“I have lived too long with those who hate peace.”

That's the title of one of the chapters in the autobiography Francis published months ago. In fact, since they hated peace, they hated him; so much so that they prayed for his quick death. That's why, last fall, he said goodbye to a group of Catalans who came to see him in Rome with a smile: "Pray for me, but in a good way, okay?"

Francis, who no longer wished to live in the Apostolic Palace, will not be buried in the Vatican, like his predecessors. "The Vatican is the home of my final service, not of eternity," he had said, and left written that he would be buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, without pomp or catafalque, nor a triple coffin of cypress, lead, and oak.

A Pope who on the first day rejected the red shoes with a "Carnival is over", who traveled to Mosul and Mongolia, who brought a family of Syrian refugees from Lampedusa to Rome, who asked that the churches of the cities be opened as field hospitals (such as the parish of Santa Anna, in Barcelona)He left an explicit will about who his people were and how they were to be treated.

Francis has become a moral counterweight to Trump's fear and darkness in the global battle for ideas, and now the battle will move to the conclave, because the new Pope will be a coveted prize. Four months ago, Francis appointed 21 new cardinals from Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Japan, the Philippines, Serbia, Brazil, the Ivory Coast, Iran, Canada, Australia, and Italy, informed by a thought by Gustav Mahler for which he had an understandable predilection: "Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire."