“The Legacy of Pope Francis: Imitating God in the Gift of Human Encounter”

HOMILY – MEMORIAL MASS FOR POPE ✝FRANCIS
Wednesday of the Second Week of Easter
Memorial of Pope St. Pius V
30 April 2025 – St. Mary’s Cathedral – San Francisco
Acts 5:17-26; John 3:16-21

Introduction

It is my pleasure, and indeed my honor, to welcome you all here to our cathedral today for our Memorial Mass for Pope Francis. We are grateful that so many have gathered here. It is good that we come together and pray at a moment such as this, especially for our Catholic family, but also for the whole world.

I especially want to thank so many representatives of our interfaith community present with us today. We are so gratified by your presence, beginning with the Executive Director of our San Francisco Interfaith Council, Michael Pappas. We also have with us Lauren Nemirovski, the Assistant Director of the Northern California American Jewish Committee. We have retired Air Force Colonel Deborah Dacumos, who is the Board Secretary of the San Francisco Interfaith Council and also San Francisco Veteran Affairs Commissioner, along with her husband, Kenneth Eisen. Welcome to Reverend Canon Eric Metoyer, who is the Deputy to the General Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of California; Reverend Joe Williams, who is the Succentor of Grace Cathedral; Sister Kyoko Kimura and Sister Sukanya Belsare of the Brahma Kumaris Meditation Center; and Imam Na’il Shakoor of the San Francisco Muslim Community Center. I also want to extend a grateful welcome to Matthew Goudeau, the Deputy Chief of Staff from the Office of Mayor Lurie. I know we have school children from the archdiocese with us, as well. We are so grateful and gratified by your presence. It is greatly appreciated.

I think the presence of such a diverse group of people here at what is an act of Catholic worship is indicative of how all world religious leaders, all religious leaders who are prominent on the world stage, exert a moral influence beyond the confines of their own faith community. Certainly, for us as Catholics, that is the pope, but we as Catholics also look to leaders of other religions who are prominent in the world and in our country for moral guidance. People of all faiths and no faith look to prominent religious leaders for moral guidance in their lives.

Two Popes Converging on this Day

We were looking for a day to celebrate this Mass during this nine-day period of mourning that we have in our Church from the day of the pope’s funeral – mourning for nine days beginning then – trying to pick a day that had some significance, so we landed on today. Today is, in our Catholic calendar, the feast day of a sainted predecessor of Pope Francis: Pope Pius V.

Not only that, though, but also because, as you may know, Pope Francis – instead of being buried in St. Peter’s Basilica, where the popes for more than 100 years have been buried – chose to be buried in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, a few miles away from the Vatican, in the city of Rome. A significant church for us, it is the first church in the western part of the ancient Christian world of the fourth century to be dedicated to the mother of Jesus under the title of “Mother of God.” As we know, Pope Francis always prayed there before and after he made a journey, and he will be buried nearby the tomb of his predecessor, Pope Pius V. This presents for us then an interesting and, I think, helpful juxtaposition.

Pius V: The World Then

Pope Pius V led the Catholic Church in the middle of the 16th century. As you know, that was a very significant time in world history. Seismic shifts were happening: political, social, and even economic. It was a time of what was considered to be the splintering of a unified Christian world, which ushered in the historical anomaly of wars of religion.

It was also the same time that Europeans discovered that parts of the world existed that they did not know about before, and they began to explore them – as well as other parts that they kind of vaguely knew about. This exploration was made possible by advances in world travel, now with the ability to circumnavigate the globe. They began exploration and colonization, which, of course, led to cultural exchange but also cultural conflicts, and also wars among the European powers themselves fighting for hegemony over those parts of the world.

The world at that time, then, started to become smaller, beginning the process of what we now call “globalization.” With these advances in travel, people around the world began to know about each other’s cultures more. Trade became more possible. Yes, there were conflicts and human rights abuses, but there was also more of an awareness of the wider world that was out there.

