The Rev. John Kieran was on a trail in California’s Yosemite National Park when he learned Monday of Pope Francis’ death, 6,000 miles away in Vatican City.
Kieran, a priest for 57 years with the Archdiocese of Atlanta, arrived at Seattle’s St. James Cathedral in a taxi Friday to attend a candlelight vigil for Pope Francis on the eve of the late pontiff’s funeral and burial.
“I’m here to pray for all of Pope Francis’ intentions,” said Kieran, who was passing through the city on his way to Vancouver, B.C. “He stood for the church of Jesus that was always the church of inclusion of those struggling, those in poverty and stricken by war. The forgotten.”
As people streamed through the doors of the early 20th-century cathedral, they were handed white taper candles and programs with snippets of sheet music inside. Byron George, of West Seattle, brought his 7-year-old son Thomas to pay his respects.
“They called him the people’s pope. … He powerfully modeled Jesus’ love for everyone,” George said. “I’m closer to Jesus because of him.”
Parishioners Paula and Silvana Avellaneda, a mother and daughter from Sammamish, said they wished they could be in Rome for Francis’ funeral service at St. Peter’s Basilica and the procession to his final resting place in the Basilica of St. Mary Major.
“He was a wonderful man. He was humble and wise and very tuned in to the problems of the world,” Silvana Avellaneda said.
Inside the sanctuary, tea lights were scattered on the dais around the altar, and late afternoon sunlight filtered through stained glass windows. The vigil was something of a homecoming for Colleen O’Connor, a longtime King County public defender who attended St. James before moving to Lacey, Thurston County, four years ago when she became an administrative court judge in Olympia.
She displayed a favorite quote from Francis on her cellphone screen: “A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and a little more just,” it read.
“He walked the walk. He lived his faith. He believed in mercy. He stood up for people, he stood up for immigrants,” O’Connor said. “He really moved the church to practice the core beliefs of Christianity.”
The Rev. Michael Ryan, pastor at St. James Cathedral since 1988, said the gathering to remember the pope was a way to be together in sadness and grief but also in comfort and quiet joy.
“Pope Francis was for everyone. That’s because his doors were open to absolutely everyone,” Ryan said. “We gather with people around the world — young and old, believers, searchers and skeptics.”
For about an hour, cantors led the congregation in song, with each hymn interspersed with readings of Francis’ own words, starting with a homily from March 2013 when he was first elected pope to a homily he delivered in October for the conclusion of the Synod on Synodality, a multiyear initiative he led to guide the Catholic Church in the modern era.
The readings touched on Jesus’ great capacity for forgiveness and Francis’ preference for a “bruised” and “dirty” church that is out in the world instead of keeping to church structures that give a false sense of security. One reading lamented the rise in the number of poor migrants fleeing from environmental degradation and phenomena brought about by climate change, with no legal protections since they aren’t recognized as refugees, and widespread indifference to their suffering.
As the congregation rose to sing “Alleluia 11,” Ryan took a lit taper from a church official and used his candle to light each of the speakers’ tapers. They fanned out across the nave, with people in each row passing a flame from one person to the next. Under the soft glow of candlelight, Ryan encouraged the congregation to take time for self-reflection, the shared quiet broken only by the occasional cough or creak of a wooden chair.
After reciting the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary and singing a final song, the crowd of a couple of hundred people made their way to the door, where Ryan sent them on their way with hugs and handshakes.
“It’s hard not to love him,” Ryan said of Francis. “He represented the best of who we are and who we want to be.”
Ryan recalled briefly meeting the pontiff nine years ago in the Vatican, when Ryan was there celebrating his 50 years as a priest.
“I threw my arms around him and kissed him on the cheek,” Ryan said with a chuckle. “He invited that kind of spontaneity.”
Francis, he said, was a unifier in a world that’s so torn apart and fractured.
“He wanted the church to open its arms to the world, especially the people the world overlooks,” Ryan said. “Reaction to his passing isn’t just Catholics — it’s the whole world, people who don’t even identify as Christian but are part of the human family.
“It was the human family he embraced.”
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