By Philip Pullella
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis changed the face of the modern papacy more than any predecessor by shunning much of its pomp and privilege, but his attempts to make the Catholic Church more inclusive and less judgmental made him an enemy to conservatives nostalgic for a traditional past.
The Vatican said on Monday in a video statement that he had died.
Francis inherited a deeply divided Church after the resignation in 2013 of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. The conservative-progressive gap became a chasm after Francis, from Argentina, was elected the first non-European pope in 1,300 years.
The polarization was fiercest in the United States, where conservative Catholicism often blended with well-financed right-wing politics and media outlets.
For nearly a decade until Benedict’s death in 2022, there were two men wearing white in the Vatican, causing much confusion among the faithful and leading to calls for written norms on the role of retired popes.
The intensity of conservative animosity to the pope was laid bare in January 2023 when it emerged that the late Australian Cardinal George Pell, a towering figure in the conservative movement and a Benedict ally, was the author of an anonymous memo in 2022 that condemned Francis’ papacy as a “catastrophe”.
The memo amounted to a conservative manifesto of the qualities conservatives will want in the next pope.
Francis appointed nearly 80% of the cardinal electors who will choose the next pope, increasing, but not guaranteeing, the possibility that his successor will continue his progressive policies. Some Vatican experts have predicted a more moderate, less divisive successor.
Under his watch, an overhauled Vatican constitution allowed any baptised lay Catholic, including women, to head most departments in the Catholic Church’s central administration.
He put more women in senior Vatican roles than any previous pope but not as many as progressives wanted.
Francis was 76 when he was elected to the post and his health was generally good for most of his papacy. He recovered well from intestinal surgery in 2021 but a year later a nagging knee problem forced him to slow down. He was never keen on exercise and the restriction of a wheelchair and a cane led to a visible increase in his weight.
His inability to help bring an end to the war in Ukraine was a great disappointment. From the day of Russia’s invasion in February 2022, he made appeals for peace at nearly every public appearance, at least twice a week.
The conflict brought relations between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church to a new low in 2022 when Francis said its Patriarch Kirill, who supported the conflict, should not act like “Putin’s Altar Boy”.
He made frequent appeals for the release of hostages taken by Hamas militants but increased criticism of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza ahead of the January 2025 ceasefire agreement in the Israel-Hamas war that erupted in October 2023.
BESIEGED BY CONSERVATIVES
Conservatives were unhappy with the pope from the start because of his informal style, his aversion to pomp and his decision to allow women and Muslims to take part in a Holy Thursday ritual that previously had been restricted to Catholic men.
They balked at his calls for the Church to be more welcoming to LGBT people, his approval of conditional blessings for same-sex couples in December 2023 and his repeated clampdowns on the use of the traditional Latin Mass. He said conservatives had made themselves self-referential and wanted to encase Catholicism in a “suit of armour”.
Their spiritual gurus were Pell and U.S. Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, who once famously compared the Church under Francis to “a ship without a rudder”.
In 2016 and in 2023, Burke and a handful of other cardinals lodged public challenges known as “Dubia” (doubts), accusing Francis of sowing confusion on moral themes, once threatening to issue a public “correction” themselves.
They spoke at conferences where participants openly referred to Francis as the precursor of the Antichrist and the end of the world.
“I don’t feel like judging them,” the pope told Reuters in 2018. “I pray to the Lord that He settles their hearts and even mine.”
But a year after Benedict’s death, Francis lost his patience with conservative ringleaders, stripping Burke, who was rarely in Rome, of his Vatican privileges, including a subsidized apartment and a salary.
Burke’s punishment came days after Francis dismissed Bishop Joseph E. Strickland of Tyler, Texas, another of his fiercest critics among U.S. Catholic conservatives, after Strickland refused to step down following a Vatican investigation.
Conservatives were also rattled by his decision to declare capital punishment inadmissible in all cases, his frequent attacks on the arms industry, and his calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
But liberals were deeply disappointed in 2020 when Francis dismissed a proposal to allow some married men to be ordained in remote areas, such as in the Amazon.
SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDALS
Francis’ papacy was also marked by his struggle to restore credibility to a Church rattled to its core by clergy sexual abuse scandals, even though the overwhelming part of the crimes took place before his election.
Francis summoned almost 200 Church leaders to a summit in February 2019 on child sex abuse by the clergy, issued a landmark decree making bishops directly accountable for sexual abuse or covering it up, and abolished “pontifical secrecy” for abuse cases. Victims’ groups said this was too little, too late.
The COVID-19 crisis forced him to cancel all trips in 2020 and to hold virtual general audiences, depriving him of the contact with people that he thrived on.
