s position of climate change, calling his encyclical Laudato Si, perhaps “the most important piece of writing so far this millennium.” The encyclical, McKibben says, “uses the climate crisis to talk in broad and powerful terms about modernity.”
I spent several weeks living with that book-length epistle in order to write about it for the New York Review of Books, and though I briefly met the man himself in Rome, it is that encounter with his mind that really lives with me. Laudato Si is a truly remarkable document—yes, it exists as a response to the climate crisis (and it was absolutely crucial in the lead-up to the Paris climate talks, consolidating elite opinion behind the idea that some kind of deal was required). But it uses the climate crisis to talk in broad and powerful terms about modernity.
The ecological problems we face are not, in their origin, technological, says Francis. Instead, “a certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.” He is no Luddite (“who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?”) but he insists that we have succumbed to a “technocratic paradigm,” which leads us to believe that “every increase in power means ‘an increase of “progress” itself’…as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.” This paradigm “exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.”
Francis followed up Laudato Si with a letter last summer, Fratello Sole, which reminds everyone that the climate crisis is powered by fossil fuel.
There is a need to make a transition to a sustainable development model that reduces greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, setting the goal of climate neutrality. Mankind has the technological means to deal with this environmental transformation and its pernicious ethical, social, economic and political consequences, and, among these, solar energy plays a key role.
Sixty years after I wrote some 220 words about a pope’s visit to my home state, I am once again writing about a pope. In the 1960s, the pope was working on modernizing the Catholic Church with Vatican II. This pope spread his influence much further than the church, seeking to be influential in matters of social justice, migration, poverty, war, and the climate crisis.
I have read many tributes to the pope but really felt Gavin Newsom’s summed things up well:
Like the saint honored by His Holiness’s papal name, Saint Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis led with his love of peace and creation and sought to protect and lift up the vulnerable. He championed human dignity, especially that of the poor, called the world to urgent climate action, condemned the death penalty, and confronted painful truths — including the Church’s role in the genocide of Indigenous peoples. His papacy was characterized by moral courage, a profound respect for all creation, and a deep conviction in the transformative power of love to heal and unite. As we mourn His Holiness, we honor him by choosing to believe that a better world is possible through grace and kindness, and through fellowship with our neighbors, no matter our differences.
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