26/04/2025 Homily for Saturday Matins Pope Francis died nearly a week ago, in the early hours of Easter Monday. Over the past week, reading fuller accounts of his life and deeds, I feel more moved with emotion than I had foreseen at the humility and selflessness he embodied throughout his entire pontificate. My fellow leftists are not quite as enthused, with most of the people I know focusing on his shortcomings -- namely around gay rights, abortion, eucharist for divorcés -- rather than his virtues. I suppose maybe I'm not quite as cynical, and strive to see the best of his deeds in spite of the areas where he fell short. Or maybe I'm more cynical, and believe that we can only reasonably expect a Pope to be so progressive, which makes our recently departed pontiff just about the best we can hope to get. But whatever the case, the fact remains that the defining characteristic of Francis' papacy was humility. The Pope reached out to the poorest and most marginalised, to trans people, to the homeless, to migrants, and treated them as equals. He famously washed the feet of prison inmates for Maundy Thursday in 2016, something that I could not ever imagine Benedict doing, with his bunker mentality and fire-and-brimstone traditionalism. For Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the regnal name "Francis" wasn't simply a formality or a traditional practice to legitimise him as the successor to a 2000 year-long lineage of Popes, but a standard to aspire to.

One of his final official engagements, in the days leading up to his death, was a visit to a prison to which he had long-standing ties. He would go there to meet with the inmates, to hear their spiritual concerns, to pray with them. As he spoke to the press from his car, waiting to set off on the drive back to the Vatican, hoarse and weak and breathless from his chronic lung condition, with great difficulty he uttered a phrase that will remain imprinted on my memory for the rest of my life: "Every time I enter in those prison doors, I ask myself 'Why them and not me?'"

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In the warm months of 2023, I was beginning to come into myself. I had a boyfriend, who I am no longer with but who remains a friend. I had hit about a year on hormones, two years total of transition. But on the whole, my self-image was still largely governed by the attitudes instilled by the conservative environment in which I grew up. I went about in pity for myself. I hated my body, my face, my voice, I felt repulsive and subhuman. I had in the past school year suffered a transmisogyny-borne social assassination, and my outcast status truly left me feeling like I had it uniquely bad. It was a tough time to live in my head! And one day there was a road closure, as I was walking with my ex-boyfriend to go downtown for some reason or another, and so we had to re-route onto Park Avenue between Milton and Sherbrooke, which is an area known for its large homeless population, with issues of substance abuse and violence running rampant. Like most urban residents, I had developed the callous psychological shield that allowed me to live in the constant presence of such abject human suffering without going crazy. You keep your head down, you walk by, you say "sorry, I don't have any change", you continue on your way and within a few dozen seconds all is forgotten. Everyone feel sheepish about it -- occasionally, you'll turn to your friend and make a dry, off-colour remark about being a horrible person -- but nobody feels remorse genuine enough to break down the walls of indifference.

Anyways that was a tangent. Back to the story at hand. My ex-boyfriend and I were walking thru Milton-Parc when on the sidewalk I suddenly noticed one person in particular. She couldn't have been more than 23 -- maybe younger or older, but roughly my age, at any rate. She had shoulder length brown hair, much like mine. She wore a black slip dress. Her features were elegant, defined, and feminine despite being brushed in dark stubble. I was struck by her beauty, a divine feminine beauty, at once fully womanly and fully trans. And she was clearly mentally ill, pacing the sidewalk, yelling and raving. Most of all, the impression that remains with me was of a woman far, far too young to be living on the street. And I felt an overwhelming sense of kinship for her. From a purely physical perspective, she could have been my sister. We were the same age, the same height, with the same hair, a similar build... And yet as I walked the streets by choice, basking in the beautiful weather by the safety of daylight, she was there, vulnerable and alone, because she had nowhere else to go. As throngs of McGill students passed by her patch of sidewalk on their way to and from their expensive student apartments, this girl their own age had to spend every day living the dangerous reality of being a trans woman on the street, mere metres from their warm beds and stocked fridges. I could tell by how she carried herself that she was tough -- more than likely she was an experienced veteran of the streets -- but calluses form over abrasions, and her strength belied a difficult life.

And then- "STOP staring at the homeless trans woman." Whisper-shouted words that hit like a well-aimed punch to the gut. I can understand how it must have looked to my ex. He couldn't read my mind, he didn't know what I was thinking and feeling in that moment. And God knows that the last thing the girl needs is to be stared at on top of everything else. But while he -- and, no doubt, others around me -- associated my staring with a gormless rubberneckers' ogling of a grotesque spectacle, the reality was that I was staring because of how shocked I was to realise that her and I were really one and the same. I felt like I was looking in some kind of mirror. There was really nothing meaningful separating us. She had the shit luck, and I didn't. The image of her, and everything it made me feel, has remained burned in my brain ever since. It wouldn't be until two years later, in the late days of April, 2025, that Pope Francis would put into succinct and poignant words that feeling which rattled around my head and my heart for days after that chance encounter: the feeling of seeing one's self in someone exiled to the margins of society, and with one's gaze cast upward towards the heavens, pleading, begging to understand, Why her and not me? Why her and not me? Why her and not me?

That the most powerful religious leader in the world, whose predecessors lived in gilded palaces, who commands the loyalty of 1.4 billion faithful worldwide and the respect and admiration of so many more, could visit a prison and be so moved in seeing the divine humanity of those imprisoned there that he asks himself "Perche loro e non io?", is something that we have come to take for granted these past 12 years. I hope we can continue to take it for granted, and that future Popes and religious leaders will follow in Francis' compassionate footsteps. Realistically, I suspect we have lost a man who was far more unique than we know. But come what may, I promise myself, and God, and the girl on the street, that I will always, always strive to live up to Francis' example of true, radical humanity.

-A