Pope Leo XIV Teared Up for Francis — and Gave Us a Glimpse of the Bond That Made Him Pope

The American pope paused mid-tribute amid his own tears. Francis died one year ago this Easter Monday — and Leo, the disciple, will be on a different continent when the anniversary comes.

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Pope Leo XIV teared up this morning.

Standing at the Apostolic window at the Vatican on Easter Monday, the American pope paused mid-sentence as he tried to describe the man who had summoned him from a small diocese on Peru’s northern coast and, in the final weeks of his life, made him one of the few cardinal bishops in the Catholic Church.

The man he was mourning was Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday last year — April 21, 2025 — after twelve years of upending the Church and infuriating the powerful.

The official anniversary of his death falls in just over two weeks, but Leo will not be in Rome to mark it. He will be in Africa, on the second major papal voyage of his young pontificate, carrying the Gospel to a continent Francis loved and visited often.

So this morning’s tribute became something rare: a private grief made public, offered ahead of schedule, by a successor who clearly cannot wait two more weeks to say what his predecessor meant to him.

In Elise Allen’s new book due out on April 28, Leo described watching Francis make his final public appearance on Easter Sunday last year — the blessing of Rome and the world that turned out to be a goodbye:

“I am not a doctor, but when I saw him pass through the square, I was not in St. Peter’s Square, I was watching him on television. Something was not right. I did not think he would leave so soon, but I simply knew that something was happening. And it was the following morning that he died. And that is Easter: life, death, resurrection.”

Those of us who have followed the friendship between Leo and Francis know the bond ran far deeper than protocol.

For years, the two men met many Saturdays inside the Casa Santa Marta — the simple Vatican guesthouse where Francis chose to live instead of the Apostolic Apartment — to talk about their lives, their consciences, and the future of the Church.

Both men were religious-order priests at heart, shaped by the dust and poverty of Latin America, and convinced that the Gospel meant nothing if it did not find the poor first. Out of those Saturday conversations, a rare thing took root inside the modern Vatican: a real friendship between a pope and the quiet American who carried his trust.

Francis trusted Prevost so much that he moved him through the ranks of the hierarchy at a pace almost without precedent.

In just eleven years, Francis raised him from a priest to the bishop of Chiclayo, then to a Vatican official inside the Dicastery for Bishops, then to the prefect of that same dicastery — the most powerful office in the Church when it came to choosing the world’s bishops — then to cardinal priest, and finally, while he was lying in Gemelli Hospital fighting for his life this past February, to one of the small handful of cardinal bishops, the senior tier of the College that elects the pope.

That last act was not bureaucratic housekeeping. It was the choice of a dying man preparing the Church for what came next.

Vatican journalists Gerard O’Connell and Elisabetta Piqué, who knew Francis better than almost any reporters alive (the late pope married them, in fact!), have now written a new book reconstructing how Robert Prevost rose from Chiclayo to the Chair of Peter.

As I wrote when their book first appeared, his reporting confirms what many in Rome had long whispered: Francis saw in Prevost the qualities the Church would need after him — Augustinian humility, missionary instincts, fluency across three languages and three continents, and the rare gift of governing without becoming a bureaucrat. Francis did not name a successor.

What he did, very deliberately, was make one possible.

And here is the truth that Pope Leo’s tears this morning made impossible to ignore: the last and perhaps the best gift Pope Francis ever gave us was Pope Leo XIV.

From the very first hours of his papacy, Leo carried Francis with him. Stepping onto the loggia on the night of his election last May, the new pope reached almost immediately for the memory of that final Easter blessing:

“We can still hear the faint yet ever courageous voice of Pope Francis as he blessed Rome, the Pope who blessed Rome, who gave his blessing to the world, the whole world, on the morning of Easter.”

He has not stopped hearing it since.

Francis spent his final months knowing his body was failing.

With every reason to rest, he reached instead for a phone from his hospital bed and, against the counsel of those who told him to slow down, made the appointments that would shape the Church for a generation.

Among the very last papers he signed was the decree elevating Robert Prevost to the rank that placed him at the heart of the conclave that would soon meet to choose his successor.

Two months later, white smoke rose over St. Peter’s Square, and the cardinal bishop Francis had named from his sickbed walked out onto the loggia as Leo XIV.

This morning, the disciple decried for his brother. And the world caught a glimpse, however brief, of the human cost of carrying the gift Francis left behind.

For those of us who still miss Francis, Leo’s tears were a kind of permission. Grief and gratitude can live inside the same heart. The man Francis trusted most is now the man asking us to keep walking.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of Catholics around the world who are still grieving Pope Francis and learning to love the disciple he left us.

We believe the friendship sealed inside the Casa Santa Marta on those Saturday mornings was one of the great gifts of the modern Church — and that the work of human dignity, mercy, and solidarity Francis began is now Leo’s to carry, and ours to defend.

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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.