I will never forget the first time that I met the Pope in 2013.
I had never met a pope and was on sharp. The Vatican is designed to overwhelm visitors with power. We walk through long corridors to his office, a man in a beautifully custom -made tail coat that leads us; Swiss guards greetings in their entire uniforms while we pass.
The murals are out of description; You could follow a Renaissance Art Course, just in the rooms we go through. I am taken in the meeting, with my colleagues, cameras clicking, TV – It is surreal. The others are switched off and we are on either side of a desk.
“I'm senior for you,” he says with a flat look. I feel a feeling of disappointment: I didn't think he was like that. “Indeed, you are, your holiness …” I start.
He interrupts, smiling, “by three days”. He was inaugurated so much for me: in March, earlier that year.
We both laugh and there are the beginning of a friendship.
The second striking time I remember with the Pope is around 2016 – in a small room in the modern flats block in Rome where the Pope has lived since his election.
I am with him and an interpreter. We speak of prayer, about God's love in Christ, about the work of God's Spirit in a world of war, of human weakness, including ours. I listen to his wisdom about how I can lead a global church.
The Archbishop and Pope in January 2024 (AFP/Getty)
At the end of the meeting I nervously ask if he would make a recorded message a few months later for an event on Trafalgar Square. He grins. “Do you have your phone?” I answer yes. “Let's record it now, before someone tries to stop me!” He delivers a smooth and of the cuff's message about the work of the Holy Spirit of God, profound in theology, accessible and powerful.
The third precious memory is of a Baddene evening in 2023. I am in a huge stadium and gathering place in Juba, South Sudan; The crowd extends to the horizon, some have walked nine days to be there.
There are three chairs on stage. In the middle, the white covered figure of the pope. To his right is the moderator of the Church of Scotland. I'm on the left. It is the pilgrimage of peace: we each turn on the crowd and all speak directly with different people. The president and the cabinet are in the front row.
No punches are pulled. The pope challenges corruption, violence, power seeking. He turns to the women in the crowd and tells them about God's love for them in their pain of war, rape and hunger. He talks about the need for a government that loves. Inspired by his example, the moderator and I are just immediately.
While the crowd reacts with singing, with cries and tears, a flight of cranes flies over our heads to the setting sun. It is the universal pastor of Christians who speak God's calling to a government that does not seem willing to listen, in the hearing of the people they are meant to give.
How often have we met? I'm not sure, but a lot. We last spoke when he called after the announcement of my resignation last November.
The pair of joke in the Vatican during their meeting in 2013 (AFP/Getty)
There was little warning, just a phone call and his voice.
This was typical for the man who was primarily a pastor. Every day he called a designated telephone number to talk to the congregation of a bombed monastery in the north of Gaza. It was always his instinct to connect and comfort.
The last time I saw him personally was on St Peter's Square, the great basilica behind us when he gathered a meeting of Christian leaders – from Orthodox to Pentecost and all in between. He was, as usual, humble and friendly, as some of us spoke. We knelt in silence and united prayer for an Ikon of the crucifixion of the Jesus, the crowd behind us is also silent while the sun shoots from a cloudless sky.
It always seemed to be sunny when we met. It was probably the most varied and largest meeting of church leaders since the Reformation. He did not call it with violence, but through love and it was in mutual love that a moment such a large part of the more than 2 billion Christians were represented together before Jesus Christ to seek God. While we all left, he shook my hands with both.
Francis was someone who made sure that people wanted to know God – and God's love – as He did. He was not perfect, but he was passionate about God. He was extremely relational – regardless of status – and he lived his call to the shepherd to be close to the sheep. He saw those who, no matter how bad and fallible, were looking to follow Christ as brothers and sisters. Whether they were in prisons or palaces, slums or stadiums made no difference.
He easily lived, as St. Francis, whose name he accepted. He lived in the song of Maria, The Magnificat, in the Gospel of Luke – that revolutionary hymn for the reversal of power. As Mary, the mother of Jesus sang, so obeyed Francis – the powerful to serve, the rich to be sacrificing generous, the rulers to be at the feet of the ruled person.
He was a supreme master of symbolic actions that immediately preached a sermon.
In 2019, the leaders of the government and the rebels in South Sudan gathered at his request for a 36 -hour retreat in the Vatican. Again, the then moderator of the Church of Scotland and I worked with the Curia and led the event together. At the end he spoke about the witness and the call of Christ – excellent, deep.
Then he got up, walked around to the South Sudanese leaders – including the towering Dinka and Nuer – and knelt to kiss their shoes and say: “I beg you, make peace”. It's on YouTube.
Their choice about what to do – and they still have to act as they should – was square for them. The symbol spoke in tones of absolute authority; As a result, the voice of God said: “Trade rightly like my servant Francis”.
So what now? God's universal, broken and suffering church is so much larger than any pope (let alone archbishop). As I even found in the small corner that Anglicanism is all over the world, centuries of history and a worldwide presence bring a complexity – which means that even Roman Catholicism is an organism, a living ecology, not an organization.
It can be frustrating – I saw and heard his frustration. Little seems to change on the outside observer. It will take decades before we see if things are fruits Francis. The next pope may come from Asia or Africa, with a deep conservatism about issues that we find in the UK as so clear that they do not need a discussion.
But they will also discover that bending the attitude of 1.2 billion Catholics is unthinkable compared to a single agenda. They come from every country on earth and speak every tongue under heaven. The pope is not the CEO of Rome Inc., but the Holy Father. His call is to love God and love people – and by enabling his universal primacy, to enable Catholics to first (and all others) to love God in Christ and to love people.
That is his legacy: being a pope of love, serving the God of love that emptied himself, took the form of a servant, such as Jesus Christ. That love was sent back – and it is that love that God's church is called to sow, cherish and see a harvels in God's time.