But he also said the pandemic offered a chance for a great reset, to narrow the gap between rich and poor nations. “We can either exit from this pandemic better than before, or worse,” he said often. He criticized “vaccine nationalism,” saying poor countries should be given priority.
On March 27, 2020, when the whole world was in various forms of lockdowns and death tolls spiralled, he held a dramatic, solitary prayer service in St. Peter’s Square, urging everyone to see the crisis as a test of solidarity and a reminder of basic values.
Francis moved to clean up the Curia, the staid central administration of the Roman Catholic Church that was held responsible for many of the missteps and scandals that marred Pope Benedict’s eight-year pontificate.
Despite massive improvements compared to the past papacies, financial scandals still plagued the Vatican during Francis’ pontificate.
In 2020, he took drastic action by firing Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who was accused of embezzlement and nepotism and was also enmeshed in a scandal involving the Vatican’s purchase of a luxury building in London. Becciu has denied any wrongdoing.
On July 3, 2021, Becciu was among 10 people sent to trial in the Vatican charged with financial crimes including embezzlement, money laundering, fraud, extortion and abuse of office. In December 2023 Becciu was found guilty on several counts of embezzlement and fraud and sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail. He and others convicted are free pending appeal.
Francis brought the Catholic Church’s dialogue with Islam to new heights in 2019 by becoming the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula, but conservatives attacked him as a “heretic” for signing a joint document on inter-religious fraternity with Muslim leaders.
A trip to Iraq in March 2021, the first ever by a pope, aimed to solidify better relations with Islam while also paying tribute to the Christians whose two millennia-old communities were devastated by wars and Islamic State.
FROM BUENOS AIRES TO THE VATICAN
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on December 17, 1936 into a family of Italian immigrants who had settled in Buenos Aires.
He attended a technical high school and worked for a while as a chemical technician at a food laboratory. After he decided to become a priest, he studied at the diocesan seminary and in 1958 entered the Jesuit religious order.
At about that time, when he was 21, he caught pneumonia and had to have the top part of one lung removed because of cysts.
While still in the seminary, his vocation was thrown into crisis when he was “dazzled” by a young woman he met at a family wedding. But he stuck to his plans and after studies in Argentina, Spain and Chile, he was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1969, rapidly rising to head the order in Argentina.
That coincided with the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, during which up to 30,000 suspected leftists were kidnapped and killed.
The Vatican has denied accusations by some critics in Argentina that Francis stayed silent during the human rights abuses or that he failed to protect two priests who challenged the dictatorship.
As archbishop of Buenos Aires from 2001-2013, he clashed frequently with the Argentine government, saying it needed to pay more attention to social needs.
A SIMPLE START
Francis endeared himself to millions with his simplicity when he spoke minutes after his election as pope on March 13, 2013.
“Brothers and sisters, good evening,” were his first words from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, departing from the traditional salutation “Praised be Jesus Christ!”.
The first pope from Latin America and the first Jesuit to hold the post, Francis was also the first in six centuries to take over the Church after the resignation of a pope.
He took the name Francis in honour of Francis of Assisi, the saint associated with peace, concern for the poor, and respect for the environment.
In that first appearance, the new pope shunned the crimson, fur-trimmed “mozzetta”, or cape, and also did not wear a gold cross but kept around his neck the same faded silver-plated one he used as archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Gone too were the plush red “shoes of the fisherman” used by his predecessors. He kept the same simple black shoes he always used and wore $20 plastic watches, giving some away so they could be auctioned off for charity.
In his first meeting with journalists three days later, Francis said: “How I would like a Church that is poor and for the poor.”
MODEST LIVING
Inside the tiny city-state, where some cardinals lived like princes in frescoed apartments, Francis renounced the spacious papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace and never moved out of the Vatican hotel where he and the other cardinals who entered the conclave of 2013 were billeted in simple rooms.
The Santa Marta residence, a modern building with a common dining room, became the nerve centre of the more than 1.3 billion-member Roman Catholic Church.
“It (the decision to stay in Santa Marta) saved my life,” he told Reuters in an interview in 2018, explaining that apartments used by his predecessors were like a “funnel” isolating inhabitants.
The bulletproof papal limousine was dispatched to the Vatican Museums and Francis took to being driven around Rome in a blue Ford Focus with no security features.
His first trip outside Rome was to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa to pay tribute to the thousands of migrants who had drowned in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe and a better life.
“In this globalised world we have fallen into the globalisation of indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others. It doesn’t regard us. It doesn’t interest us. It’s not our business,” he said.
A TERRIBLE YEAR
The year 2018 was Francis’ “annus horribilis” – chiefly because of the simmering crisis around Church sex abuse.
It began with a trip to Chile in January, where at first he strongly defended a bishop who had been accused of covering up sexual abuse, testily telling reporters that there was “not a single piece of evidence against him”.
