(OSV News) — In 2017, 4-year-old Gemma Pompili, wearing a blue T-shirt and jeans, held Pope Francis’ hand as he addressed Special Olympics athletes during an audience. A Special Olympics child athlete, Pompeii was chosen to present the pontiff with red sports shoes. Instead of returning to her seat, she sat on a stool next to Pope Francis as he read his address.
The image of Pope Francis holding Pompili’s hand, while giving his speech, lingers in the mind of Charleen Katra, executive director of the National Catholic Partnership on Disability. The Washington-based organization promotes the meaningful participation of people with disabilities in the church and society.
“People pay attention,” she told OSV News. “If it’s OK for Pope Francis — if he can relax and let the Spirit be in the room, why can’t all of us, you know?”
When it comes to Pope Francis’ impact on ministry in the church, various ministry leaders highlighted not only new Vatican initiatives or papal writings during his papacy, but the way he modeled love for others.
‘He’s Showing Us How’
“It’s like, this is the way — he’s showing us how,” Katra said. “Words are one thing, but when you actually model it, it’s more impactful.”
Pope Francis’ attention to groups of people who have been historically marginalized in society also resonated with Catherine Wiley, founder of the Catholic Grandparents Association. Describing the late pope as a “champion of grandparents,” she said his 2021 institution of the annual World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly near the feast of Sts. Joachim and Anne, Jesus’ grandparents, was “the greatest gift Pope Francis has given” her work.
“He has said so much over his papacy about grandparents and their strength and wisdom,” said Wiley, whose organization promotes grandparents’ role in passing on faith to their grandchildren.
Grandparents’ opportunity to spiritually accompany their grandchildren as they navigate contemporary culture reflects the pope’s emphasis on synodality, or “walking together” as the church. Pope Francis, Wiley told OSV News, was “the greatest champion of the family — not just grandparents, but the family — what it represents, what it means, in all its shapes and all its joys and dysfunctions.”
Promoting Marriage Catechumenate
Mary-Rose Verret, who with her husband, Ryan Verret, founded the marriage formation ministry Witness to Love in 2012, said she appreciates Pope Francis’ attention to the family through his promotion of a marriage catechumenate.
“What couples need today is very different than what couples needed 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago,” she said, something she thought Pope Francis understood well. “Because of the breakdown of the family, they need real married couples walking with them before and after the wedding.”
Presented in the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Laity, the Family and Life’s 2022 document “Catechumenal Pathways for Married Life,” a marriage catechumenate is a period of discernment and formation for Catholic engaged couples. In 2021, the Verrets spoke about their marriage ministry, which uses a catechumenate model, at the Vatican in a symposium on “Amoris Laetitia,” Pope Francis’ 2016 document on marriage and family, and in 2023 the pope appointed the couple as consultants to the Vatican Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life.
‘Family Missionary Discipleship’
“We’ve been very involved in cracking that document (“Catechumenal Pathways”) open with leaders from all over, especially in North America,” said Mary-Rose Verret. She and Ryan Verret, along with OSV News national news editor Peter Jesserer Smith, wrote “The Road to Family Missionary Discipleship: Forming Marriages and Families to Share the Joy of the Gospel” in 2023 as a practical guide for parishes to put in practice the marriage catechumenate and family-based evangelization envisioned by Pope Francis and his predecessors.
“People’s initial reaction to the (marriage catechumenate) document is, ‘What is this, why is it important?’ But then after they started reading it and discussing it and processing it they were like, ‘This is amazing,'” Verret said.
However, Catholic marriage experts are still unpacking St. John Paul II’s writings on the family after his 2005 death, Verret noted. As for Pope Francis’ legacy, “we won’t know for years to come what is the impact with this, this sort of spotlight and sense of urgency on supporting new marriages and preparing couples,” she said. “The more that leaders can get together and really sort of prayerfully discern what is being asked for, what’s possible, what are we called to do to support marriage, then that’s where we’re going to see the impact.”
Caring for Creation
One facet of Pope Francis’ legacy that is evident now is his promotion of caring for creation. In 2015, he issued the encyclical “Laudato Si'” that connected care for humanity with care for the Earth. He followed it up in 2023 with the apostolic exhortation “Laudate Deum,” which underscored the need to respond to the global climate crisis.
“He will be remembered as the moral leader who, from the highest, highest moral pulpit in the world, gave forth a call to every person living on this planet to cherish and love our beautiful home that is God’s gift to us, to recognize that this home is meant to provide abundantly for every person on this Earth, and that we’re called to examine critically the systems and structures that don’t serve that and to change them, because things can change,” said Erin Lothes, a theologian who focuses on the faith-based environmental advocacy movement and a former senior manager of the Laudato Si’ Animators Program with the global Laudato Si’ Movement.
