With deep respect and revolutionary mourning, Christians for National Liberation (CNL) joins peoples of faith and conscience across the world in commemorating the life, ministry, and passing of Pope Francis—Jorge Mario Bergoglio—on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025.

The timing of his death, on the holiest day of the Christian calendar, is rich with symbolism. As the Church remembers the crucified Christ and the promise of resurrection, we reflect on a papacy that rekindled the liberating essence of the Gospel amidst a world scarred by exploitation, empire, and exclusion.

Pope Francis did not dismantle the structures of patriarchy and clericalism that continue to haunt the Catholic Church. He did not—perhaps could not—fully reconcile the Church with the oppressed peoples it has historically marginalized. Yet, he took critical steps to reclaim the Church’s prophetic vocation. In an institution long allied with emperors and capital, he dared to stand with the poor, the migrant, the earth, and the occupied.

From the shanty towns of Buenos Aires to the halls of the Vatican, Pope Francis embodied a shift—not of dogma, but of direction. He was the first pope from the Global South, the first Jesuit pope, and the first in recent memory to publicly name the spiritual and material violence of capitalism, colonialism, and ecological destruction. He called capitalism “the dung of the devil,” decried militarism, and named climate change for what it is: a moral and political crisis rooted in greed.

He offered solidarity, not charity. He met with the landless, the displaced, the excluded—not as a gesture, but as a commitment. He canonized Óscar Romero, embraced the preferential option for the poor, and welcomed voices once exiled from the Church’s center. He condemned the bombing of Gaza, called for justice in Palestine, and refused to baptize imperialism in religious language.

Yet his legacy, like all legacies, is unfinished. Pope Francis leaves behind a Church still contested by the forces of reaction—those who fear a Church allied with the people more than they fear injustice itself. He was often isolated, even within his own hierarchy. But he reminded the world that Christianity must not serve Pharaoh but stand with the Hebrews in struggle.

Christians for National Liberation honors Pope Francis not as a perfect leader, but as a flawed and courageous pilgrim who bent the arc of an ancient institution toward justice. In a time of fascist resurgence and ecological collapse, he wielded the papacy as a witness against indifference and domination.

As revolutionaries rooted in faith, we do not await another savior. We take from Francis’s life a call to action: that the Church belongs in the trenches of the people’s struggle; that faith without justice is hollow; that the Gospel lives not in gilded cathedrals but in the movements for land, peace, and liberation.

May his memory ignite deeper solidarity. May his passing birth not despair, but renewed commitment.

The struggle continues.