If a humanist education has taught me anything, it’s this: people are generally immutable. Their institutions are cyclical. Their behaviors are reactionary. 

I understand these facts not as justification for cynical defeatism, but as strategic notice, a precautionary question. How might we engineer durable change given the tendency toward reversion and backsliding? 

This fact is no less true of the Catholic Church than of any other institution, perhaps more so. This is why Pope Francis’s death, for me, is more than political. It is a question of whether anything can really change and stay changed. As a Catholic, this question weighs heavily on my mind. As a gay Catholic, it feels existential. His passing is not just news. It is Holy Saturday: the Church breathless, love wrapped in linens, waiting to rise.

Whatever else can be said, this much is certain: no pope before him reached so far toward the margins, or brought the margins so close to Rome. He extended an olive branch to LGBTQ people. He blessed same-sex couples, met transgender Catholics and told us — out loud — that we belonged to God. It wasn’t everything. But it was more than anything before. His theology was not liberal; it was deeply Christic. His was the Samaritan’s gaze — radical in its proximity, scandalous in its mercy. 

Pope Francis never changed doctrine, and that truth still bruises. The Catechism’s language remains untouched, clinical and cruel in its verdict on people like me. But beneath that stillness was his quiet agitation. He turned the Church’s face toward the forgotten — not with edits or erasures, but with eyes that lingered, hands that blessed. His Fiducia Supplicans declaration did not sanctify our unions canonically, but it dared to say what bishops would not: that queer love is not unworthy of blessing.

And so, as we wait in this tomb-dark silence, progressive Catholics must not flee. We must stay. 

Because if love is to rise again, it will need a body willing to bear it. The Church cannot carry forward what Francis began unless we do — not as relics of a passing moment, but as living altars of mercy. So much of the Church still clings to stone tablets. But Francis pointed instead to the flesh — to the body of Christ as it weeps, welcomes, bleeds. His was a corporal papacy, pierced by the contradictions of the Church’s past. Yet Francis did not hide the institution’s wounds, but held them up, letting light through the holes, and said: “Look – God still breathes here.”

His critics called this a distraction, a pendulum swung too far, instability, sentimentality, a softness unbecoming of Peter’s seat. They long for a return to “clarity,” a Church more internally governed than outwardly given. Cardinals like Robert Sarah, who once named queer love a “poison,” and Willem Eijk, who dismissed Fiducia Supplicans as doctrinal failure, now posture for succession. Theirs is an antique pastoralism, more concerned with liturgical smoothness than the roughness of human pain, with reactionary traditionalism than radical love.

And so we find ourselves on the edge of a long eclipse. If we surrender the altar now, out of exhaustion or cynicism, we will not simply lose power, but presence. Parishes that go on blessing and naming the dignity of LGBTQ lives will be cast as theological insurgents, outlaws for loving too fully. The tragedy is not only institutional, but spiritual. Because the Church that once crucified Christ for loving too widely now risks crucifying His love all over again — not on a hill outside Jerusalem, but inside the Vatican’s own walls. The Church that claims to be the unbroken continuation of Christ’s ministry has become the Roman imperial guard hindering it.

We may not wear the vestments or cast the votes, but we are not powerless. We are still the body of Christ, moving through the world. And as white smoke rises, marking their choice, we must make ours: will our Church be the flesh or the lance, the heart or the law? Will we allow ourselves, through the wounded, resurrected Christ, to be changed enough to protect, in perpetuity, the change His ministry began? The question He asked in Gethsemane is now ours to answer: “Will you stay with me?”

I will. I must. I will not hand over the body of Christ to those who wield it as a weapon against the people it was broken to save. Someone must tend the fire, say again the image of God lives in every face: queer, trans, aching, radiant. That the Gospel still means what it did. The last will be first. The poor will be filled. The sorrowful will be blessed. And love — unarmed, unflinching, unimaginable — will rise again.

So we stay, women at the tomb, through conclave, as the cardinals convene to choose the successor. We stay with whoever is next. We stay not to stop regression — we know it comes — but to be sure love leaves a mark deep enough to survive. We stay not because the Church has earned it, but because resurrection needs witnesses. And someone has to roll back the stone.

Pope Francis, rest in God’s peace.

OWEN HANNON is a sophomore in Morse College studying Economics and Religious Studies. He can be reached at owen.hannon@yale.edu.