Marcello Tarì

«Itote, omnia accendite et inflammate»

(Go and set everything on fire)

St. Ignatius of Loyola

The legacy of Pope Francis is very wide and certainly cannot be condensed into a little article, so I will only dwell here on one aspect of it, or better a small part of it and, to do so, I will use a medium very dear to Francis, cinema. However, outside of any intellectualism, I am equally confident that his whole legacy can penetrate and live into every heart open to the proclamation of the Gospel and dilated by Love.

The title of this article, The Mission, intentionally recalls that of the famous 1986 movie directed by Roland Joffè, starring Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro and featuring a superb soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. If any of you have never seen it, I recommend you do so: it’s a moving journey into the concrete utopia of Christianity and, at the same time, into Jesuit spirituality. For that reason, I believe it can tell us something about some of Pope Francis' political and social convictions that are consequent to his spirituality.

When some people speak of Francis, in fact, they often do so as if he had been first and foremost a political leader and, as such, loved or detested. But I believe we should avoid projecting onto him what the saeculum wants to see and, instead, consider that his every gesture and every word have been aimed at re-centring the world and history in Christ, at indicating that it is possible to find God in everything and especially at inviting us to see the presence of Jesus in the last, in the poor, in the oppressed.

Personally, if I had to define him, I would say that he was essentially neither a theologian nor a political pope, but a mystical pope, a passionate lover of the Other and of others, an incendiary missionary of the Gospel, inspired by a popular and therefore revolutionary mysticism. This subjective inclination, being a “contemplative in action”, depended both on his theological magisterium and in his having been a great “Christian spiritual leader”, as his confrere Father Antonio Spadaro defined him in an important article published in l'Osservatore Romano (Dalla crisi la speranza, Osservatore Romano, 2 May 2025).

The Mission narrates a personal story of forgiveness and conversion within the broader history of conversion embodied in the Jesuit Reducciones, which were Christian communes built by the Jesuit fathers together with the Guaraní people in the 17th-18th centuries in a territory between the borders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. Some scholars have described them as forming a “Christian communist republic” (or even a “socialist theocracy”) and for this reason, the missions were and still are the subject of criticism, crude enough but usual: too communist for bourgeois Christians and too Christian for Marx's disciples. However, things are simpler and one only has to read verses 32-35 of chapter 4 of the Acts of the Apostles to know where the inspiration for the Jesuit fathers' fervent “communism” came from.

In any case, these communes were the fruits of a happy encounter, witnessed as a successful process of inculturation, and remain, to this day, one of the most daring and visionary social experiments of Catholicism, born and grown in one of those peripheries so dear to Francis, so dear that he built an entire theological and political chapter of his pontificate on it. Several historians are convinced that if the communes-missions had not been destroyed by European states and vilified (even by various Enlightenment philosophers, Voltaire, for example), the history of Latin America would have been very different. That of the Reducciones was the glorious history of a struggle against slavery and exploitation, the adventure of a joyful evangelisation bloodied by martyrdom, an adventure that took place within and against the great colonial empires of the time and an institutional Church that was too often succubus to their interests. Empires that, then as in the time of Jesus and still today, are the promoters of what Pope Francis has called on several occasions - most recently in the meditations he prepared for this year's Way of the Cross - “the economy that kills”, a harsh judgment on which I believe too little thought has yet been given, especially in the Catholic ranks. The Jesuits and the Guaraní, on the other hand, were the protagonists of an episode of what Ernst Troeltsch called the “communism of love”, referring to the form of life of the first Christian communities described in the Acts of the Apostles which, especially at crucial moments in the history of Christianity, has always functioned as the model of societas to strive for.

There is, in this regard, an exemplary dialogue in the movie — one between the cardinal sent by the Holy See to decide the fate of the missions, which by then entered into a harsh conflict with the imperial powers, and a Jesuit father who, by the way, is himself an Indian. The cardinal, struck by the prosperity of the mission, asks him how the revenues were divided up, and the Jesuit's reply is fulminating: ‘It is shared among them equally. This is a community.’ To which the prelate insinuates: ‘Yes, there is a French radical group that teaches that doctrine. ’ The Jesuit then looks at him somewhat astonished and says: ‘Your Eminence, it was the doctrine of the early Christians!'.

