So farewell then …

As the Jesuits used to say: Give us the boy and we’ll keep the man, no matter his digressions in between.

It worked well for Robert Mugabe. After years as a revolutionary Maoist-Leninist anti-Christ he returned to the bosom of the Roman Catholic Mother Church and made regular confessions to his family priest.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at those sessions, assuming he sought forgiveness for the violence and excesses of his 37-year dictatorship.

Pope Francis, a lifelong Jesuit, has gone to the Great Basilica in the sky. No one can tell if he will bump into the spirit of Robert Mugabe there, wherever it is. It’s doubtful there’s segregation between forgiven bad guys and good guys like Francis.

Originally from Argentina, he was the first non-European pope in the hundreds of years of the papacy. With his knowledge of the ‘Global South’ he was a reformer of age-old doctrines but even he could only go so far in the historic bastions of Catholicism.

Modest, humble, humorous. A congregant asked him why her son was still living at the parental home at the age of 40 without moving out to start a God-fearing family of his own. Stop ironing his shirts, Francis told her.

Above all, he was a pope for the poor and disadvantaged. Build bridges not walls, he said. The Americans weren’t listening. He was anti-war and arms proliferation. Was anyone listening?

In the greater scheme of things, Catholicism has waned in developed countries but has grown in poor countries of Africa and the ‘Global South’ during his 13-year tenure in Rome.

American VP J.D. Vance said he didn’t realise how sick Francis was when he had an audience with him the day before he died.

“I got to shake his hand and tell him that I pray for him every day,” said Vance, a convert to Catholicism in 2019.

A fat lot of good that did.

Noticeable too was the applause given to Zelensky on his arrival at Francis’s funeral and the indifference that greeted Vance’s boss D. Trump.

Second rankers. Zimbabwe VP C. Chjiwenga meets J. Biden at the funeral. (Right) The Pope’s last ride to his final resting place, past the Colosseum to Santa Maria Maggiore, his favoured church in a poorer district of Rome.