By Daniel Payne
CNA Staff, Apr 25, 2025 /
19:36 pm
Pope Francis asked us “to be a Church which announces the good news of Christ,” Cardinal Christophe Pierre said on Friday, one of the many fruits of the Holy Spirit’s having selected the late Argentine prelate to be the supreme pontiff.
Pierre, who has served as apostolic nuncio in various countries over several decades and who has served as nuncio to the United States under Francis, told EWTN News President and COO Montse Alvarado that as he sees it, Francis’ election in 2013 was the fruit of a process that arose out of the 2007 Aparecida conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops in Brazil.
Then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio headed up the committee that produced the conference’s final document. The bishops at that conference were “inspired [and] helped” by the future pope, Pierre said.
“Then, six years later, Pope Francis was elected pope,” Pierre said, describing the selection as providential. “The Holy Spirit chose him so that he could be an instrument of Christ in today’s world,” the cardinal said.
He further pointed to Francis’ regular contention — articulated first in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium — that “realities are more important than ideas.”
“Today in the world, we are all tempted to transform reality into ideas,” Pierre told Alvarado. “And when you transform reality, it’s in abstractions. And ideas become ideology, and they become instruments of power, of war, of dispute between ourselves. And it is impossible to achieve peace as Christ asks us to do.”
“Even in the Church, at times we are tempted to defend our ideas,” the cardinal said. “But what Christ wants us to be is simply like him, and like Pope Francis has been.”
Asked about what the Catholic Church needs in the wake of Francis’ death, Pierre said it “needs first and foremost to be close to the people, to be attentive to the real needs of the people, especially the poor.”
He further urged Catholics to “remember that Jesus met you and changed your life.” He encouraged the faithful to “be a witness of Jesus for the world today.”
“I met Jesus, and this has transformed my life,” the prelate said. “And because Jesus transformed my life, I cannot do anything else but to announce his presence through my witness of life, but also through the way I live [and the way] I see the world.”
Daniel Payne is a senior editor at Catholic News Agency. He previously worked at the College Fix and Just the News. He lives in Virginia with his family.
