By CHUCK BACLAGON
Bulatlat.com

By all accounts, Pope Francis had impeccable timing. He passed from this world on the eve of Earth Day — a date freighted with symbolism, a secular feast day for the sacred theme that defined much of his pontificate: the care for our common home.

It was the kind of divine choreography that Francis himself might’ve winked at — a reminder perhaps, that the Spirit has a sense of irony, or at least, a schedule.

A Faith That Lingered When Mine Was Fractured

When Francis became pope, I was drifting through a quiet crisis of faith. I had long left evangelicalism, unable to reconcile its narrowness with the wideness of Christ. I wasn’t sure where I belonged anymore. And then came Francis.

He spoke of grace in a register I hadn’t heard in years. He wept over the poor, thundered against the greed of the powerful, and — shockingly — blessed the Earth like a sacrament. And even before his now-famous encyclical Laudato Si’ came out, his words were already working their way into my bones.

And yet, my belief never quite landed anywhere, really. I still live in that unsettled space between reverence and doubt, where faith is less a doctrine than a direction. What I’ve clung to — maybe the only thing I’ve truly trusted — is the belief that life is a struggle for justice in the world and for wholeness within the self. Pope Francis didn’t give me certainty — but he gave me a language for that struggle.

I remember the first action I ever coordinated with 350.org. It was tied to his 2015 visit to the Philippines, months before Laudato Si’ would be published. He chose to celebrate Mass in Tacloban, ground zero for Typhoon Haiyan’s devastation. Rain slashed the runway. The sky wept. And there stood this gentle old man in white, clutching his wind-blown cape, holding liturgy for the lost.

That image has stayed with me. In that moment, I didn’t see just the head of the Catholic Church — I saw someone trying, in his own way, to show up for a broken world.

The Prophet Who Named the Idols

Francis did something few religious leaders dared: he called out the gods of our age — unfettered capitalism, technological hubris, consumerism dressed as freedom. “The earth, our home,” he wrote in Laudato Si’, “is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

And yet, his message was never doom. He was a practitioner of what I would call resurrected realism — fully awake to collapse, yet clinging to hope. In Laudate Deum, his final climate exhortation, he warned that “the world may be nearing the breaking point,” but urged multilateral, justice-rooted action. This was not hand-wringing. This was faith with its sleeves rolled up.

As an activist, I drew strength from this. Because while Francis sat on Peter’s chair, he was also walking beside us in the streets, calling investors to divest from fossil fuels, praising bishops and laypeople who dared to step away from extractive wealth. His words armed our movements with theological firepower. He made it clear: what we fund reveals who we worship.

A Table Wider Than Dogma

Francis also opened the Church’s heavy doors a little wider. I still recall the astonishment in the voices around me when he said: “Who am I to judge?” about LGBTQI persons. It wasn’t policy change — but it was a gesture of welcome, an echo of Christ stooping to draw in the sand.

In time, he blessed same-sex couples, called for the decriminalization of homosexuality, and affirmed trans Catholics with quiet dignity. It wasn’t doctrinal revolution. But it was a revolution in tone, posture, and heart — and that matters, especially to those long exiled from the fold.

He took sides, too. Not in the easy way of politics, but in the way of the Beatitudes. He grieved with “martyred Gaza” and “martyred Ukraine.” He named occupation, militarism, and the machinery of death for what they are.

When bombs fell on Palestinian homes and children became rubble-statistics, he didn’t look away. He called for ceasefires, for peace built on dignity, not domination.

It was a stark contrast to the deafening silence — or worse, the theological justifications — offered by many American evangelicals, whose dispensationalist theology saw the suffering in Gaza not as a moral outrage, but as a necessary prelude to prophecy. Where their gospel bent toward empire and end-times spectacle, Francis’ gospel leaned low, toward the wounded. Toward the ones forgotten by history, but not, it seemed, by the divine.

Francis, My Accidental Spiritual Director

What I loved most about Pope Francis is that he never claimed moral high ground. He preferred the margins. He believed God speaks from there. And that conviction has shaped the very way I move through the world — not just as an activist, but as a person of flimsy faith still searching for home.

He once said, “God loves us as we are.” Not as we should be. Not as our campaigns perform. Not as our credentials pretend. But as we are. That single sentence offered me more stability than a thousand dogmas.

So here we are. The Pope is gone. The Earth is still groaning. But somewhere between the storm-battered Mass in Tacloban and the pages of Laudato Si’, a seed was planted in me. It continues to grow.

At a time when my own language of grace had fallen silent, his words offered a kind of echo — a reminder that to care for the Earth is, perhaps, to care for something sacred, whatever name we give it.

Even in death, he leaves us with a kind of timing that feels less like coincidence and more like a final benediction.

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Chuck Baclagon is the Asia Regional Finance Campaigner for 350.org, a global grassroots movement dedicated to ending the age of fossil fuels and building a world of community-led renewable energy for all. Based in the Philippines, he has spent two decades in environmental and social justice advocacy.