We should have seen it coming – pope Francis had been sick, old and frail for some time. But still his death was a shock, reminding those who care of the lugubrious truth that there really are very few people of world renown standing up for the homeless, the destitute, the immigrant, the Gazan, the stranger, and of course, that splendrous panorama of life and beauty called the natural world, deathly imperiled by late capitalism’s arrogance and hubris, burning fossil fuels with abandon and thus warming and wrecking Earth.

Francis was not your average pope. He lent hope for the world to plenty of people who are not Roman Catholic, and he wasn’t shy about his papally unconventional views, as he led a very hidebound global institution with 1.4 billion adherents toward recognizing that things are not as they should be, are even, in some cases, abominations not only to the divine but to any living human conscience.

On the verge of nuclear Armageddon, Francis noted that Europe and the U.S. provoked the crisis with Russia, a far from popular perspective in the west. He never stopped advocating for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, meeting with former Israeli hostages and talking by phone regularly with Gazan Christians under bombardment. He loved the humble and did so without a scintilla of cloying false modesty. It always seemed that given the choice between a meal with a world ruler and an indigent Syrian immigrant, Francis would prefer the latter, though he certainly regarded the former as an opportunity to bend power toward justice.

So now one cannot help wondering who will replace this profoundly good man? There have been ferociously anti-communist popes, popes who collaborated with Nazis and no pope, aside from Francis, who cared about the Great Mistake of humanity’s desecration of the natural world. Will the pendulum swing back to a cardinal with right-wing bona fides taking the helm? Though not a Roman Catholic, I can’t help remarking that this is not what our species needs now. The hard right rules much of the globe, just as it assiduously ignored Francis, regarding him as some kind of outdated hippie gadfly rather than God’s emissary, a role popes are cast for but which, in Francis’ case, offended secular power. The powerful and the wicked ignored him, even as they conferred with him in the Vatican, taking absolutely nothing he said to heart.

Francis brought to mind the Latin American heroes of liberation theology, heroes so ferociously extirpated by that infamous institutional evil called the CIA. Though not explicitly a liberation theologian, he shared the zeitgeist that produced that noble, doomed experiment and made it seem that maybe it wasn’t so doomed after all. Because if someone like Jorge Bergoglio could ascend to the papacy, then those priests, down among the people, who made peasants’ struggles their struggles, who make peasants’ liberation their fight and were killed for it, well, in some sense they won.

It may seem that Francis was a once-in-a-century pope, but maybe not, maybe there are enough cardinals satisfied with how he managed things to balk at electing someone who would seek to undo it all. Because never underestimate the late pope’s agility when it came to navigating church politics. He packed the conclave of cardinals with his own people and survived a dozen years of internecine attempts, some spearheaded by very conservative American churchmen, to undo his work. And don’t forget the skill involved in becoming pope in the first place. No one knew better than Francis how reactionary some church factions could be. But he slipped past them, they couldn’t trip him up, and he thus managed to serve truth and justice like no pope before. His death is a huge loss for all people of good will.

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