Pope Francis challenged us to rediscover the Church not as a fortress, but as a field hospital—welcoming, healing, and journeying together. With Laudato Si' and Laudate Deum, he taught us to see the earth as a common home, entrusted to our care, especially for the sake of generations to come. And with his characteristic wit and warmth, he once called our Overseas Filipino migrant workers “contrabandistas de la fe”—smugglers of the faith—reminding us that the witness of simple, faithful lives can cross borders and touch hearts where formal missionaries cannot go.

Indeed, Pope Francis was not in some sort of “spiritual cloud” which prevented him from enjoying, with the rest of us, some simple pleasures of daily life. Very early on in his papacy, he referred to his passion for football. He was proud of his fellow Argentinian, Lionel Messi, arguably the best football player in the world today. I remember that a group of football enthusiasts who organized a football club for some high school boys had the bright idea of trying to attract the attention of Pope Francis during that 2014 trip to Leyte by ostentatiously wearing the jersey of the Argentinian national football team and the jersey of FC Barcelona, who at that time was winning one Championship after another, thanks to Lionel Messi. These football enthusiasts positioned themselves very visibly along the route that the Pope would take. Unfortunately, because of the storm that hit the island at that very moment, the Pope’s schedule had to be modified, and he could not afford to stop where the footballers were. I still have one of those shirts that the organizers gave me as memorabilia, an FC Barcelona jersey!

This personal experience of mine with Pope Francis reminds me of another personal encounter that a friend of mine had with the Pope more recently at a Congress he attended in Rome for social media communicators. I am referring to an article I just read in the online magazine called Omnes. In a commentary entitled “Great Job, Lolo Kiko,” theologian and author Dr. Raul Nidoy described his most recent encounter with Pope Francis last January 2025 as follows: “He was being wheeled through the central aisle of the Paul VI auditorium, people crowding towards him. A lady nearby was shouting words of thanks, and so I joined her in expressing gratitude. Next to me was a fellow pinoy who kept on repeating: “Mabuhay (Viva), Lolo Kiko!” …As a theologian, I try to base my thinking on current issues from the perspective of faith, which is basically God’s viewpoint. Faith in all the teachings of Jesus and his Church, which includes faith in God who decided to speak and govern through a pope.”

Dr. Nidoy then focused on a theme that went straight to my own deepest impression of the papacy of the late Pope. As an economist, I have always declared that the greatest failure of Philippine society, the blame for which should be shared by both the Government and the private sector, is the scandalously high rate of poverty. Among our peers in Southeast Asia, we are the only one with a double-digit poverty incidence of 23 percent of the population (and 16 percent of households). This means that close to 20 million Filipinos go to bed hungry every day. Until we address this problem and bring down our poverty incidence to the level of the 0 to 3% average of our ASEAN neighbors, it is an empty boast for us to claim that our GDP is among the fastest growing in the Indo-Pacific region today. That is why, as Dr. Nidoy observed, we should be thankful to Pope Francis for reminding us that the Church and the world is a field hospital—so many people wounded, so much suffering. Because of this realistic reading of the world today, the pontificate of Pope Francis was permeated with the theme of mercy. His motto was “Miserando atque eligendo, having mercy and choosing.”

It was this focus on mercy by Pope Francis that led a group of top business people in the Philippines to do something about the plight especially of poor Filipino children who suffer for the rest of their lives because they were not sufficiently nourished in their early years. Very early in the papacy of Pope Francis, the Philippine Food Bank Foundation was established to address the serious problem of the stunting of millions of Filipino children because of malnutrition and undernutrition while at the same time doing something about what Pope Francis referred to as a “throw-away” culture, referring to millions of tons of food being thrown away as surplus or soon-to-expire while tens of millions of people, especially children, suffer from hunger. The food bank also addressed another major concern of the Pope which he discussed extensively in his encyclical Laudato Si' about the harm to the physical environment done by extremes of consumerism. Surplus or excess food thrown away can damage the environment.

As Dr. Nidoy pointed out, however, the mercy of which Pope Francis preached should go much beyond material poverty. He enumerated the top seven accomplishments of Pope Francis as follows: