“Together with the risen Jesus,” Pope Francis wrote his final message to the world on Easter Sunday 20 April, those who trust in God “become pilgrims of hope, witnesses of the victory of love and of the disarmed power of life.”
Pope Francis’ campaign against clericalism was waged when meeting both ordinary parish priests and “princes of the church,” as cardinals once were known.
Pope Francis listened to survivors carefully with great empathy, and he regularly met with them privately, Father Zollner said. He tried to be a model for all Catholics and especially those in authority, he added.
Over the course of his 12 year pontificate, Pope Francis never relented in his ap-peals to world leaders and ordinary citizens to treat migrants humanely.
As the first pontiff from the Americas, the first Jesuit successor of St Peter and as an innovator in other respects, Pope Francis struck many in the world of visual media as a breath of fresh air.