Since the promulgation of “Laudato Si’,” explained Lothes, a visiting scholar at the Center for Earth Ethics in New York, “we have really seen creation care ministry in the United States flourish and grow and institutionalize.”
Laudato Si’ Action Platform
Even prior to the document, Catholics, especially religious sisters, were doing important work on the intersection of environmentalism and faith, she said, but efforts were largely outside of parishes and institutions. Now many U.S. dioceses, parishes and universities are engaged in environmental sustainability efforts, especially through participation in the Laudato Si’ Action Platform — an initiative of the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, she said.
“That is a huge accomplishment of which the Catholic Church can be very proud,” Lothes told OSV News. “I don’t know of any other platform for planning and analyzing and setting high goals globally such as the Laudato Si’ Action Platform.”
Meanwhile, Catholic universities have established sustainability research hubs, and lecture series, popular education, webinar and prayer opportunities abound, she said.
In 2015, Pope Francis joined the Catholic Church to ecumenical, Eastern Orthodox-led efforts to celebrate World Day for Creation Sept. 1 and the Season of Creation that continues through Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi.
‘Flourishing in Many Ways’
“People are participating in the Season of Creation, they’re gathering for outdoor Masses, so it’s really flourishing in many ways,” Lothes said. “And I think that’s really been seeded and watered by ‘Laudato Si’,’ both as a prayerful document inviting people to reflect on the gospel of creation, and its intellectual witness squarely in the Catholic tradition.”
Tracey Lamont likewise explained how she sees Pope Francis having been key in expanding ministry opportunities for lay leaders, in part by giving lay people unprecedented roles in Vatican efforts and by admitting them to roles once restricted to men preparing for holy orders.
“He’s bringing them (lay people) into greater forms of leadership, and he’s modeling this language of ‘co-responsibility’ that we throw around a lot,” said Lamont, director of the Loyola Institute for Ministry and associate professor of religious education and young adult ministry at Loyola University New Orleans. “He’s actually doing it. He’s paving the way.”
Women Lectors and Acolytes
In 2021, Pope Francis amended canon law to allow women to become lectors and acolytes, formal public ministries in the church up to that point reserved for laymen, but typically received by seminarians, explaining it reflected the development of the church’s doctrine on lay ministry. In many communities, women had long been permitted to perform the roles’ liturgical functions — which include reading at Mass and serving at the altar — but without the opportunity for formal institution into the lay ministries St. Paul VI had envisioned in his 1972 reform “Ministeria Quaedam.”
Later that year, Pope Francis formally instituted the ministry of catechist, a role open both to lay men and women.
Pope Francis also highlighted lay leadership through the synod on young people in 2018 and by permitting lay people to participate and vote in the Synod on Synodality‘s 2023-2024 sessions in Rome, Lamont said.
Listening to Laypeople
“His language around missionary discipleship and the efforts that he has to really empower and listen to laypeople is huge,” she said.
Katra saw Pope Francis apply similar energy to inclusion of people with disabilities in the church. In 2021, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life launched the “I Am Church” video campaign to highlight the contributions of people with physical and intellectual disabilities. The five-part series’ name came from Pope Francis’ 2021 remarks for the International Day of Persons with Disabilities: “Baptism makes each one of us a full-fledged member of the Church community, so that all of us, without exclusion or discrimination, can say: ‘I am Church!'”
“What we’re trying to do in the U.S. is to advance participation of persons with disabilities in the church, and you know, he’s 200% behind that, or more,” Katra said of Pope Francis. “He’s the leader. He leads us.”
Ministering to People With Disabilities
Katra said much work is still needed to help parishes expand ministries and adapt the liturgy for people with disabilities, but she thinks important groundwork has been laid under Pope Francis’ papacy. The topic is also gaining momentum among academics and ministry leaders, both in the U.S. and internationally. In 2024, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences chose disability inclusion as the theme for a plenary assembly marking its 30th anniversary. In an address to its members, Pope Francis noted international progress in recognizing the rights of people with disabilities, and he emphasized their inherent dignity.
“Even if they are unproductive, or were born with or develop limitations, this does not detract from their great dignity as human persons, a dignity based not on circumstances but on the intrinsic worth of their being. Unless this basic principle is upheld, there will be no future either for fraternity or for the survival of humanity,” he said, quoting “Fratelli Tutti,” his 2020 encyclical on human fraternity.
Katra said she believed Pope Francis understood — and tried to teach — that “when people with disabilities are involved in the full life of our faith community, God uses them to touch hearts.”
A key part of Pope Francis’ legacy, especially with respect to people with disabilities, she said, can be summed up as “listen to what I say; watch what I do.”
“He puts flesh on it,” she said. “There’s integrity. His actions match his words.”
Maria Wiering is senior writer for OSV News.
