A Brush with the Divine: Remembering Pope Francis’ Visit to Manila

I was 15 when Pope Francis stopped by the Philippines in 2015. Unsurprisingly, that visit saw millions of devout Filipinos flock to Quirino Grandstand just to try to catch any glimpse they could of the leader of the Catholic faith. 

There’s something poetic, and even cinematic, about the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio dying one day after Easter Sunday. The same can be said about the tales passed on to me by my friends and family who were fortunate enough to have laid eyes on him.

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Pope Francis in Manila

Pope Francis was the first pope to visit Manila since Pope John Paul II in 1995. There were reports John Paul was set to return to country in 2003 but couldn't after his Parkinson’s disease worsened. 

In the case of Pope Francis, the news of his death immediately conjured images of him in the popemobile, cruising through the cramped streets of Manila.

According to official estimates, close to seven million people stood in the humid and rainy Luneta skies to attend Pope Francis' last mass in the country. It was reportedly the largest papal crowd in the world, ever. Nearly 40,000 law enforcers were deployed in Manila at the time to block security threats, and cellular service in the area to call or text anyone was virtually nonexistent, thanks to the cell jammers due to the sheer volume of people.

If you happened to be in Manila in the weeks leading up to Pope Francis’ visit, good luck trying to listen to anything other than Jamie Rivera’s “We Are All God’s Children,” the official theme song that played through virtually every loudspeaker in every mall I came across.

Besides Manila, Lolo Kiko (which was an endearing nickname Pope Francis got during his time here) also visited Tacloban and Palo in Leyte, both of which had been devastated by super typhoons Haiyan (Yolanda) and Hagupit (Ruby).

"I only really got to see the top of his head after what felt like a whole day of squeezing and shimmying through a sea of people," one of my closest friends, let's call him JD, told me about seeing Pope Francis in 2015. “And yet there was a sense of serenity that came over me even after seeing what I thought was the hat he always wears.”

“I was probably 16 back then,” another friend told me. “When the pope showed up, everything seemed quiet in Luneta, and it was probably the only time I genuinely felt inner peace, where all the cheers and noise didn’t matter.”

Aerial shot of Rizal Park during the Papal Visit, January 2015

As for me, I was in the middle of finishing high school in an established Catholic school in Makati that year and my religion teacher “strongly encouraged” us to try to go out and see Pope Francis and to write about how we felt about the experience in class.

Many of my schoolmates also went to something called papal camp, which involved reflections, fellowship, and traditional camp activities like talks over bonfires and smores. We even studied Pope Francis’ Laudato Si encyclical in class. I never really thought that a pope could speak out on the excesses of consumerism, but he did. I thought he was a very different pope than what I was used to since he was very open to talking about things that other spiritual leaders normally wouldn't.

A brush with the divine

At the time, I could not imagine another human being the cause of what my brother and dad called “an invitation to the divine.” My older brother Matthew, after waiting under the sun for nearly six hours, said he had caught the Pope’s gaze for just a split second, which was long enough to leave a profound imprint on him. 

“Once I had dropped my phone, for a split second, I saw his iconic face...as if....no,...HE WAS looking directly at me,” my brother said in a Facebook post in January 2015. “I was dumbstruck and could not talk for the next few seconds and It was miraculous that our eyes met in spite of him being in a moving vehicle.” 

My brother said that his decision not to stay glued to his phone or worry about getting the perfect shot of the pope was the best thing he could have done so he could get lost in that moment. 

My dad, meanwhile, was supposed to attend and even serve in the papal mass as a minister, but he fell ill and tried to get a cab home along Quirino Avenue when he saw the pontiff.

“And then suddenly there he was in the Popemobile right in front of me waving,” he told me over dinner. “It felt like it was some type of grace that did not want me to leave empty-handed.” 

“Francis started his papacy with mercy, and I felt every of bit of that when he drove past me in that instant,” he added. 

Now that Pope Francis is gone, I’m left with questions like: how young will the next guy be? And will he be even more of an iconoclast and challenge norms as much as his predecessor did? Will I ever see a Filipino pope in my lifetime? 

A decade later, halfway through my 20s, I’m feeling this tinge of regret missing out on what seemed like an overwhelming sense of clarity and calm—and perhaps even a brush of the divine—that my friends and family felt when Pope Francis made his first and only visit to the Philippines.