By Benedict Rogers in The Tablet
My life as a Catholic has been intertwined with Pope Francis since the beginning of his pontificate. I was received into the Church in St Mary’s Cathedral, Yangon, by Myanmar’s Cardinal Charles Bo on Palm Sunday 2013, 11 days after Francis was elected to the papacy. I had the privilege of personally meeting Pope Francis three times. And I was able to be in Myanmar when he became the first pope ever to visit the country.
A Jesuit priest in Myanmar liked to joke that I waited until the first Jesuit pope was elected before becoming a Catholic. That was not true – for two years, I had been on a journey of exploration, inspired by a conversation with Cardinal Bo, with whom I had worked closely in Myanmar, and guided by a variety of Catholic friends, saints, writers and thinkers, and certainly influenced by Francis’ two immediate predecessors, Benedict XVI and St John Paul II.
My spirituality has drawn on a range of traditions – I have been on retreats in Benedictine monasteries, enjoyed deep conversations with Dominican friends, visited Franciscans in Assisi and been guided by Cistercians like Thomas Merton, Carmelites whom I met in East Timor and three great Salesian bishops whom I have been privileged to know, Cardinal Bo, Hong Kong’s Cardinal Joseph Zen and East Timor’s Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo.
Nevertheless, it is true that Ignatian spirituality has shaped my faith journey. I have a Jesuit spiritual director who guided my first retreat at Campion Hall in Oxford in preparation for my reception into the Church. I have been on several Ignatian retreats at St Beuno’s in Wales. And while my regular parish priest is diocesan, I often attend Mass at the Jesuit-run parishes of Farm Street in Mayfair and Sacred Heart in Wimbledon.
So, for all these reasons, Pope Francis has a special place in my heart – and, like billions of people around the world, I will miss him deeply.
I will never forget the first time I was honoured to meet him, ten years ago, in a private audience for participants of the International Catholic Legislators Network (ICLN) in the Clementine Hall in the Vatican. I stood in line, preparing in my mind what to say. When I reached him and Austria’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Patron of the ICLN, introduced me, I said: “Holy Father, I became a Catholic in Myanmar, inspired and received into the Church by Cardinal Bo.” He looked genuinely surprised and gave me a big smile.
The following year, when I met him again, I was able to present the Holy Father with a book I had written about my faith journey, titled From Burma to Rome: A Journey into the Catholic Church.
And the third time I met him, in 2017, I heard that he was considering a visit to Myanmar. The apostolic visit had not been officially announced, so I did not want to be presumptive, but when I was face-to-face with him, I said: “Holy Father, I understand you might be visiting Myanmar?” He looked straight into my eyes and said, in English – which was rare for him – these words: “Not ‘might’. I ‘will’ be visiting Myanmar.” I told him how glad I was to hear that, how I hoped to be there during his visit, and I presented him with another of my books, Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads. As I turned to move on, conscious that there were others in line behind me, I felt him grab my hand and tug me back. “Give my greetings to Cardinal Bo,” Pope Francis told me, seemingly remembering our earlier encounters. I promised him I would.
Later that year, I stood in the crowds of thousands lining the road from Yangon airport into the city, waiting to greet him as he arrived in Myanmar. A couple of days later, in the early morning, I joined 150,000 others in a two-hour open-air Mass with Pope Francis, in what was the largest single event in Myanmar’s history. I remember the readings for the day – on which he preached his homily – included the story of King Belshazzar’s feast and the writing on the wall for that particular tyrant. That seemed almost divinely aimed at Myanmar’s military dictators. Pope Francis’ message focused on wisdom, healing and forgiveness. The theme of his apostolic visit was “Love and Peace”.
After three days, Pope Francis travelled on to Bangladesh – where he met Rohingya refugees who had fled the unfolding genocide in Myanmar. While he had been criticised for not using the word “Rohingya” in Myanmar, in Dhaka, Pope Francis stood on a platform with Rohingyas and said: “The presence of God today is also called Rohingya.”
