As dusk gathers gently over the Vatican and the bells toll softer with each passing hour, the world turns its gaze to Rome not out of duty or spectacle but out of reverence. His Holiness Pope Francis, the 266th Bishop of Rome, walks slowly now towards eternity, his final days on this earth wrapped in the prayers of millions.

For the global Church, this marks the end of an era—an era not shaped by grandeur but by humility. For those of us who have lived in the quiet corners of Catholicism, whose identities have not always sat easily in pews or pulpits, this is the closing of something miraculous.

I write this tribute as a fa’afafine born of the islands and the Church, raised in the paradox of reverence and rejection. There were years I wondered if God had made space for someone like me, someone who danced between gender, whose truth defied neat categorisation within Church teachings. But I stayed in the stillness of prayer, in the flicker of candlelight and the hush of confessionals. My spirit stayed.

I’ve never met Pope Francis. We never shared words or crossed paths in the flesh. But through prayer, we’ve known each other. In moments of deep spiritual conflict when the world’s gaze made me feel like a question mark in the margins of my own faith, his voice reached me with radical love. He made room. Not by rewriting doctrine but by expanding the walls of mercy.

There is a profound ache in being born into a world that does not always recognise the full breadth of your spirit. As a fa’afafine, I’ve known the grace of duality of walking in both femininity and masculinity, not as opposites but as sacred coexistence. The Church in its older and often rigid forms once left little space for someone like me.

And then Pope Francis came.

He didn’t dismantle every rule. He didn’t dissolve every tension. But he did something holier. He cracked open the door and let the wind of the Spirit blow through. With his now-iconic words, “Who am I to judge?” he handed the marginalised a key to the front door of the Church. He allowed those of us who had been treated as footnotes to be read aloud as part of the sacred story.

Pope Francis did not just lead, he listened. He wept with the wounded, walked among the ignored and dared to remind the Church of its soul not law, but love. And in doing so, he made it possible for someone like me to believe that I wasn’t just welcome in God’s house I had always been living within it.

Under his guidance, the Church remembered the Gospel that formed it. Not a Gospel of exclusion but of radical embrace. A Gospel that lifted the beggar, the widow, the outcast and made them the cornerstone.

For someone like me, it meant that even if tradition had not yet caught up to identity, love had. And love in the end is the Church's oldest and truest tradition.

Pope Francis showed us that revolution does not always come in banners it sometimes comes in gestures. In prayers. In softened language. In the quiet but powerful confession that God’s heart is larger than any structure we’ve built to contain it.

As his body slows and the candles begin to flicker, I know his spirit is not fading. It is expanding into every corner he opened, every life he touched, every person like me who once lived on the margins but now finds themselves sitting at the table.

In the mystery of our human experience, he and I are bound. Not by doctrine. Not by proximity. But by something far greater: GRACE. And in that grace, I’ve found belonging.

As the world begins to whisper its farewells, I say mine not with despair but with deep and abiding gratitude. You gave many of us what no one else dared to offer; visibility, dignity and a place at the sacred table.

Thank you Holy Father for showing us that holiness is not about perfection but compassion. That the Gospel lives not only in scripture but in how we love the least, the lost and those like me who once weren’t sure we could ever belong.

May the angels lift you gently. May the saints open wide the gates. And may your legacy of mercy, of revolution born in tenderness echo forever in the Church you helped to transform.

Rest in peace, Your Holiness.