On Easter Monday, while the world mumbled empty hallelujahs and posted carefully filtered brunch photos, something real happened: Pope Francis died. The news tore a wound across the soul of the Church—a wound too deep for tweets, too raw for protocol. In an age where authenticity is an endangered species and faith has been reduced to hashtags, Francis was the last stubborn witness that truth still had a voice, and that love, radical love, still had a price.
For twelve years, he shaped a Church that did not exclude, did not judge, but opened its arms to the lost, the dirty, the broken, and yes, even the hypocrites who now rush to wrap themselves in his memory. His death is not just a Catholic loss. It is a human loss. It is the loss of one of the few remaining bridges between the sacred and the profane, between the God who weeps and the man who dares to wipe another’s tears.
Zagreb’s Archbishop Dražen Kutleša captured it perfectly in his pastoral letter: the news came during the echo of Easter’s triumph over death, an irony so brutal only believers can stomach it. Kutleša wrote of his sorrow but also of the Christian hope that Francis’s earthly journey ended in the arms of the Christ he served with unyielding love, stubborn humility, and a mercy so radical that it scandalized the professional Catholics more than any doctrinal debate ever could.
This was no administrator’s pope, no politician’s puppet. This was a man who believed every forgotten, ugly, broken soul deserved the kind of love polite society reserves only for the clean and the useful. And for that, he was hated. Quietly. Politely. Until today, when the crocodile tears flow and tributes rise from the same mouths that yesterday whispered that he was too soft, too human, too much a man to properly represent the Holy Institution.
Francis’s coffin—a simple box of wood lined with zinc, no gold, no pomp—mocked the marble vaults and jeweled miters that have for centuries decorated the cowardice of lesser men. As his body passed Rome’s monuments to imperial arrogance, the true monument was the silent millions lining the streets, clutching rosaries and photographs and broken hearts.
Some felt as if they had lost a father, and they had. Not a biological father, but a father of spirit, a man who gave direction when direction became a luxury. His death cracks the emotional foundations of many who now ask: Who now sets the course? Where now lies the Church’s soul?
And the answer is as simple as Francis himself: it lies where it always has—in the bruised hands of the poor, in the tired prayers of the forgotten, in the reckless love of those who still believe mercy is stronger than doctrine, and humility is stronger than power.
Pray for him, yes, but pray harder for yourselves.
Because the world you wake up to now is colder, harder, and infinitely more desperate without him.
And if you’re looking for another Francis to save you—look around. There isn’t one.
He was the last.
Ivan SH l poskok.info
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