Pope Francis Projects a Lonely Moral Voice in a New World of Politics and Trump

Opinion|What the World Will Lose When This Papacy Ends

Pope Francis has been in a Rome hospital for a month, battling double pneumonia and its complications. His condition would be serious for anyone but could be more threatening for an 88-year-old man who had part of a lung removed as a youth and who stubbornly refuses to slow down. While the Vatican reported this week that he is improving, he may be so weakened that, some have speculated, he could decide to step down.

Either way, the fate of a pope remains of great concern among the world’s approximately 1.3 billion Catholics, and a source of heightened curiosity for those who see Francis as an increasingly lonely moral voice on the world stage and wonder what kind of pope will eventually succeed him.

The yearning for a leader who puts the needs and interests of others — including the least powerful — ahead of his own is felt especially among the many Americans today who desperately seek a light inside the darkness of Donald Trump.

For this pope has emerged as an increasingly lonely moral voice against perilous global trends that have at times left the forces of liberal democracy reeling: nationalism, populism, disinformation, xenophobia, economic inequality and authoritarianism. A world without a pope like Francis will in some ways resemble a Hobbesian dystopia without both a prophet pointing to our better angels and a sensible idealist showing a better way.

Francis has become even more outspoken as those worrisome political trends accelerated, especially with Mr. Trump’s electoral victory. Shortly before the onset of his current illness, Francis took direct aim at Mr. Trump’s mass deportation policy and demonization of immigrants. “What is built on the basis of force,” Francis warned in an extraordinary letter to American bishops, “and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”

The pope proclaimed his vision almost immediately after he was elected 12 years ago this month as the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere, the first Jesuit pope, the first to take the name of the saint from Assisi. He traveled in the sweltering heat to the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where so many migrants have landed, or where their boats and bodies were lost, and celebrated Mass on an altar made from the wood of refugee boats.