Vatican City: Pope Francis, history’s first Latin American pontiff who charmed the world with his humble style and concern for the poor but alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and climate change, has died Monday. He was 88.
“At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the home of the Father. His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of his Church Cardinal,” Kevin Ferrell, the Vatican camerlengo, said in an announcement.
Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital February 14, 2025, for a respiratory crisis that developed into double pneumonia.
He spent 38 days there, the longest hospitalisation of his 12-year papacy.
From his first greeting as pope — a remarkably normal “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) — to his embrace of refugees and the downtrodden, Francis signalled a very different tone for the papacy, stressing humility over hubris for a Catholic Church beset by scandal and accusations of indifference.
After that rainy night on March 13, 2013, the Argentine-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio brought a breath of fresh air into a 2,000-year-old institution that had seen its influence wane during the troubled tenure of Pope Benedict XVI, whose surprise resignation led to Francis’ election.
But Francis soon invited troubles of his own, and conservatives grew increasingly upset with his progressive bent, outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics and crackdown on traditionalists. His greatest test came in 2018 when he botched a notorious case of clergy sexual abuse in Chile, and the scandal that festered under his predecessors erupted anew on his watch.
And then Francis, the crowd-loving, globe-trotting pope of the peripheries, navigated the unprecedented reality of leading a universal religion through the coronavirus pandemic from a locked-down Vatican City.
He implored the world to use COVID-19 as an opportunity to rethink the economic and political framework that he said had turned rich against poor.
“We have realised that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented,” Francis told an empty St. Peter’s Square in March 2020. But he also stressed the pandemic showed the need for “all of us to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other”.
Reforming the Vatican
Francis was elected on a mandate to reform the Vatican bureaucracy and finances but went further in shaking up the church without changing its core doctrine. “Who am I to judge?” he replied when asked about a purportedly gay priest.
The comment sent a message of welcome to the LGBTQ+ community and those who felt shunned by a church that had stressed sexual propriety over unconditional love. “Being homosexual is not a crime,” he told The Associated Press in 2023, urging an end to civil laws that criminalise it.
Stressing mercy, Francis changed the church’s position on the death penalty, calling it inadmissible in all circumstances. He also declared the possession of nuclear weapons, not just their use, was “immoral”.
In other firsts, he approved an agreement with China over bishop nominations that had vexed the Vatican for decades, met the Russian patriarch and charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.
He reaffirmed the all-male, celibate priesthood and upheld the church’s opposition to abortion, equating it to “hiring a hitman to solve a problem”.
Roles for women
But he added women to important decision-making roles and allowed them to serve as lectors and acolytes in parishes. He let women vote alongside bishops in periodic Vatican meetings, following longstanding complaints that women do much of the church’s work but are barred from power.
Sister Nathalie Becquart, whom Francis named to one of the highest Vatican jobs, said his legacy was a vision of a church where men and women existed in a relationship of reciprocity and respect.
“It was about shifting a pattern of domination — from human being to the creation, from men to women — to a pattern of cooperation,” said Becquart, the first woman to hold a voting position in a Vatican synod.
The church as refuge
While Francis did not allow women to be ordained, the voting reform was part of a revolutionary change in emphasizing what the church should be: a refuge for everyone — “todos, todos, todos” (“everyone, everyone, everyone”) — not for the privileged few.
Migrants, the poor, prisoners and outcasts were invited to his table far more than presidents or powerful CEOs.
“For Pope Francis, it was always to extend the arms of the church to embrace all people, not to exclude anyone,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell, whom Francis named as camerlengo, taking charge after a pontiff’s death or retirement.
Francis demanded his bishops apply mercy and charity to their flocks, pressed the world to protect God’s creation from climate disaster, and challenged countries to welcome those fleeing war, poverty and oppression.
After visiting Mexico in 2016, Francis said of then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump that anyone building a wall to keep migrants out “is not Christian”.
While progressives were thrilled with Francis’ radical focus on Jesus’ message of mercy and inclusion, it troubled conservatives who feared he watered down Catholic teaching and threatened the very Christian identity of the West. Some even called him a heretic.
A few cardinals openly challenged him. Francis usually responded with his typical answer to conflict: silence.
He made it easier for married Catholics to get an annulment, allowed priests to absolve women who had had abortions and decreed that priests could bless same-sex couples. He opened debate on issues like homosexuality and divorce, giving pastors wiggle room to discern how to accompany their flocks, rather than handing them strict rules to apply.
St. Francis of Assisi as a model
Francis lived in the Vatican hotel instead of the Apostolic Palace, wore his old orthotic shoes and not the red loafers of the papacy, and rode in compact cars. It wasn’t a gimmick.
“I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he told a Jesuit journal in 2013. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”
If becoming the first Latin American and first Jesuit pope wasn’t enough, Francis was also the first to name himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century friar known for personal simplicity, a message of peace, and care for nature and society’s outcasts.
Francis sought out the unemployed, the sick, the disabled and the homeless. He formally apologised to Indigenous peoples for the crimes of the church from colonial times onward.
And he himself suffered: He had part of his colon removed in 2021, then needed more surgery in 2023 to repair a painful hernia and remove intestinal scar tissue. Starting in 2022 he regularly used a wheelchair or cane because of bad knees, and endured bouts of bronchitis.
He went to society’s fringes to minister with mercy: caressing the grossly deformed head of a man in St. Peter’s Square, kissing the tattoo of a Holocaust survivor, or inviting Argentina’s garbage scavengers to join him onstage in Rio de Janeiro.
“We have always been marginalized, but Pope Francis always helped us,” said Coqui Vargas, a transgender woman whose Roman community forged a unique relationship with Francis during the pandemic.
His first trip as pope was to the island of Lampedusa, then the epicentre of Europe’s migration crisis. He consistently chose to visit poor countries where Christians were often persecuted minorities, rather than the centers of global Catholicism.
Friend and fellow Argentine, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, said his concern for the poor and disenfranchised was based on the Beatitudes — the eight blessings Jesus delivered in the Sermon on the Mount for the meek, the merciful, the poor in spirit and others.
“Why are the Beatitudes the program of this pontificate? Because they were the basis of Jesus Christ’s own program,” Sánchez said.
AP
