ROME (OSV News) – From the first moments of his papacy, Pope Francis was heard using one particular word in his pontifical speeches. For him, it was a reminder that God is not the one who punishes, but the one who loves, and that the church, led by him, should seek to be the same — the church of “tenderness.”
Until the very last moments of his papacy, the “pope of tenderness” was his other name — like when he visited the Roman prison on Holy Thursday, blowing a kiss to prisoners greeting him from behind the glass doors.
In his first speech, during the homily at the Inauguration Mass of his pontificate, Francis spoke of tenderness for the first time: “We must not be afraid of goodness or even tenderness!” He added that “caring, protecting, demands goodness, it calls for a certain tenderness.”
Over the years it became clear that Francis, rather than speaking of tenderness, preferred to practice what he preached, whenever he had the opportunity.
Hundreds of names confirm this: Vinicio Riva, a man with a face disfigured by a rare genetic disease, whom the pope kissed in St. Peter’s Square shortly after his pontificate started. Riva himself acknowledged that his own father never dared to embrace him. He died in January 2024.
In April 2018, Pope Francis consoled little Emmanuele during a visit to a parish in Rome. The boy, between sobs, asked the pope with great concern if his father, who had just died, was already in heaven because he was an atheist. Francis put him at ease, assuring him that God was proud of his father, because he wanted to baptize his children without being a believer.
A month later, in May 2018, Pope Francis embraced the smiling young Nigerian woman Blessing Okoedion, trafficked from her country and forced into prostitution in Italy, whom Catholic sisters and the pope himself helped to regain lost dignity.
“I still seem to hear the force with which Francis made it very clear that prostitution is a crime because it involves torturing a woman,” said Eva Fernández, author of “El Papa de la Ternura” (“The Pope of Tenderness”).
“Countless are his meetings behind closed doors in Santa Marta or during his international trips to listen to and ask forgiveness from the victims of sexual abuse within the church. He remained in contact with some of them until the end, taking a fatherly interest in their problems,” the Spanish journalist with COPE Catholic radio told OSV News.
His tending to the homeless of Rome became somewhat legendary. On Dec. 17, 2013, the first birthday that Francis celebrated as pope, the poor were his guests at Santa Marta Mass. With the help of Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, papal almoner and prefect of the Dicastery for the Service of Charity, the pope made it clear that even small gestures matter in a tender approach.
“Calling people that wrote letters to him out of the blue was something completely normal for him, but a woman in Venice got an even bigger surprise when Francis sent her money after she wrote to him that she was robbed of a purse on her way to the hospital to visit the sick husband,” Fernández said.
A parish priest received the Vatican Secretariat of State-sealed envelope for the lady, who was in her 80s. It contained the equivalent of $200, four times the sum stolen from the elderly woman.
On another occasion, in 2016, Pope Francis donated a pair of scooters to an elderly couple in Rome who were not able to leave their house because of the effect of diabetes and hypertension on their mobility.
Through his charitable point man, Cardinal Krajewski, he has sent dozens of ambulances to Ukraine, thousands of kilos of warm clothes and medical supplies to places in the world that have suffered wars, earthquakes or floods, and supported Africa’s impoverished nations.
Pope Francis visited some 650 female inmates during his apostolic trip to Chile in 2018, many of whom were imprisoned with babies and small children. “As women,” he told them, “you have an incredible ability to adapt to new circumstances and move forward. Today I appeal to that ability to bring forth the future that is alive in each one of you. That ability enables you to resist everything that might rob you of your identity and end up by killing your hope.”
Fernández, who traveled with the pope on dozens of trips, remembered every detail of this meeting.
“I had the opportunity to witness how moved he was in that prison when he listened to Janeth, a repentant prisoner, as she shared with him her suffering and that of so many other fellow prisoners, because they watched their children grow up in prison.”
The images remembered from the papacy will be many — from children embraced in the Lesbos refugee camp in 2016 to the then 84-year-old priest Father Ernest Troshani Simoni, a survivor of communist persecution in Albania who moved Pope Francis to tears with his testimony of torture and Christian perseverance. Camera shutters were fastly clicking as the pope embraced Father Simoni during the apostolic trip to Albania in September 2014. Two years later, the pope elevated the elderly priest to the cardinalate.
“Francis lived the tenderness he preached with a radicalism that requires complicating one’s life. For example, he set out to fight against the indifference with which the world treated the Rohingya minority and did not mind undertaking a grueling journey to focus on the tragedy. These people were suffering in the face of the silence of the international community, and he wanted to be there for them,” Fernández said of the Muslim ethnic group persecuted in Myanmar.
During the apostolic trip, in Bangladesh, Pope Francis received 16 refugees fleeing Myanmar, living in the Cox’s Bazar camp.
“It was almost impossible to hold back tears as an interpreter translated to the pope the atrocities they had suffered before escaping,” the Spanish journalist recalled.
“Francis would not let go of their hands. One refugee told the pope that Myanmar’s military killed his 3-year-old son by throwing him into the fire without him being able to do anything to stop it,” Fernández remembered.
After listening to the testimonies, the pope apologized for the “indifference of the world.”
“The presence of God today is also called ‘Rohingya,'” the pope said during the event in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka Dec. 1, 2017.
He then asked forgiveness “in the name of all those who have persecuted you or done you wrong.”
“The most important spiritual leader in the world had just asked for their forgiveness for cruelties he had not committed. Unheard of,” Fernández said.
“He was a witness of tenderness that always knew how to put himself in the place of the other. It’s endless examples,” she added, listing mothers like Rosalba, an 80-year-old widow who had lost her son and who received a call from the pope every month until her death. Or Anna, a single mother who decided to go ahead with her pregnancy and Francis baptized her son.
“I can’t even count calls to prisoners and refugees, to priests, nuns, young people and children, shopkeepers, firefighters — we could go on and on,” the book author said.
“His revolution of tenderness was contagious. It is something that only springs from hearts that move on the same frequency as God.”