On April 25, Archbishop Gomez celebrated a Mass for the repose of the soul of Pope Francis at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. The following is adapted from his homily.
Our first reading takes us back to the world’s beginnings, to the days after the fall of Adam and Eve. We hear the voice of God, crying out to Cain, “Where is your brother?”
Pope Francis returned to these words often in his preaching and teaching. For him God’s ancient question was alive, he wanted his words to burn in our hearts and arouse our conscience.
For his first pastoral visit outside of Rome, he chose to travel to a tiny island in the Mediterranean called Lampedusa.
This island is the main passage into Europe for Africans fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands. And thousands of migrants and refugees have died at sea trying to get there.
Francis held a penitential service there, begging God’s forgiveness for the world’s indifference — for our indifference — to the sufferings of these refugees.
In his homily he recalled God’s words to Cain, “Where is your brother?”
Then he said, “This is not a question directed to others. It is a question directed to me, to you, to each of us.”
God’s question is still directed to you and to me.
Francis challenged our conscience and the assumptions of our way of life. He questioned the “culture of comfort” that causes us to think only of our own needs, which insulates us and makes us insensitive to the cries of the poor.
For these past 12 years, the pope has been urging us to recover our common humanity.
He gave us a beautiful vision of the world as God intends it to be:
It’s a world where God is our Father and all men and women are our brothers and sisters! It’s a world where every human life matters, where every person is a child of God, made in the divine image, made for a reason, made out of love.
It’s a world where Jesus Christ has come and laid down his life for the love of every man and woman.
Francis envisioned a Church that is apostolic and missionary, a Church that proclaims with joy the truth of Christ’s love and salvation.
In our time, he said, the Church must return to the simple message of salvation that the apostles called “the kerygma.”
And he offered us a beautiful summary of this message to carry to our neighbors. He said: “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen, and free you.”
Pope Francis wanted us to remember that our baptism calls us to be “missionary disciples.” He also wanted us to take seriously the call to holiness in our everyday lives.
He told us that we should become “the saints next door,” that we should seek holiness in raising our children with love, in working hard to support our families, in caring for our elderly parents, in bearing our burdens with a smile.
And he told us that our love can never rest!
As we hear in the Gospel today: We will be judged by the compassion we show to the hungry and thirsty, the naked and sick; to the stranger, the immigrant and refugee; to the prisoner.
In the least among us we find the answer to God’s ancient question, “Where is our brother?” In loving the least among us as our brothers and sisters, we find God himself.
In my prayers, I keep coming back to that short speech that Pope Francis gave before the conclave that elected him in 2013.
He talked about how the Church must go to “the peripheries,” how we must enter into the depths of pain and misery caused by the Fall, by human sinfulness.
He also talked about the ancient idea of the mysterium lunae (the mystery of the moon).
The Church Fathers used to say: Just as the moon has no light of its own but only reflects the sun’s light, so the Church has no light of her own but can only reflect Christ’s light.
That’s true for the Church. It’s also true for every disciple.
You and I, we have no light of our own. We are called to shine with the light of Jesus Christ, to reflect his holiness and his love in our lives.
This is the way we honor the legacy of our Holy Father.
Let us entrust Francis to the mercy of God. May the Lord let his face shine upon his faithful servant.
And let us ask holy Mary, our Blessed Mother and the mother of the Church, to help us always to follow the path of her Son.
All with Peter to Jesus through Mary!
