“I am a son of the Church.” With those seven words, Pope Francis defined himself in 2013, just after his election to the See of Peter.
This simple, filial relationship was lived out by the pope in many ways, but perhaps nowhere was it reflected more clearly than in his spiritual practices and devotions. Here’s a look at six of the most characteristic elements of Pope Francis’ prayer life.
A devotion to St. Joseph
“I am leaving you my dearest friend,” Pope Francis said upon blessing a statue of St. Joseph and the Child Jesus to leave at the seminary where he stayed on the first leg of his Canada trip in 2022. Being installed as pope on St. Joseph’s feast day was a “kindness from heaven,” Francis considered. And it was in a church dedicated to Joseph that the future pope discovered his vocation. All through his life, he acknowledged, “I have never hidden the closeness I feel towards St. Joseph.”
It was this closeness that led the Pope to declare a year of St. Joseph (2021), dedicate an audience series and an apostolic letter to him, and add his name to the canon of the Mass. He also admitted that he turned difficult issues over to Joseph: “If there’s a problem, I write a message to St. Joseph on a piece of paper and I put it under the statue of him I have in my room. It is a statue of St. Joseph asleep. And now he sleeps on a pillow of little papers!”
The ‘saints next door’
In fact, Pope Francis had a great love for the saints, from Thérèse and Francis de Sales (to whom he dedicated apostolic letters) to Charles de Foucauld (who “helped me so much to overcome crises”) to fellow Jesuit Peter Faber (whom he canonized, describing him as someone who was taught by their founder, St. Ignatius, “to unite his restless but also sweet — I would say exquisite — sensibility, with the ability to make decisions.”)
Then, too, there are all the holy men and women the pope referred to as the “saints next door” — the ordinary people all of us know in our families and neighborhoods who won’t be canonized but nevertheless live a life of holiness and even heroic virtue.
Little moments of prayer
The pope noted a few times that he structured his day with little moments of prayer, but not in long or complicated ways. He once encouraged a morning offering as simple as “Lord, I thank you and I offer this day to you.” In fact, he often suggested aspiration prayers such as this to repeat throughout the day, saying they are like “text messages” sent to the Lord.
As the first Jesuit to be elected pope, it’s not surprising that Pope Francis frequently encouraged discernment, one of St. Ignatius’ legacies to the Church. Francis helped the faithful to learn discernment by giving ideas for questions to ask, warning that, too often, we don’t know ourselves. We need the “good habit of calmly re-reading what happens in our day,” asking, “What happened in my heart? What made me react? What made me sad? What made me joyful? What was bad?” He dedicated general audiences to the theme of discernment in 2022.
Francis made off-hand comments revealing other daily practices of prayer, including a greeting to Mary each morning, a daily prayer to St. Joseph, and St. Thomas More’s prayer for good humor.
A love for Scripture
Pope Francis showcased his Jesuit formation and love for Scripture especially in homilies. He would generally emphasize three points based on details from the Gospel, sometimes building an entire homily on seemingly obscure scriptural details.
“The Word of God opens every door because He is the door,” the pope said, promising that, with just two or five minutes a day spent on the Gospel, “your life will change.” More than once he gave away pocket-sized Gospels to those in the Square, and he designated the third Sunday of Ordinary time as Word of God Sunday.
The wounds of Christ
“Look at the crucifix, but to look within it,” the pope encouraged, and noted more than once a devotion that he practices: “In the evening, before going to bed, I say this short prayer: ‘Lord, if you will, you can make me clean!’ And I pray five ‘Our Fathers,’ one for each of Jesus’ wounds, because Jesus has cleansed us with his wounds.”
The wounds of Jesus were for him a “tactic” that Jesus uses in his own heavenly prayer. “There is one thing that Jesus does today, I am certain that he does,” the pope said. “He shows his wounds to the Father. And Jesus, with his wounds, prays for us as if to say, ‘Father, this is the price! Help them, protect them, they are your children whom I have saved.'”
For Pope Francis, the wounds of Jesus are linked to his Sacred Heart, where the side wound leads. “If, gazing on the face of Christ, you feel unable to let yourself be healed and transformed, then enter into the Lord’s heart, into his wounds, for that is the abode of divine mercy,” he invited.
In fact, it was the Sacred Heart that was the subject of his final encyclical.
‘We have a mother’
Finally, an overview of Pope Francis’ simple and filial spirituality has to include mention of the Christ’s — and the pope’s — mother.
At the end of Mass of Jan. 1, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, the pope liked to invite the congregation to repeat three times: “Mother of God, Mother of God, Mother of God”
He did it nearly every year from his first Jan. 1 Mass as pope in 2014. “Celebrating the Holy Mother of God reminds us that we have a Mother. We are not orphans. We have a Mother.” And such a beautiful truth, for a simple son of the Church, needed repeating more than once.
