For Christians, the struggle to love starts in each individual heart and then touches the world.
Pope Francis, the Argentinian pope who died on April 21, 2025, and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the American religious foundress who died on January 4, 1821, were centuries and continents apart. But their pastoral styles were forged along remarkably similar lines.
They were both leadership figures for the Church in the Americas, and they were both deeply influenced by Italian piety — Pope Francis via his immigrant Italian family and Elizabeth through the Filicchi family who introduced her to the Catholic Church in Italy.
But even more deeply than that, their personalities and struggles were surprisingly alike.
Jorge Bergoglio (the future Pope Francis) and Elizabeth Ann Seton both experienced tension with their fathers.
Pope Francis’s new autobiography, Hope, shares a number of frank remembrances about issues in his past that he was not proud of. Two concern the death of his father, José Bergoglio, when Jorge was in his early 20s.
From his hospital sickbed, his father attempted to arrange a photograph of himself with his five children. The future Pope was embarrassed about the idea and, “with the self-importance typical of young people, I managed to make sure it didn’t happen,” he said.
A few weeks later, when Jorge visited the hospital, he found his father sleeping, and not only didn’t allow him to be awakened, but when his father woke up anyway, he arranged for nurses to tell him that he had already gone.
These acts of disdain toward his father hurt him his whole life long. “I have often felt a deep pain and suffering for this lie of mine. How I wish I could replay that scene,” he said.
Elizabeth also lost her father in her 20s and had a distant relationship with him. She wrote about one incident from her early teens when her father was away:
“In the year 1789 when my Father was in England, I jumped in the wagon that was driving to the woods for brush about a mile from home,” and found a meadow with a chestnut tree, she wrote in her journal. “I thought at the time that my father did not care for me — well God was my Father — my all. I prayed, sang hymns, cried, laughed, in talking to myself of how far he could place me above all sorrow,” she continued.
For Elizabeth, this was a spiritual awakening. The fact that both she and Francis reviewed those incidents years later says a lot about their spiritual sensitivities — and their personalities.
Both Francis and Elizabeth admitted to struggling throughout their lives with their melancholic temperaments.
Pope Francis spoke about how the feeling of sorrow — and the more problematic feeling of enjoying sorrow — never left him. “Melancholy has always been a companion in my life, certainly not constant, but nonetheless a part of my essence, a sentiment that has accompanied me and which I have learned to recognize,” he wrote.
“Life inevitably has its sadnesses, which are part of every path of hope,” he added. “But it is important to avoid wallowing in melancholy at all costs, not to let it embitter the heart.”
Elizabeth Ann Seton, throughout her life as a mother and then later as a widow and religious sister, had the same predilection — and the same conviction to minimize it.
As a young adult, she wrote to a friend, “It is my fixed principle both as a Christian and a reasonable being never to dwell on thoughts of future events which do not depend on myself, yet I never view the setting sun or take a solitary walk but melancholy tries to seize me.”
She would eventually make it a spiritual practice to turn all such thoughts into longing for heaven. She described her formula for dealing with them in her spiritual remembrances: “Folly — sorrows — romance — miserable friendships — but all turned to good and thoughts of how silly to love anything in this world,” she wrote.
Mother Seton taught the Sisters of her congregation that the path to charity depends on this kind of detachment.
It was this kind of conviction that Pope Francis appreciated in the religious women in his life.
Pope Francis often spoke about the religious sisters he encountered in his life as a Jesuit and bishop in Argentina and then as pope.
But it started in childhood. “Nuns had a profound influence on me and on my entire family. They were companions and teachers at many happy and difficult moments of our lives,” he says in his autobiography.
He also shares an ironic story of an anti-clerical activist who, when badly ill, was cared for by religious sisters whom he cursed at first but grew to appreciate. When he returned to his factory job and heard a fellow worker shout out a curse word at a nun, the activist hit him so hard he knocked him down.
“You can say what you like about God and the priests, but don’t ever insult Holy Mary and the nuns!” he shouted.
If Pope Francis was a Jesuit who relied on the help of religious sisters, Elizabeth Ann Seton was a religious sister who relied on the help of Jesuits, particularly Archbishop John Carroll of Baltimore, to whom she turned again and again as she founded her congregation, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s.
With his help, her congregation became pioneers in both religious life and Catholic education in the United States.
Pope Francis also shared Mother Seton’s dedication to education.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton saw her teaching vocation as a call to be “the mother of many daughters.”
Pope Francis made the same observation. “Education is the most exciting challenge in life. As a high school teacher, it was something I thoroughly enjoyed,” he said. “It is an act of fatherly love, like giving life, and constantly requires us to participate, to question what we do.”
Francis and Elizabeth earned their spiritual fatherhood and motherhood through patience with their own weaknesses and struggles, and their determination to become who God needed them to be for others.
Or, to put it another way, both trained their hearts to love — and their love inspired the Church and the world.
TOM HOOPES, author most recently of The Rosary of Saint John Paul II, is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Kansas, where he teaches. He hosts The Extraordinary Story podcast about the life of Christ. His book What Pope Francis Really Said is now available on Audible. A former reporter in the Washington, D.C., area, he served as press secretary for the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman and spent 10 years as editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper and Faith & Family magazine. His work frequently appears in the Register, Aleteia, and Catholic Digest. He lives in Atchison, Kansas, with his wife, April, and has nine children.
Image: Pope Francis, via Shutterstock.