More foreign affairs in a crazy, mixed-up world

Remembering the Pope, a man comfortable in his own skin

I was never fortunate enough to meet Pope Francis in person. But a friend of mine who did meet him—introduced by President Obama as a staff member during his visit to the White House in the fall of 2015—described him to me this week as “such a humble man,” and recalls that she “looked into his gentle eyes” with some astonishment and wonder. She had gotten us the tickets to attend.

For his long record of achievement, she now thinks he should receive the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. I agree. He has become a familiar figure in all our lives—the first “people’s Pope,” able to reach across religious lines and inspire followers not normally drawn to a Catholic leader.

But along with 20,000 others, I was lucky enough to hear him speak when he visited the White House in the fall of 2015—and in a small but very real way, he helped change my life by showing me the direction I needed to take. It was not so much in what he said—in clear but somewhat halting English—as in the overall feeling he conveyed: a sense of abiding peace and goodness, and encouragement, and flashes of his trademark humor.

He was a man who was above all, comfortable in his own skin—and remarkably approachable. Even great men can be accessible to all, I began to understand—and the greater their stature, the best of all are those who retain ordinary humility.

Pope Francis, shown in 2014—famously humble and smiling. Public domain photo

I am a devout Christian, if not a Roman Catholic—if just close enough: an Episcopalian, or “Catholic light,” as some of my friends jokingly call us. I grew up in a smaller Protestant denomination, the Disciples of Christ, then became an Episcopalian after college, after attending services sporadically at the lovely old church in Chapel Hill with a friend. There was something about the liturgy of the service that appealed to me spiritually—and like the church of my childhood, its communion was also offered regularly, if at the rail, instead of being distributed by deacons among the congregation.

As members of the worldwide Anglican Communion, we do not recognize the supremacy of the Pope, of course—it was just one of the things that Henry VIII dispensed with when he established his new church 500 years ago—although we share a number of rituals with the modern Catholic services. For one, our priests are able to marry, and even to divorce without stigma. The real reason that Henry VIII excommunicated the Catholic Church from England in the 1530s was because he wanted to divorce his own Catholic wife, to marry someone else, and the Pope said no. So the king headed up his own new church, and made history—if not always nobly so.

We are stepchildren of a sort to the much larger Roman Catholic church. And as such, we Episcopalians do recognize the Pope’s moral leadership, and listen to his words. Many of my Episcopal colleagues were more than thrilled when Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, was chosen to succeed Pope Benedict XVI in 2013, in part because of the enormous changes, both doctrinally and personally, promised by the first Jesuit—and first citizen of the Americas—to become pope.

In adopting the unusual papal name of Francis, never used before, he personified the simplicity and compassion of St. Francis of Assisi—who has long drawn admirers from other faiths, not only for his love of animals. The “people’s Pope” did not disappoint us during his 12 years, but always stood for compassion and forgiveness—and social justice, especially for migrants and suffering children worldwide.

Even the car he used in Washington in 2015—a very small Fiat 500L four-door sedan, not a limousine or even the fabled Popemobile—spoke to his personal simple tastes. We joked as we saw it: what’s this, a clown car? Is he kidding? But it suited him.

The Pope’s Fiat sedan, letting him out at the White House in 2015. Public domain photo

When he died this week of a stroke and heart failure—after a long, frightening hospital stay for treatment of double pneumonia, Pope Francis was 88. And yet even as he declined, before our eyes, he seemed forever young, forever laughing, forever ours … Until the very last moment, he was greeting his beloved followers from his Popemobile on Easter Sunday in Vatican City, just hours before he went to sleep for the last time.

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My wife Margaret was raised and educated in the Catholic faith in her native Jamaica, where we met in 1983, weeks after I arrived to begin my first Foreign Service tour. One of my early memories of our courtship was accompanying her to Sunday evening mass at Saints Peter and Paul, a large parish on Old Hope Road in Kingston. In those days, the church doors were often left open to improve air circulation within the (non-air-conditioned) sanctuary, and I vividly remember on at least one occasion, young goats from a nearby farm run by the boys prep school came and stood in the doorways and bleated during the service. (Margaret insists that never happened… but I was there!)

Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, Kingston, Jamaica. Photo courtesy Facebook

Technically, I was not supposed to receive communion—as a non-Catholic, and even worse, a divorced man—but I managed to do it just once, until I realized the Jamaican priest in charge had mistakenly assumed I was simply a visiting American Catholic—and once he learned I was not Catholic, would never permit the same mistake again.

