Pope Leo remembers Francis – one year after his death

By CathNews New Zealand

April 24th, 2026

Pope Francis in Portugal in 2023. (CNS photo/Lola Gomez)

Pope Francis’ memory “is alive in the Church and in the world”, Pope Leo said on the first anniversary of his predecessor’s death. Source: The Tablet.

In a message to Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, that was read out at a Mass on April 21 at Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Pope Leo said Francis offered “to all of us a courageous witness that represents a significant inheritance for the Church”.

“His teaching was lived as a disciple-missionary, as he loved to say. He remained a disciple of the Lord, faithful to his Baptism and to his consecration in episcopal ministry, until the end,” Pope Leo said.

“He was also a missionary, proclaiming the Gospel of Mercy to ‘everybody, everybody, everybody’, as he said many times. The blessings brought by his witness as a caring shepherd have touched the hearts of many people, to the end of the earth, thankful too for the apostolic pilgrimages and especially for the final ‘journey’ that was his illness and his death.”

Pope Francis died on April 21, 2025 in his rooms in the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta.

In his message for the anniversary Mass, Pope Leo said Francis became pope “in a time that marked and is still marking a change of epoch”.

Following the legacy of the Second Vatican Council, he spurred the Church to be “open to mission, guardian of the world’s hope, impassioned for the proclamation of that Gospel that can give fullness and joy to every life”, Pope Leo said.

“Still we hear his exhortations ring out, expressed with eloquent words to make the good news more understandable: mercy, peace, fraternity, the smell of the sheep, the field hospital and many others,” he continued.

“Every one of these expressions takes us back to the Gospel that he lived with a new language that proclaims the same Gospel of all time.”

Pope Leo said death “is not a wall, but a door that opens wide to the mercy that Pope Francis tirelessly proclaimed”.

Speaking to reporters during his flight from Angola to Equatorial Guinea on April 21, Pope Leo said Francis gave much to the Church by living “closeness to the poorest, the smallest, the sick, children and the elderly”, and by the example of his life and preaching.

FULL STORY

Leo remembers ‘courageous witness’ of Francis one year since his death (By Patrick Hudson/The Tablet)

Pope Leo XIV recalls Pope Francis a year after his death (EWTN News)