PITTSBURGH (TNS) — “It’s true that if you venture out onto the street, the same thing could happen to you as could happen to anyone: you could have an accident,” said the Argentinian cleric Jorge Bergoglio in a book-length interview he gave three years before becoming Pope Francis. “But I prefer an injured Church to a sick Church, a thousand times over.”

Pope Francis has died, after 12 years in an office that gets much attention from the world’s media, but has little power in the world beyond what influence the pope can get from what he says.

He tried, if I understand him right, to shape the Catholic church into a body that understood how marginal it has become, and how much more marginal it’s going to get. He saw this as a chance for the Catholic church to do better at doing what it’s supposed to do.

LOOKING FOR THE 99 Jesus spoke of a shepherd who left the 99 sheep in the fold to find the one that was lost. Today, Francis said, “We have one in the flock and 99 that we are not searching for.”

The church is certainly declining in Europe and the English-speaking countries, measured by the number of Catholics who go to Mass every Sunday, something the church requires. Complicating matters, the percentage even of those who go every Sunday who consider the church an authority for their lives, personal and public, is small. The bishops, once powers in the land, have little more public status than the CEO of a middle-sized company.

The Diocese of Pittsburgh claims 628,000 Catholics, about 1/3rd of the population, but as far as I can find (you won’t find the number on the diocesan website), only about 120,000 go to Mass on a typical Sunday. That number is from 2018 and may well be lower now. Judging from a typical Sunday Mass, the average age must be 50 or more.

Programs with titles like “The Church alive!” — declining institutions love programs with happy titles that essentially manage decline — don’t help. Reporters don’t turn to the bishops for comments on local affairs. The church even in traditionally Catholic Pittsburgh exists as a private club, not as a public enterprise.

Francis’s predecessor Benedict understood how much political and cultural power the Catholic church had lost in the last 60 years and in response emphasized a deeper knowledge of the church’s teaching and urged more reverence in the church’s worship. He wanted to make Catholics stronger believers and the church a more coherent and committed community.

He wanted the church to get better at doing what it does, hoping that the church would shrink in order to do more for the world. He believed the church was much better off without the power it once had, and had often abused.

LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WHERE THEY LIVE Francis took a different approach, but to the same end. In a world with 99 out of 100 sheep outside the flock, he said, “the most basic thing for the Church is not to reduce or limit the requirements or make this or that easier, but to go out and seek people, to know people by name.” The church needed “to go outside and look for people where they live, where they suffer, and where they hope.” A church that exists only for its members “will atrophy” and “a self-referential church … becomes paranoid.” (The second I think we see today in the persecution complex many Christians have.)

In one of his most famous lines, Francis used the old image of the church as “a field hospital after battle.” The Church, he said, “does not exist to condemn people but to bring about an encounter with the visceral love of God’s mercy,” the way parents love their children, even the wayward ones. If there’s a judgment, leave it implied, because it rarely needs to be said.

”God loves us in this way, with compassion and mercy,” he continued. “Jesus does not look at reality from the outside, without letting himself be moved, as if he were taking a picture. He lets himself get involved. This kind of compassion is needed today to conquer the globalization of indifference. This kind of regard is needed when we find ourselves in front of a poor person, an outcast, or a sinner. This is the compassion that nourishes the awareness that we, too, are sinners.”

SPEAKING OF MERCY FIRST Reversing the traditional pattern of judgement first, then proclamation — an act many American Catholics deeply opposed — the late pope wanted us to speak about mercy without first setting out the reasons we need mercy. “We” because he insisted Catholics are no different, certainly no better, than anyone else, and just as in need of compassion and mercy, and therefor responsible for giving everyone else what they want for themselves.

He wanted Catholics to speak to others as a doctor who wants them healed: first listen to them without judgement as they talk about themselves, then make the offer of healing, then give the diagnosis, then present the treatment they may not like but may accept because you did not judge. You might change a life that would be lost if you judged first.

(David Mills is deputy editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)