CAMDEN – The bells of Sacred Heart Church rang across South Camden this afternoon, their echoes stretching farther than the sounds of car engines and music booming from passing vehicles.
In the church’s vestibule, Father Vincent Guest and members of the faithful each took a turn at the bell pull, ringing the bells 88 times – one for each year of Pope Francis’ life.
“He was a pastor for the world,” said Father Guest, Sacred Heart pastor, who led rosary prayers at noon, hours after the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had died at 7:35 a.m. Rome time this Easter Monday.
Some openly weeping, members of the faithful prayed before a small framed photo of Pope Francis and a large wooden cross draped in a white cloth – a sign of Jesus’ Resurrection, which was celebrated just the day before.
“He was a beautiful man,” said Colin McGuigan, a parishioner of Sacred Heart. “In a world that is backsliding democratically and becoming more violent and unstable, his was a voice of peace, justice and compassion.”
McGuigan, who is set to graduate the University of Dayton next month, spent 12 years on his dissertation on Pope Francis and the ecological crisis. The pope wrote on the environment, consumerism and the responsibility of neighbor in his 2015 encyclical, “Laudato si’” (On care for our common home).
McGuigan, a father of four, said he was inspired by Pope Francis in “his effort every day to love better than the day before. … He did his best to confront the issues of sexual abuse in the Church; he was often, at times, the lone voice for the rights of migrants and refugees. He was welcoming to those who felt shut out.”
Those who can feel shut out were exactly the people Pope Francis aimed to reach, seen early in his pontificate. “I see the Church as a field hospital after battle,” he said not long before his 2013 apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii gaudium” (The Joy of the Gospel).
“I’ve said many times that if the pope ever came back to America, he would be very welcome and comfortable in Camden with the poor, the broken, the abandoned, the neglected, the homeless, the addicted,” Father Guest said. “Pope Francis spoke to my heart, his idea of the Church as a field hospital. He’s the kind of priest I strive to be.”
Thomas Callaghan, a parishioner and 22-year-old student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, couldn’t help but question the timing of the pontiff’s death. “Two months ago, we all thought that Pope Francis was going to die … and then he miraculously recovered, it seemed,” said Callaghan, recalling when the pope was first admitted to the hospital for what would become double pneumonia.
“Instead, he dies the day after Easter, and that makes me wonder if God was doing two things: wanting Pope Francis to give one more powerful appearance on the most important day in all of Christianity, and also preparing all of us for what we talked about on Easter Sunday – that with the Resurrection of Jesus, Death no longer has the final word. Was God preparing us for this hard-hitting death that was to come?”
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