That was during the early days of Pope John Paul II, who in 1978, had become the first non-Italian pope elected in many centuries. His youthful vigor as an anti-Communist rebel in Poland led many to believe he would reform the rigid, hidebound church. Sadly, that that did not happen; his conservative views instead tended to harden over the years of his 27-year tenure, followed by his successor, an arch-conservative, Benedict XVI.

I had arrived in Kingston in 1983 as a newly-minted Foreign Service Officer, assigned to the consular section of the large U.S. Embassy, and barely settled in. I had not yet started attending local Anglican services, when I met Margaret; when she and I later decided to get married at the end of my tour (January 1985), she approached her associate priest—an American, whom she trusted and considered a close friend—and discussed the possibility of holding our marriage at Sts. Peter and Paul.

That is where we hit a snag. He was not encouraging. Unless I was willing to annul my first marriage—which had ended in an amicable divorce a year before I arrived in Kingston—my remarriage there would not be permitted. [I refused outright; I had no intention of converting to Catholicism, and would not disavow either my first marriage or the legitimacy of my only daughter, period.] Nor would he able to attend our service elsewhere, even as a bystander, he said. His hands were tied by his bishop, who forbade any association by him with her marriage to a divorced man.

Margaret was understandably frustrated by the situation, but even more, she was disappointed in her friend—and in the church’s blind devotion to a wrong-headed and hypocritical rule. She has since chosen to attend Episcopal services with me—although both of us have continued to attend occasional masses with our Catholic friends over the ensuing years.

That is how we came to be married instead in a small ceremony at the majestic St. Andrew Parish Church at Halfway Tree—a 300-year-old Anglican church in the greater Kingston area. Canon Herman Spence, the rector at St. Andrew, was more than happy to help me obtain the only necessary document I needed: a dispensation from my then-bishop in North Carolina, Sidney Sanders, my good friend, who willingly complied. Both Canon Spence, later elevated to Diocesan Suffragan Bishop, and Bishop Sanders were happy to oblige in facilitating the course of true love between two Christians.

St. Andrew Parish Church, Halfway Tree, Jamaica. Public domain photo

We had not wanted to stage a large show, which so often turns into a circus. So the smaller, intimate setting of the old church was somehow comforting and more inviting to the guests at our small wedding, in the company of our families and close friends—and a handful of invited dignitaries, including the U.S. Ambassador (my boss) and his wife and the Deputy Prime Minister (Margaret’s nominal boss, as head of her flight attendants’ union).

It seemed curiously fitting for us to be married there, as well; Margaret’s Anglican grandparents are buried in the sprawling church graveyard just beyond the church doors.

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You may be wondering by now what any of this has to do with Pope Francis. Well, bear with me. He and I had one other connection—we both “came of age,” so to speak, in 2013. Back then, he was 76; I was a decade or so behind. Both of us had already lived and worked for most of a normal modern life—ready for retirement, in most cases—but there was more to come for both of us: a new chapter in each of our lives.

By then, I had more or less drifted away from regular attendance at Episcopal services during the years after Margaret and I struck out on my diplomatic career, serving in Copenhagen, Paramaribo, Singapore, and Riga, before I left the Department of State in 1997. We went sporadically, usually on special occasions, even though we lived three blocks away from a wonderful parish church in Alexandria, Virginia, for nearly 20 years.

After leaving State, we remained in the Alexandria area for nearly a quarter of a century. In 2012, we sold our small rowhouse and moved, temporarily, out into suburban Fairfax County—and after an all-but-disastrous experience looking at possible rentals all over Northern Virginia, finally stumbled by accident onto a spacious rental property, a 1960s-era ranch house near George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate.

While looking for a new place to live, we had been housesitting for two months for a Foreign Service pal since Jamaica days, John Clarkson, who had just purchased a suburban retirement property three blocks from St. James’ Episcopal Church. He was waiting to retire from his last post in Muscat, Oman, in July of 2012.

And that was how, in June of that year, we happened to be attending services at St. James’, still scouring the neighborhood in vain for ideas and hoping for a miracle. We were increasingly desperate. John and his wife—and their cat—were due home in a month, and we had to move out! The house we stumbled across was actually the former St. James rectory, a block away from the sanctuary on Old Mill Road—now rented out on the open market, between fulltime rectors.

As it turned out, St. James’ had just hired a new rector—to start in September—who owned his own house nearby, and did not need the rectory. The rectory’s last tenants had moved out the week before—and the church was looking for a new tenant. On that Sunday, the parishioners were meeting, ironically, on folding chairs in the noisy hallway outside the sanctuary, with fans on, due to a malfunctioning air conditioning unit. (I kept waiting for baby goats to appear at the doorways … there were actually no goats, but plenty of baby deer and foxes outside in the surrounding woods, I later learned—and even a few skunks!)

