Pope Francis, who died today at age 88, took Roman Catholicism back to street level and brought the papacy down to earth through sheer personableness, Paul Elie writes. “In a historic moment characterized by autocrats and would-be autocrats, Francis was the antithesis of a strongman.

 Pope Francis, who died today at age 88, took Roman Catholicism back to street level and brought the papacy down to earth through sheer personableness, Paul Elie writes. “In a historic moment characterized by autocrats and would-be autocrats, Francis was the antithesis of a strongman. 

He was the model of the world leader as a shrewd, searching, and practical man who faced hard choices in vexing circumstances, and responded humbly,” Elie continues. “He was the Pope whom people of our time encountered as akin to themselves, not as an authority figure or an object of veneration. His humanity was the best argument for the beliefs he represented.” Read his full remembrance

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Mexican director Sara Gómez, who died in 1974, made about 20 short documentaries in her short life, starting in 1961, two years after the Revolution. In 1974, she shot her only feature-length film, “One Way or Another,” completed posthumously, which mixes a romantic drama with documentary sequences. Gómez, the first woman to direct movies in Mexico, created “a body of work that was in the creative and political forefront of its time and, in many ways, remains so even now,” Richard Brody writes. “Gómez, with her blend of documentary and fiction, of drama and intellectual analysis, devised a new cinematic method, which she used to express a powerful vision of her country, her time, and her own place in both.”

“On March 6, 2020, Andrew and I went to a rave. If it weren’t for what happened later, I don’t think it would have stood out in my memory.” In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Emily Roxy Witt writes about New York at the beginning of the pandemic—the uncertainty, the fear, the loss, the protests, the rage, the loneliness—and the end of a relationship. The Last Rave The Last Rave In the summer of 2020, I felt as if I’d entered the wrong portal, out of the world I knew and into its bizarro twin.