Barb Caffrey's Blog

Folks, I realized last week I hadn’t blogged in a bit. My health has continued to be problematic, and I’ve been run ragged by work, family concerns, and writing.

Yes, writing. (I do that sometimes. Still.)

Anyway, I just finished a short story in collaboration with Gail Sanders yesterday. (It still feels like the same day to me, but I know it’s not. Moving on…) We sent it out to its market (no, I’m not going to tell you any more than that right now), and it’s with the editor. We have high hopes, and once I know if the story has been accepted (or not), I’ll tell you more.

I’ll also say that Gail and I have discussed what to do if this story isn’t accepted. (In other words, we have a backup plan.) I have a couple of other stories that I can put with it that are of the same type and with at least some of the same characters, and Gail’s a whiz with cover art, so…it looks like either way, you’ll see something from me this year, whether it’s in an anthology or a story collection.

That’s important to me, too. It may not seem like it, as other than some short stories here and there, I haven’t had a huge output, writing-wise, in years. The last novel I put out was in 2017, it did not do well in the marketplace (to put it mildly), and while I have other novels that I’m working on, none have been completed. Worse yet, my computer gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, and while I have bought a new one, I found that not all of my files had been properly backed up. This was very irritating, because I try hard to back everything up every couple of weeks…and what this means is, the last few months felt like a few days (at least in some ways; in others, it’s felt like decades).

The other thing I wanted to discuss tonight was the death of Pope Francis, which happened earlier this week. It was both expected, as the Pope had not been in good health for the past year, and unexpected, as the Pope had taken part in Easter festivities (as do all Popes) just the day before.

See, Pope Francis was a truly good person. He came from a different background than many popes had before him, as he was from Latin America. He also had worked as a bouncer, I read, plus he had been a food scientist. And when he was just twenty-one years old, he had such a bad bout of pneumonia that part of one of his lungs was excised. He also didn’t go into the seminary until he was twenty-two, so it’s possible that the life-threatening illness had made him reevaluate his life, though no one has explicitly ever said so.

At any rate, he took to the Church, and they took to him. He became a Jesuit priest, and Jesuits are known for several things. Intellectual rigor. Care for the poor. Truly believing that priests should not amass wealth, and taking very, very little for themselves. He took a degree in philosophy, and he taught classes in psychology and literature in several high schools.

All of this showed him the value of an ordinary life. Not that any life is ordinary, which he knew and taught also. But he saw how regular people lived, and he wanted them to have their chance to live their best lives. He was never a priest for the elites. He was instead a priest for everybody, but most especially the poor, the vilified, the oppressed, the hurt, and the misunderstood.

At one point, Pope Francis (long before he became pope; I believe he’d just been consecrated as an auxiliary bishop) became estranged from other high-ranking Jesuits because of his beliefs as he dissented from some orthodoxy and/or made them uncomfortable. (I think it was the latter.) Because Pope Francis cared about the ordinary person, he was not as interested in social justice in the same ways as others were back then — which seems odd, as that’s nearly the first thing people bring up now that he is known for. But the way he did it was through direct work with people, not mass movements or calls to action, and perhaps that’s why some other Jesuits back then did not agree with him.

Anyway, when he was elected to the papacy, Francis decided he would eschew as much ostentation as he could. He rarely used the Popemobile. He did not live in the traditional opulent apartments, instead living in something like a quasi-dormitory as it was far more comfortable for him. He looked for ways to help regular people, even as he continued to hone his intellect (over the years, he did a dissertation — this, too, long before he became Pope — learned English and other languages, and finally, was known for being an erudite and sparkling conversationalist in all of them).

This personal style of his was characteristic of the man Francis had always been. He was intelligent, had wide-ranging experiences, cared about people in specific as well as in the abstract, and it was his goodness that made the difference. His true, caring heart, the soul he showed in his actions and words, and the way he treated people (to him, the President of the United States was no more important than a fisherman or someone who owned a convenience store, as every person had value and worth to be celebrated). Francis believed we all sin, but our greatness as human beings is in continuing to strive for better conduct, better treatment of others, better care for the poor, all of that.

Pope Francis was a man to be admired, emulated, and appreciated, precisely because he wanted none of those things. All he wanted was for people to treat each other better and to see each other as valuable regardless of social stature, country of origin, sexuality, or gender. Everything he did in his life was in service to that belief, because that was the hope that Jesus brought (along with the promise of eternal life). What we do on this earth, the works we do, the way we treat others, matters because we want to emulate how Jesus treated people…and besides, it’s the right thing to do.

One thing most people probably don’t know about me (but will now) is that I was raised Catholic. I took a few extra years to decide to become confirmed in the faith, meaning I was confirmed when I was sixteen rather than thirteen or fourteen. My CCD teacher was a very learned woman, a deacon, who hoped that someday, the Church would admit female priests. (I had conversations with her about it several times, privately.) There were hopes that the Church would admit married priests someday, too, though neither of these have happened as of yet. Most of all, though, the Church was known to be flawed — the scandal of all the children who’d been molested by priests was known, though not to the huge extent found out over the last few decades — but still did more good than harm.

This is why I became confirmed in the faith. I believed in the promise of Jesus (in many ways, I still do), I believed in a positive eternity, and my belief in the feminine face of God (also called the Shekhinah) was validated at the time not only by my CCD teacher but by Father Andrew Greeley. Father Greeley was a well-known author and sociologist, and he said quite bluntly that the way he kept to his oath of chastity and faithfulness was to remind himself that God encompassed male and female. (He said he thought of the Holy Spirit as Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom, too. I’m for that.)

Why I went away from the faith is a long story, but I will say this: the worst of the church, the worst of any church, should not turn you away from your values even if you must turn away from the church for a while (or even for always).

As Pope Francis believed, it’s more important what you do than what you say. But yes, you should try to live your values. You should try as hard as you can to treat others the way you want to be treated. And you should remember that we’re all equal before the eyes of God, who encompasses male and female alike, and that what we do matters whether anyone else can see it or not.

Also, honor the truly good people among us whenever and wherever you find them.

That, in a nutshell, is why so many people, including many non-Catholics like me, are missing Pope Francis today.