“Pope Francis has returned to the House of the Father.” Those sad words, read out by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, a former Bishop of Dallas, shortly after 10 a.m. local time yesterday morning echoed John Paul II’s final utterance in April 2005: “Allow me to depart to the house of the Father”. It is twenty years since the world last saw a pope die in office.
Few Catholics can not have been moved by Francis’s dignified response to suffering and decline over the past few months, which his spiritual testament has now told us he offered “to the Lord, for peace in the world and for fraternity among peoples”. His long hospitalisation occasioned an outpouring of sympathy and concern; he willed himself to be discharged from the Gemelli Hospital to reach the Easter liturgies, and to appear amongst his flock one last time.
