Remembering Pope Francis A Reflection for the First Anniversary of His Death

Walking Together: Remembering Pope Francis

A Reflection for the First Anniversary of His Death — April 21, 2026

One year ago today, on Easter Monday morning, Pope Francis returned to the Lord. He had given his final Easter blessing the day before, frail and labored, but still insisting on the joy of the Resurrection. Within hours he was gone. A year on, the Church still feels the shape of his absence and the deeper shape of his gift.

 

What a gift he was! A Jesuit from the end of the world, the first pope to take the name of the Poor Man of Assisi, Francis spent twelve years reminding the Church of something it had nearly forgotten about itself: that we are a people on the road. He pushed open the doors of the institution and said, again and again, go out. Go to the peripheries. Go to the prisoner, the migrant, the woman hiding bruises, the young person who has stopped believing the Church has anything to say. Go without fear of getting your shoes dirty. Go and listen before you speak.

 

He preached mercy with such relentless tenderness that even those who had walked away began to wonder if the Church might still have a place for them. He grieved with families in Lampedusa and Lesbos. He kissed the disfigured. He apologized for sins the Church had taken centuries to name. He wrote Laudato Si’ and asked us to hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor as a single cry. He called us to a culture of encounter in a world increasingly built on contempt.

 

And then there was synodality. It was, in many ways, the great inheritance of his pontificate, the slow and patient labor of teaching the Church how to listen again. To listen to one another. To listen to the laity, to women, to the young, to those long pushed to the margins. To listen, above all, to the Holy Spirit speaking through the whole People of God. Synodality is not a program or a meeting. It is a way of being Church. It is the conviction that the Spirit is given to everyone who has been baptized, and that we discover the will of God only when we walk together long enough to hear it.

 

How fitting, then, that this anniversary falls just two days after we heard the Gospel of Emmaus. That story is the very portrait of synodality. Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem, away from the Church, away from the failed dream. And Jesus does not call them back from a distance. He does not stand on a hillside and lecture. He falls into step beside them. He asks what they are discussing. He listens to their disappointment all the way to the end. Only then does he open the Scriptures, and only at the table, in the breaking of the bread, do their eyes finally open.

 

This is what Francis wanted us to be. A Church that walks. A Church that accompanies. A Church that listens before it teaches, and breaks bread before it pronounces. He used to speak often of the shepherd who must smell of the sheep, the priest who walks among his people rather than above them. The Emmaus road was one of his favorite icons of the Church, precisely because Jesus there does the very thing he asks of us. He walks with those who are walking away, and by the gentleness of his presence, he turns their steps back toward home.

 

A year after his death, we honor Francis best by continuing the journey he set us on. Tomorrow, as the universal Church gathers in prayer at St. Mary Major where his body now rests, let us at St. Simon also pause and give thanks. Let us pray for Pope Leo XIV, who carries forward this same vision with his own gifts and his own voice. And let us ask ourselves the question Francis would surely ask us: Whom am I walking with this week? Whose disappointment am I listening to? Whose road home am I helping to make a little easier?

 

God Bless,

Fr. Brendan

A Blessing on the First Anniversary of Pope Francis

By Fr. Brendan McGuire

One year on, the road still bears your footprints,
shepherd of the peripheries,
who walked among us
smelling of the sheep,
who knelt to wash
what others would not touch.

 

You taught us the Emmaus way:
to fall into step beside the disappointed,
to listen all the way to the end
before opening the Scripture,
to break the bread
before pronouncing the word.

 

You gave your last blessing
on Easter morning, frail and luminous,
then slipped quietly into the Resurrection
you had spent your life proclaiming.

 

May the Risen Christ,
who still walks unrecognized
on every dusty road of grief,
keep the doors you opened open,
the windows you flung wide,
and our feet, Holy Father,
forever turning toward
the ones still walking away.

Amen.

 

© 2026 Fr. Brendan McGuire