His comments were widely criticised by victims, their advocates and in newspaper editorials throughout Latin America.
Even key papal adviser Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston distanced himself, saying the pope had caused “great pain”. Francis later apologised, saying his choice of words and tone of voice had “wounded many”.
Soon after he returned, he sent the Church’s top sexual abuse investigator to Chile.
The subsequent report by Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta accused Chile’s bishops of “grave negligence” for decades in investigating the allegations and said evidence of sex crimes had been destroyed.
That May, all of Chile’s 34 bishops offered their resignations en masse. The pope accepted seven resignations over the next few months. He later defrocked the two other bishops and the priest at the centre of the abuse scandal.
Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., stepped down as cardinal over sexual misconduct accusations in July and in August the U.S. Catholic Church was rocked by a grand jury report in Pennsylvania that detailed 70 years of abuse.
“With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them,” Francis wrote in a letter to all Catholics on August 20, 2018.
Still, the topic of sexual abuse dominated his trip to Ireland in August 2018, during which a conservative Italian archbishop took advantage of the media’s presence to issue an unprecedented broadside demanding that the pope resign over the McCarrick affair.
Francis defrocked McCarrick in February 2019, making him the highest-profile Church figure to be dismissed from the priesthood in modern times.
An institutional report on McCarrick in 2020 showed that Francis’ two predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, knew about rumours of his sexual misconduct but promoted him or failed to discipline him anyway.
WORLDWIDE PRESTIGE
Francis enjoyed considerable prestige internationally, both for his calls for social justice as well as for risky political overtures.
He made more than 45 international trips including the first by any pope to Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Myanmar, North Macedonia, Bahrain and Mongolia.
In 2014, secret contacts mediated by the Vatican resulted in a rapprochement between the long-hostile United States and Cuba.
In 2018, he led the Vatican to a landmark deal on the appointment of bishops in China, which conservatives criticized as a sell-out by the Church to Beijing’s communist government.
Under his watch, the Vatican and the United Nations teamed up to hold international conferences on climate change and in June 2015 he issued an encyclical in which he demanded “action now” to save the planet.
In the 2018 interview with Reuters, he said then U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement had pained him “because the future of humanity is at stake”. The pope and Trump were at odds over many issues, mostly immigration.
Throughout his pontificate, Francis spoke out for the rights of refugees and criticised countries that shunned migrants.
He visited the Greek island of Lesbos and brought a dozen refugees to Italy on his plane, and asked Church institutions to work to stop human trafficking and modern slavery.
He ordered his charity arm to help the homeless in the neighbourhood around the Vatican, opening a shelter and a place for them to have baths and haircuts and see foot doctors. He gave the homeless a private tour of the Sistine Chapel.
During a trip to Sicily in 2018, he appealed to “brothers and sisters of the Mafia” to repent, saying the island needed “men and women of love, not men and women ‘of honour,'” using the term mobsters apply to themselves.
After a wave of Islamist militant attacks in France in 2015-2016, including the killing of an elderly priest who was saying Mass, the pope called on all religions to declare that killing in God’s name was “Satanic”.
THE FRANCIS EFFECT
Although his style was not welcomed by all members of the Church hierarchy, some of whom had become accustomed to the luxury of stately mansions and palaces, the “Francis Effect” began trickling down the ranks.
His desire to connect extended to telephone calls. He became known as the “cold call pope” for phoning people unannounced, usually after they had written to him about a problem or he had heard that they had been touched by tragedy.
“This is Francis,” were the words incredulous people heard on the other end of the line. “Really, this is Pope Francis.”
He also sought more openness with journalists. On one freewheeling encounter on the way back from Brazil in 2013, the pope, responding to a question about gay priests, offered an answer that made world headlines.
“If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?”
The comment did not mark a change in Church teaching that calls homosexual acts sinful, but it became emblematic of his preference for mercy over condemnation.
A CHURCH FOR THE POOR
From the start, Francis sent clear signals to priests and bishops about the type of Church he wanted.
He said there was no room for “careerists or social climbers” among the clergy, told cardinals they should not live “like princes,” and said the Church should not “dissect theology” in lush salons while there were poor people around the corner.
“If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy and people say ‘what are we going to do?’ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing. This is our crisis today. A Church that is poor and for the poor has to fight this mentality,” he said early in his papacy.
Even as pope, Francis remained an ardent fan of the Buenos Aires San Lorenzo soccer team.
In the 2018 interview with Reuters, Francis said he did not miss Argentina. “I only miss the street. I am a ‘callejero’ (a man of the streets). I really would like to be able to do that again, but I can’t now.”
(Reporting by Philip Pullella and Joshua McElwee; Editing by Frances Kerry)
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