A friendly bunch, they welcomed us with open arms. When one enterprising vestry member learned we were looking for a new home, he steered me to the parishioner in charge of renting the rectory—she planned to put it back on the open market the next morning—who arranged a tour that same afternoon. It seemed like the answer to all our prayers, perhaps even a sign from above. Not only was it immediately available—clean and repainted, with a huge yard, and room for the new puppy we planned to get—but it was large: four bedrooms, three baths, with a fireplace and a study, and (barely) affordable.

As we signed the contract a week later, I did not realize that the terms included an unwritten but very real fine-print clause: lifetime membership in the church itself. And within six months, as I became more and more enamored of our new church home, my new rector, and our new church friends, I was asked to run for a vacant seat on the vestry—and ended up with the plant-and-property portfolio. (I was a natural choice; I lived next door … so when the alarms went off at night, as they inevitably did, guess who got called in first …)

St. James’ Episcopal Church, next door, in the snow, 2019. Author’s photo

Two things then occurred that, in retrospect, seemed divinely driven, and hardly coincidental. I found myself busy on free days inspecting the church grounds—a sprawling three-acre-plus plot, including an outdoor stations-of-the-cross path in the woods next to my new house. And on my first regular trips around the churchyard, I walked through the church peace garden—actually, an in-ground columbarium started by parishioners a few decades earlier.

There, I stumbled upon a small stone statue under a tree that bore the image of St. Francis of Assisi, wandering patron of animals, the poor, and some say, itinerant lost souls like me. Donated and placed there by some other lost soul who had made St. James his new home … a common enough garden decoration, but somehow strangely meaningful.

St. Francis of Assisi, 13th-century Catholic saint venerated by the Western world. Public domain photo

It was weeks later, and I had just entered my first tour on the St. James’ vestry, in fact, when Pope Francis was elected by the conclave in Rome—and many of my new friends, former Catholics who had found a friendlier home here, made his election the talk of every church meeting, it seemed. He seemed larger than life, perfect for a world starving for spiritual leadership.

As I gradually came to know both of these great men—the new Pope in Italy and my own new statue next door—I realized how my own life had taken a sharp turn back into religious involvement, and a new dedication to the lives of those around me. Until I left Virginia for Florida nearly a decade later, in 2021, I was inspired by their shared ordinary charm—and their irresistible mandate to me—to make something better of my life, and give a little bit back, eventually far more than I was receiving.

I was still working full-time as an editor back then—requiring a two-hour daily commute into and out of D.C.—but somehow seemed to find more time than ever for my new avocation, including a second full term on the vestry, and even a year as senior warden. There was also much more on my church plate; St. James offered a variety of community projects for its members to pursue, including supplying food for a pantry for the needy nearby as just one outlet—and unending satisfaction.

By the time I heard Pope Francis speak in 2015, I had become inspired by him to be more active than I ever had been before—in a small church that had welcomed me as one of its own. That same year, my nationwide church took a page out of Francis’s playbook, selecting the similarly activist Bishop Michael Curry—the man some called the “apostle of joy,” the first African American to be so honored—as presiding bishop of the U.S. church, after serving as Bishop of North Carolina. I understand the two kindred spirits met nearly half a dozen times. (I did get to meet the Bishop once—and what a treat that was!)

I look back now on that era of my life as an unexpected blessing, and my accidental “brush” with both Pope Francis and Bishop Curry—purveyors of sanity in a confusing and turbulent world—as the reminder I needed that I was once again on the right path. Whenever we are back in Northern Virginia, we attend services at St. James—we are still members—and when the time comes, Margaret and I have decided we will be interred in the peace garden, near the statue I found there a dozen years ago.

And now,a personal message to Pope Francis, the good father to us all: you will be missed by millions of American admirers—of all faiths—and will not soon be forgotten. You left us far too soon for your reward. On behalf of at least some of them, I feel I must apologize for the fact that the last American face you had to see was that of our publicity-hungry vice president, grinning like a Cheshire cat, who had no excuse for intruding on your solitude on your final day on this earth—and whose boorish behavior certainly does not represent the rest of us in any way.

Cheers to a long, extraordinary life, one very well lived—with my personal thanks, and with luck, that well-deserved Nobel Prize for Peace will soon be yours.

Next time: More foreign affairs in a crazy, mixed-up world