​The World Now

That was almost 500 years ago. That development has now come to full blossoming. Imagine the world that we live in now. With the ease of world travel, we can be in one part of the globe one day and the next day on the other side of the globe. Means of communication are possible now that were not thought possible in the lifetimes of people who are still alive today, such as myself: for example, the ability to speak to anyone anytime, anywhere in the world, and even to see each other live on a screen.

Communication is made possible in other ways, with technology for translation services, and then, of course, there is the instant contact through social media. This, of course, carries dangers as well as benefits. We all know about the problem of “misinformation.” Most significantly, in my mind, though, is that it gives greater possibility for the human encounter. We all lament our concern on what we hear about constantly, the polarization in our society, hostility, people canceling each other out, who disagree with them. Nonetheless, I still believe much progress has been made over the centuries. Compare where the world is now to where it was 500 years ago.

​Lessons from Pope Francis: Human Encounter

I think this is perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from Pope Francis: the primacy of the human encounter, the encounter with the other as a fellow human being. Everyone has to live by some sort of a belief system. Everyone has their own beliefs, and they believe that those beliefs are true. This is natural, this is logical. It is good for one to believe that his or her beliefs are true and that the values that come from those beliefs are good. That is not the problem.

The problem is the attitude of, “I am right, everyone else is wrong, and so everyone who does not agree with me must be silenced and pushed away.” But it is also possible to have the strength of my convictions and still know that I have a lot to learn from the other. That learning from the other can give me even deeper insights into my own beliefs and a deeper understanding of what is true.

This is when the human encounter happens: when I value the other for the sake of the other – even going beyond simply understanding, trying to understand what the other thinks and believes, but also to know and understand the other as a fellow human being. It is this that makes possible the building up of love, solidarity and a more civil society.

Lessons from Pope Francis: Following God’s Own Example

In doing so, we follow God’s own example for us. In our Catholic faith, we have a series of readings for each day of the year, Sundays and also during the week. Today, we heard from the Gospel of St. John what many Christians consider to be the most beloved verse in the whole Bible, that “God so loved the world that He gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.”

This is the revelation of who God is. God is a generous God. He gives us His all. God giving us His all, giving us even His own Son – that sets the pattern of self-sacrificing love, making an oblation of oneself. That self-sacrificial love is the truth of what God created us for because loving in this way, we can know the truth about ourselves and we can know how to live in a way that leads to communion.

Communion means that I do not look to the other for what I can get out of that person, or as someone to dominate, or someone to take advantage of, or to beat into submission. Rather, I make a gift of myself, a gift of love, to the other, so we can understand the truth and be brought into the light. As this passage from the Bible that we just heard – from the Gospel of St. John – as it tells us, “…whoever lives the truth comes into the light.” It begins with that human encounter.

Conclusion

I am so grateful to the San Francisco Interfaith Council, which models this kind of love and communion. There is certainly no more appropriate place to model this than here in San Francisco, which has always been a melting pot of people from different cultures, different nationalities, different religions, different value systems, different socioeconomic backgrounds. It is very appropriate that we can model this here.

This is what the San Francisco Interfaith Council has been about for nearly 40 years now. It began as a group of clergy and lay leaders who came together at the request of the mayor of San Francisco at the time, Art Agnos, to provide additional shelter and meals to the homeless during a very wet and cold December. A number of faith communities came together to do that. This legacy continues on with the Interfaith Cold Weather Shelter Program, sponsored under the auspices of the San Francisco Interfaith Council, and, in so many of the other ways that the leaders of the faith communities come together for the good of our city. I want to thank you all and, in particular, to thank the Executive Director, Michael Pappas, for leading us in this way. You do so much to keep us united and working together, even amid the differences in our beliefs and, sometimes, even our value systems.

There is a deeper level, though, of human communion – that when we cooperate for the good of the other, it brings out the best in us. It makes love possible. This is the lesson I hope we can all learn from Pope Francis. The human encounter that seeks understanding and the way of that self-sacrificial love, this is what leads us in the way of truth, light, in a more humane society. Living this lesson is the greatest honor we can give to his memory.