Pope Francis’s Preferential Option for Elders
“Old age is not a disease,” my mom proclaimed. By this time, she was close to ninety. But age had already long freed her tongue: on reaching eighty she’d informed us, more than once, “I’m old now and I can say what I want.” In his 2022 message released for the Second World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly, Pope Francis channeled my mom, speaking out against temptations to pathologize aging: “Many people are afraid of old age. They consider it a sort of disease with which any contact is best avoided.”
Francis claims his place as one from among these “new people,” new in the sense that “there have never been so many of us in human history.” He writes and speaks as a voice of his generation, situating himself among his elder peers. He gets it—physically, socially, and emotionally—from the disappointment of curtailing participation in anticipated events, to increased dependence on a wheelchair, to health scares underscoring mortality. In his 2021 inaugural message for the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly, he reminded listeners, “I was called to become the Bishop of Rome when I had reached, so to speak, retirement age and thought I would not be doing anything new. The Lord is always—always—close to us. He is close to us with new possibilities, new ideas, new consolations.”
This option for elders is woven throughout Francis’s pontificate. Along with migration, the pope considers it to be “one of the most urgent issues facing the human family at this time.” He has expressed solidarity with and concern for elders in a variety of venues, from the pulpit to social media. From February through August of 2022, he used his weekly general audiences to impart a thematic catechesis on old age. In 2021, he instituted the World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly, celebrated every year since on the fourth Sunday of July, coinciding with the feast of saints Joachim and Anne, the grandparents of Jesus. A week before the 2014 Synod Assembly on the Family, Francis bemoaned the abandonment of elderly people, calling it out as “actually real and hidden euthanasia!” He has reiterated this condemnation several times over the years, including in a June 2024 post on X (formerly Twitter), challenging all to oppose this “poisonous, throwaway culture.”
For Francis, our penchant for disposability, especially of our elders, is sinful, motivated by profit and an aversion rooted in a “growing fear of weakness and vulnerability.” Viewed from the perspectives of production and outcomes, those who are considered elderly depreciate in value to the point of being labelled burdens and liabilities—in other words, expendable. The plaintive cry tucked into Fratelli tutti—“They did not have to die that way” (#19)—indicts not only the response to the pandemic, but any response involving neglect, inevitability, abandonment, and avoidance, which in effect are manifestations of a passive and “hidden euthanasia.”
Consistently, through an embodied and performative theology of listening, words, and deeds, Francis communicates that fragility does not impair dignity, nor does it excuse the social and personal obligations that respect for human dignity demand, regardless of age. In this precarious time of his hospitalization, Pope Francis continues his pedagogy on aging by choosing an unprecedented transparency that allows us to intimately accompany our abuelo en la fe. Whether he is working, resting, praying, or struggling, he models the theme he has chosen for this year’s World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly: “Blessed are those who have not lost hope” (Sirach 14:2).
Francis, living into his age in public ways, reminds us: “With old age you get all these illnesses and we have to accept them as they come, don’t we? We don’t have the strength of youth! And your witness will also be accompanied by this weakness.” Through his witness he cultivates solidarity not only with his peers and caregivers, but with and across generations. His visibility through health challenges is a reality check. “The elder is not an alien. We are that elder: in the near or far future, but inevitably, even if we don’t think it.” It is a caution: “And if we don’t learn how to treat the elder better, that is how we will be treated.” Solidarity is built on the recognition that we are all invested in the common good. If one suffers, we all suffer…eventually.
Pope Francis entered the hospital in what turned out to be the last hours of my ninety-nine-year-old aunt Connie’s life. She spent her last year hospitalized—feisty, fighting displacement, insisting that she deserved to be treated in ways that honored her God-given dignity. She reveled in the simple joys of ordinary life like donuts, coffee, and New York Yankees baseball. To the end, in her increasing frailty, she found ways to cultivate meaningful inter-generational relationships marked by a mutual sharing of wisdom and struggles. As her family, we bore witness to what Francis has described as a time of fragility, dependence, farewell, and of “moving away from being the protagonist of our lives.”
The pope admits, “It’s not easy to move away from being the protagonist. It’s not easy.” As a Church, this may well be the time we find ourselves in; there’s no way of knowing with any certainty. True, these times require preparation for a future beyond our elder’s physical presence; however, they also necessitate living fully in the moment, respecting how hard it might be to move away. Francis has spoken of how he enjoys talking with the elderly, “looking into their eyes: they have those bright eyes, those eyes that speak to you more than words, the witness of a life. And this is beautiful, we must preserve it until the end.” We are in a catechetical moment. Let’s look into those bright eyes, and learn from the witness of a life.
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