Throughout his papacy, Francis showed a consistent and tender concern for and interest in Myanmar. Repeatedly in his Sunday Angelus addresses from the window over St Peter’s Square, he prayed for Myanmar – including for the Rohingya. After the coup in Myanmar in 2021, he celebrated a special Mass in Rome for Myanmar. He met Kim Aris, the son of Myanmar’s jailed democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, last year and even offered Ms Suu Kyi – whom he had met several times – asylum in the Vatican.
For all of this and more, I am profoundly grateful. There was, however, one issue over which I profoundly disagreed with Pope Francis – and which will always cause me sadness: China.
I did not come into the Church with the intention of arguing with the Pope. And I was always very reluctant to criticise his approach to Beijing. Initially, hesitantly, in 2016 – as a three-year-old Catholic – I wrote an “Open Letter” constructively warning him of the dangers of a deal with Xi Jinping’s regime. Over the years, I became more vocal, expressing my concerns about the Sino-Vatican agreement on the appointment of bishops, the deterioration in religious freedom in China that ensued, and most especially, Francis’ repeated, glaring failure to speak out about the genocide of the Uyghurs, the atrocities in Tibet, the dismantling of freedom in Hong Kong and the persecution of Christians across China.
Pope Francis was the first pontiff in decades to decline to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He never spoke publicly about the imprisonment of Hong Kong’s most prominent lay Catholic dissident, pro-democracy activist and entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, and never responded to appeals to grant Mr. Lai’s son, Sebastien, an audience. Perhaps most shocking, when one of the Church’s most senior Asian bishops, Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong, flew to Rome in 2020 to seek a private audience with him, Pope Francis declined. The two men met three years later at the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI.
I have written many articles about these issues. I won’t delve deeper into the details here as we mourn a great Pope. All I can say is that for a Pope I loved, a Pope who was tireless in speaking out for justice, human dignity and human rights around the world, his silence on China was troubling.
Perhaps, as some say, it was a romantic and naive notion inspired by the great sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who was able to gain influence at the heart of the imperial palace in Beijing, that by kowtowing to Xi Jinping he could gain favour for the Church and greater access to China’s millions of Catholics.
Or, as others say, it was part of a long-term plan to secure improvements in religious freedom, even at the cost of short-term repression.
Perhaps it was motivated by a desire, as still others suggest, to become the first Pope to visit China.
For a Pope who achieved so much in terms of shining a light on the peripheries and far corners of the world and who spoke so much about the persecuted and oppressed, his failure to achieve any of these goals in China ought to raise questions about the Vatican’s China policy under whoever succeeds him.
The next Pope would do well to re-evaluate the Vatican’s China policy and – while never closing the door on dialogue – shift the dial in favour of speaking out for the persecuted Uyghurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong practitioners, Christians, Hong Kongers and other ethnic and religious minorities, and dissidents and human rights defenders across China. And given that the Vatican is one of the few states to retain official diplomatic ties with Taiwan, the next Pope would do well to rekindle those relationships and strengthen support for the Church – and democracy – in Taiwan.
But my disagreements with Pope Francis over China – expressed in many op-eds, written always with reluctance and a very heavy heart – were never personal. I never once joined the anti-Francis bandwagon. I just wished he could have expressed his commitment to justice, peace and human dignity for the peoples living under the Chinese Communist Party’s repression more clearly and audibly, as he did each week for so many other peoples living under persecution or conflict around the world.
I loved his encyclicals – Lumen Fidei, Laudato si’, Fratelli tutti and Dilexit nos. I read his autobiographical books, Life and Hope, with enthusiasm and found great richness in both, as I did with the retreat reflections written by Austin Ivereigh, First Belong to God: On Retreat with Pope Francis.
I loved his emphasis on mercy, forgiveness and justice. Early in his pontificate, he initiated a Jubilee Year of Mercy, and his pontificate ends with the current Jubilee Year of Hope.
Those two words – “mercy” and “hope” – are how he should and will be remembered.
As a 12-year-old Catholic, I thank God for the gift of Pope Francis and pray he now rests in peace. I await with anticipation the gift of the next Holy Father.
This article was originally published in The Tablet.