Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday at 88, is being lauded in death as the “pope of the peripheries,” having pointed humanity’s collective consciousness to places and peoples beyond the Catholic Church’s administrative center in the West.
In the Philippines, through a visit, episcopal appointments, and devotional actions among others, the pontiff set the tone for the hierarchy and laity to be more missionary, merciful, and synodal.
These numbers help tell the story of a Pope and his flock in a nation known as the cradle of Christianity in the Far East and the world’s third largest predominantly Catholic country after Brazil and Mexico.
1 Apostolic visit to the…