By Suvir Saran

New Delhi [India], April 22 (ANI): I grew up in a Hindu household in India, in a home where gods didn't compete--they coexisted. Ganpati smiled from the altar, Jesus hung in my grandmother's room, and the Quran sat on our bookshelf like it belonged there--which it did. We were human before we were anything else. That was the first religion I was taught.

Faith, in our home, was light--literal and metaphorical. Firecrackers at Diwali, candles at Christmas, diyas flickering through power cuts. The idea that religion could divide us? That was foreign to me. Foreign, until it wasn't.

As a boy, I was taken by the pageantry of the Catholic Church. The gold and scarlet vestments, the thunder of the organ, the long shadows cast in stained-glass light. I fell in love with the visuals. The performance. The ritual. Not because I was Catholic, but because it was beautiful. And beauty, to a queer boy with a thirst for drama and color, was sacred.

What I didn't know then--what I couldn't know--is that behind the robes and incense was an institution that would one day call me an abomination.

I moved to New York. I grew up. And I saw religion up close in a different light. I saw churches as battlegrounds. I saw pulpits used not to lift but to divide. And the Catholic Church, with its sanctified silence and weaponized scriptures, was no exception.

I saw what happened to people like me. Our love was a sin. Our presence was a problem. Our joy was a threat.

And yet--despite all that--I still wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that religion could be better. That it could be kinder. That it could be beautiful again.

Then came Pope Francis.

He wasn't supposed to be revolutionary. He was supposed to be a placeholder. A quiet choice. A compromise pope.

Instead, he became a radical--not in his rejection of religion, but in his embrace of it.

Francis wasn't trying to tear the Church down. He was trying to remind it of its soul.

And he did it with five words.

'Who am I to judge?'

He said it in 2013, just a few months after becoming pope, on a flight back from Brazil. A reporter asked him about gay clergy. And instead of pivoting, hedging, or hiding behind doctrine, he said it plainly.

Who am I to judge?

Five words. Spoken softly. But they shook the Church. They cracked open a window long sealed shut.

For the first time, someone at the very top saw us--not as sins, not as symbols, but as people.

Francis was not perfect. He never changed the Church's teachings on same-sex marriage or priestly celibacy or abortion. He didn't rewrite the catechism.

But he changed the tone. The temperature. The tenor.

He blessed same-sex couples, even as his bishops balked. He called for mercy instead of dogma. He elevated tenderness over triumphalism.

In 2024, he said: 'Nobody gets scandalized if I bless a businessman who perhaps exploits people... but they get scandalized if I give them to a homosexual. This is hypocrisy.'

Hypocrisy. That word, from a pope, not aimed at the queer community--but at those who condemned it.

He wasn't defending sin. He was defending sincerity.

He understood that morality without mercy is just vanity dressed up in robes.

Francis didn't lead from the throne. He led from the margins.

He kissed the feet of Muslim refugees. He traveled to Iraq and Congo, places no pope had dared to go. He met with imams, rabbis, and gurus--not to debate, but to listen. He prayed alone in a rain-drenched St. Peter's Square during the pandemic, the whole world watching, weeping.

In a Church built on power, he chose presence.

In a world obsessed with borders, he chose bridges.

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar remembered him as 'a deep believer and a traditionalist with a difference... a passionate advocate of interfaith dialogue.'

The Dalai Lama said, 'The best tribute we can pay to him is to be warm-hearted people.'

Barack Obama called him 'the rare leader who made us want to be better... who reminded us that we are all bound by obligations to God and one another.'

They mourned not just a man--but a moral force.

But not everyone welcomed him.

I remember asking my partner's father--a Catholic man from New Jersey--what he thought of the Pope's words on gay people. He shrugged.

That's just one priest's opinion,' he said.

One priest.

It was easier to reduce a revolutionary to a rogue than to confront what he represented. American Catholics could dismiss him when his compassion clashed with their comfort.

And that's the thing about Francis: he made it hard to look away. He made it hard to pretend that love could be regulated.

He reminded us what religion could be at its best: not a wall, but a window.

He said: 'The thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful. It needs nearness.'

He meant nearness to people. To pain. To joy. To difference.

'I would like all of us to hope anew,' he said in his final public address, 'and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves... for all of us are children of God.'

Religion, across the board--not just Christianity--has too often forgotten this. It has traded humility for hierarchy. Compassion for control. Poetry for policy.

But Francis remembered. He remembered the heart.

He criticized consumerism and climate destruction not because they were political, but because they were spiritual betrayals.

'The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,' he wrote in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si'. He made climate change not just an environmental issue, but a moral one.

He called for an economy that serves people, not the other way around.

He kissed the hands of Indigenous elders and apologized--truly apologized--for the Church's role in colonization and residential schools.

He reminded the world: holiness without humanity is just theater.

And for someone like me--someone who loved religion's drama but feared its dogma--he was a balm. A bridge. A breath of holy air.

He didn't save the Church. But he saved my belief that religion could be beautiful again.

Now he is gone. And the Sistine Chapel waits.

Smoke will rise. Names will be whispered. Odds calculated. Continuity versus change. Pietro Parolin or Luis Antonio Tagle or someone no one expects.

But whoever comes next, they will inherit more than a throne.

They will inherit a challenge: not to preserve the Church, but to prove it still matters.

Because Francis did what no dogma could: he made people feel seen.

And in a world starving for recognition, that is a kind of miracle.

He was called 'His Holiness,' but he never acted like he had all the answers.

He questioned power. He questioned borders. He questioned the idea that anyone could own God.

And in doing so, he brought the divine down to eye level.

He gave us five words.

He gave us a glimpse of grace.

And he gave me--once a boy in love with religion's glitter, then a man scarred by its rules--a reason to believe again.

Not in institutions. But in possibility.

DISCLAIMER: Suvir Saran is a Masterchef, Author, Hospitality Consultant And Educator. The views expressed in this article are his own. (ANI)