This dialogue is always contemporary and reminds me of all those times when Pope Francis, like Saint Oscar Romero and so many others, had to make it clear that being on the side of the poor and fighting with them for a just society, without exploitation and oppression, does not necessarily mean adhering to Marxism or any ideology, “progressive” or “populist” as it may be, but following the Gospel. However, I am sure we will hear that dialogue repeated until the end of time also because the poor, as Jesus told us, will always be with us, marking the contradiction of the world. We must hope, however, that the messianic conflict recalled by the movie will also be renewed and multiplied, that of the Gospel against the Empire. A conflict, which, in reality, thanks also to Francis, is already underway, but this time we must not allow it to be the case that it is strength that creates rights, as Father Gabriel bitterly noted in a touching scene of the movie. We must not allow the powers of the world to spread death and destruction and intoxicate even the hearts of the righteous to assert their dominion. God is love, the Jesuit said, and therefore as Christians we believe that only love truly creates, because only love gives life.

In one of the meetings during the apostolic journey to Paraguay in 2015, Francis had this to say about that experience: “Paraguay is rightly known throughout the world for being the place where the Reductions began. These were among the most significant experiences of evangelization and social organization in history. There the Gospel was the soul and the life of communities which did not know hunger, unemployment, illiteracy or oppression. This historical experience shows us that, today too, a more humane society is possible. You have truly lived this here. It is possible! Where there is love of people and a willingness to serve them, it is possible to create the conditions necessary for everyone to have access to basic goods, so that no one goes without. It is possible to seek solutions in every situation, through dialogue” (Asunción, 11 July 2015).

These words of Francis are very important to orient us both spiritually and politically. They tell us that the revolutionary centre of Christian action and thought does not consist first and foremost in an ideological fact or a sociological datum, since the poor are for Christians a theological place, even before being a political or social fact: everything starts from and is animated by the Gospel of Love and therefore, from this burning heart of charity, all other determinations radiate, the political, the cultural, the economic and the social ones.

As one of the great living theologians, Piero Coda, said, dwelling on the magisterium of Pope Francis in the aftermath of his death: “The message of the Gospel is a message of transformation of the human heart to the measure of that of Christ, thanks to the Holy Spirit. And precisely for this reason it is also a message of social, political, economic, cultural transformation. The Church does not proclaim only a spiritual message” (Una Chiesa in uscita nel solco del Vaticano II, Osservatore Romano, 23 April 2025). The great mistake, in history, seems to me to have always been to overthrow this principle - the “law of poverty” as Father David Maria Turoldo called it - and so, on the road to justice, love was lost and revolutionary action quickly became that of a heartless monster. And to be without mercy is to subscribe to one's own condemnation. So Francis has put the evangelical principle back on its feet, one that in turn proceeds from a striking reversal, namely that by the power of love, the last will be first and that therefore, we can conclude, only love can truly legitimise struggles for social justice.

But Francis also wanted to encourage us not to lose hope by telling us that it is possible today to build a society without oppression, and that indeed committing ourselves to this is a fundamental part of the mission in which he has constantly invited everyone to participate. That famous “todos, todos, todos!”, which resembles a true battle cry, I believe should not be interpreted only in the sense of the measurelessness welcome in the Church, but as an encouragement that all Christians, to whatever state of life they belong, should feel themselves, as baptised, disciples and missionaries, that is, protagonists of the proclamation of the Gospel and that they should fight for it. But this proclamation overflows the Church itself, as pointed out by another great Italian theologian, Pierangelo Sequeri, who was called to comment on Francis' legacy. Indeed, Sequeri indicates another important point, which has a lot to do with the mission and also with the history of the Reducciones, namely that “re-acclimatising with the mission” means “opening up the kingdom of God, before enlarging the institution” (La Chiesa non si fa solo con chi ‘viene in chiesa’, Avvenire, Monday 28 April 2025). Not only the single lost sheep is always more important than the 99, but, thinking of today, what do we do with magnificent and large institutional structures if there is no longer anyone inside them?

The mission, therefore, has been reconfigured by Francis as “a church which goes forth”, that is, the invitation is to “to go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of the light of the Gospel” (Evangelii Gaudium I, 1, 20), also because its always from the peripheries that the kingdom of God has broken through.

Behold, among the main traits of Francis' legacy there is this strong missionary impulse, the call to feel an irreducible desire to come out of our comfort zones and practically proclaim the Gospel of liberation, without fear of going against the grain with respect to the world, indeed with the awareness that martyrdom is part of the mission itself. We are not called to be militants or activists but missionaries. Disciples of a Proclamation that, despite any adversity, must always be carried with joy in our hearts because, as Francis reminded us to the very end, we trust that “hope does not disappoint”.

So, one question could be this: how do we build everywhere our Reducciones today? How to give rise to the Christian communes of the 21st century? Francis told us that it is possible today. It is in the city and in the country, in the middle of the metropolis and even in the remotest suburbs, if we first do it in our hearts. However, keeping in mind one of Pope Francis' principles - time is superior to space - namely that it is not a matter of occupying space but of giving life to processes. The answer, once again, blows in the wind. Veni, Sancte Spiritus!