Pope Francis passed away on April 21, 2025 and the funeral held a week later. There has been mourning worldwide for a man who many believed to be a spiritual leader and who affected the lives many beyond the walls of the Church. For some African writers—Okey Ndibe, Chika Unigwe, Yvonne Owuor, and Enuma Okoro—they remember the Pope specifically as a reader, who loved poetry and believed that writers help us think about the human condition and draw nearer to truth.
In the days following the Pope’s passing, Ndibe, Unigwe, Owuor, and Okoro shared personal reflections on social media. They had all met the pope in Italy at the Global Aesthetic of the Catholic Imagination conference in May 2023, an event organized by George Town University. “I have loved many poets and writers in my life,” the Pope told them. “The words of writers helped me to understand myself, the world, my people… to deepen the human heart.”
At the time of the conference Unigwe reflected on what she saw as the close link between her writing and her her catholic faith. All three author revisited their encounter with the Pope in their reflections on his death. We have shard their comment for the comfort and insight it might bring, and also to document the momentous event of the Pope’s passing.
Unigwe and Okoro both reference the Pope’s speech at the time of their visit. You can find the full text of that speech here.
Chika Unigwe
Okey Ndibe
The experience of meeting Pope Francis at close quarters was truly remarkable. I was in Rome to participate in an international conference of authors and scholars titled “The Catholic Imagination”, and I could hardly believe it when the organizers indicated that there was a good chance the pope would receive the participants in a private audience. The day before the scheduled audience, we learned that Pope Francis had taken ill and had cancelled all his engagements. We were entreated to pray for the pope’s expeditious recovery to enable him to host us. As it turned out, the pope—though far from fully recovered—decided that he desired to address us: Catholic creatives and scholars drawn from different parts of the world.
As we waited in the cavernous room where Pope Francis held some of his private audience, I remember being racked by a sense of uncertainty. I feared the prospect of a sudden announcement that the pontiff’s health had worsened, leaving him too frail to entertain company. My fears, thank God, did not materialize. After a while, a huge door was pushed open and Pope Francis entered to much applause. Flanked by aides, he had the appearance of a warm, avuncular figure. His gait was labored, and his big, rotund frame needed the support of a walking cane. Even so, his smile was vibrant, with no hint of an elderly prelate dogged by illness or fatigue. After taking his seat, he listened attentively as one of the conference organizers presented the writers, some of whom—like me—originally hail from Africa. Then he read his prepared remarks in Italian, later translated into English and various other languages.
Pope Francis’s address struck the same notes that marked his papacy. He enjoined the writers to orient their art toward asking big questions and in solidarity with the oppressed of the world. That, I believe, is the enduring legacy of his reign as the Bishop of Rome and patriarch of the Catholic Church. Few saw him as matching his immediate predecessor, Pope Benedict, in theological depth, nor as possessing Pope John Paul 11’s charisma and the vitality of personal witness. Instead, he used his papal office to champion the lot of the most marginalized people in the world, including desperate migrants who brave gargantuan odds to reach the often-unwelcoming sanctuaries of Europe, Asia or North America.
Enuma Okoro
Yvonne Owuor:
In April 4, 1999, Pope John Paul II released a “Letter to the Artist” that began with this dedication:
To all who are passionately dedicated to the search for new “epiphanies” of beauty, so that through their creative work as artists they may offer these as gifts to the world.”
Those words, like others before them, quietly shaped the way I would come to understand both beauty and the call to artistry as it returned to me, again and again, over the years. I recalled them as I listened to Pope Francis’s exquiate address to those gathered to reflect on the “poetic imagination”. He reminded us, among other things, that “Artists are those who with their eyes both see and dream. They see in greater depth, they prophesy, they show us a different way of seeing and understanding what is before our eyes.” The need to enter into and dwell within this artistic cloak we wear, this mostly myesterious texture of beingness that infuses our core, is, for many of us, unceasing. And to be, for a few days in a “Global aesthetics of the Catholic imagination” conference organised by organised by “La Civiltà Cattolica” with Georgetown University, on May 27, 2023, among those for whom the impulse to create is also a necessity, an often restless, surge alive in all its dimensions, was, for me, one of life’s rare and unforeseen treasures. A joy felt especially in presence. And through and in in presence: the meeting, the seeing, and greeting of Pope Francis in the halls of the Vatican.
News of the death of Pope Francis stung me hard for there are indeed, in the world those one meets, however briefly whose radiance, and depth of what they carry radiate with extended echoes. I am deeply grateful to one who swept the dust from the ancient, resonant Catholic imagination, to allow a fresh wind to blow into its grammar of being and encounter. The gesture rekindled the sense of the ‘Universal’ character of the Church that is, without paradox, a vibrant mosaic of pluriversal presences and tributaries, growing from the force, depth, and beauty of its many tongues, peoples, and worlds of imagination. In that conference it is not a boast to state the profound impact of the African and Diasporic African interventions, appearing and delivering, not as recepients, but as bearers, shapers and also custodians of this tremendous imaginative legacy, a story thread far too often obscured, by those whose interest it was to pretend that there was nothing in our continental vastness before and until they invaded. We were there as those from immense and distinct worlds whose dreams and roots have also long nourished the flourishing tree of the Universal Church, its heart still flowering from the vitality of countless headwaters.
I admit that I had come wearied, tethered to semi-despair, reluctantly attuned to the dissonance of a world out of joint, where nations and institutions had settled into some ancient rot, and stood as monuments to moral bankruptcy, and our earth weighted down by so many desecrations, in seeming retreat. Yet, suddenly, inside the space of the Vatican, waiting with all the others, amidst the real sense of unbroken continuity, of everything that gestured to transtemporality, time grew tender, and that lassitude dissipated at once. Anticipation became focus. Later, we would all stand, line up, and bend slightly, to greet the Bishop of Rome, the Vicar of Christ, the icon of a two-millennia institutional endurance burdened with a divine mandate. Pope Francis was already half-broken in his body, but in his eyes: clear light. Seeing, and seeing through. Nothing concealed of one’s soul, the spirt, the heart. Our eyes met, and, in me, old griefs and new fears suppressed threatened to leak. But also in his face, deep and old laughter-the silent invitation to play, to wear life, a little more simply, to dare to seek and find the tiny wild flowers that grow bright even the cracks of our fallen humanity. A moment. And then it was over. And yet, later, we would agree with each other, as excited as children, that we had each felt uniquely seen, and safe, and yes, even
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