Pope Francis, the Argentine pontiff who brought the difficult situation of the most marginalized in the world to the center of the care of the Roman Catholic Church, died at age 88, the Vatican announced on Monday.
A charismatic communicator with a friendly behavior, Francis successful when expanding the attractiveness of Catholicism in a moment of increasing disenchantment towards the Church, an institution wrapped in financial and sexual scandals.
Through his papacy from 2013 to 2025, the Pope stripped the Vatican of some layers of Opacy and connected with the concerns of the common people. He highlighted the difficult situation of the poor and that of the prisoners.
Francis condemned the abuse of power of the Church while committed to other religions.
Francis’s tone marked a radical deviation from his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who believed that fostering the most burning believers of the Church was the way to strengthen the institution.
But Francis’s change never resulted in fundamental changes in the doctrine of the Church on contentious issues. In most cases, he remained in line with previous papacies, firmly opposing gay marriage, women who become priests and priests who marry.
Even so, their steps to open the Church threw the wrath of the traditionalists, while the lack of radical change under their clock caused criticism of the progressives.
Religious pluralism and inequality
Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936 in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, of immigrant parents who fled from the fascist dictatorship of Italy or Benito Mussolini.
He trained as a chemical technician, worked in the food processing industry and, for a letter time, it was a gorilla in a nightclub in Córdoba before becoming a priest in 1969.
He liked to dance Tango, Althegh, preferred Milonga, Francis said in a 2010 interview, referring to the fastest rhythm music that preceded the tango.
His education in Buenos Aires exposed him to religious pluralism and socioconic inequalities, two factors that experts believe in their commitment to interreligious dialogue and the pointed criticisms of capital and consumerism.
With only 36 years of age, he became the head of the Jesuits of Argentina, a Roman Catholic order of priests.
At that time, it was a disciplinary tern, they say experts and biographers. At that time, the theology of liberation, a leftist interpretation of the Gospel that focused on concern for poor and oppressed slocks, was popular among the Jesuits in Latin America, but Francis did not subscribe to ideology.
Dirty war
Francis’s mandate coincided with the years of the dirty war in Argentina, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, seven years of brutal military dictatorship.
Tens of thousands of people were tortured, killed and missing. The role of the Church of Argentina in those years remains controversial, and Francis never openly denounces the regime.
Like the archbishop of Buenos Aires, a position he assumed in 1998, Hey said he was not aware of the scale of what was happening in the late 1970s, a position refuted by critics and associates that argue that it was not a way in which he could at that time.
“Pray … for the control of silence of the majority of society and the Church,” the duration of a ceremony in 1999, an appointment that some read as an admission of complacency.
Duration of his time as a archbishop, would become a critic opposite of social injustice and economic inequality.
“The church cannot simply sit sucking its finger when facing a frivolous, cold and calculating market economy,” he once said a sermon.
Breaking with tradition
In 2013, the Catholic world was surprised when the then Pope Benedict XVI resigned, breaking a centenary tradition of maintaining papal duties until death.
Francis, who by then had chosen the cardinal of the leg, hastened the Vatican to vote for a new Pope.
In what was a tight race, Francis, which had already been runner -up in the anterior papal conclave in 2005, was chosen.
With him, the Church chose its first non -European Pontiff in 1,282 years: the last one was Gregory III, chosen in 731 of Syria, and also its first leader from the global south, which today is the home of the majority.
Francis marked his papacy’s tone immediately. When he stopped on the great balcony and faced the huge crowd in the Plaza de San Pedro after being chosen, he broke with the tradition of blessing the crowd, asking people who pray for him.
He refused to move to the Grand Papal Apartment on the upper floor of the Vatican Palace, choosing to stay in the most modest residence of Domus Sanctae Marthae. I preferred to be driven in a Fiat instead of a Mercedes-Benz.
“Be shepherds with the smell of sheep,” he told a multitude of priests in 2013, urging a deviation from the pump and splendor associated with the hearachy of the clergy.
On his first trip out of Rome, he traveled to Lampedusa, an Italian island and a key entry point for migrants and refugees trying to reach Europe. He threw a crown of flowers into the sea to commemorate the people who died in the Mediterranean Sea as he risked their lives to come to Europe.
Francis criticized the plan of the then US president Donald Trump in 2017 to build a wall along the Mexican border and his speeches aimed at Muslims.
“In Pope Francis, the message that ‘all are brothers and sisters’ is very strong, along with insisting that God presses with religious multiness,” said Marco Politi, an expert in Vatican and author of the book Pope Francis.
Such pluralism translated into a more inclusive approach to other religions, said Politi, ending the “Cultural War of previous Papacies.”
From the Vatican to the Arabian Peninsula
The ties between the Church and the Muslims around the world had been grated when Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, delivered a speech in September 2006 that was perceived as linked to Islam with violence.
Francis became the first pontiff to travel to the Arabian Peninsula. In February 2019, the land in the United Arab Emirates, where he with Ahmed El-Tayeb, the great imam of the Al-Azhar mosque of Cairo.
Together, they signed a document that rejected religious fundamentalism, urging people to see in the other a “brother to support and love.” The Pope also had with El-Tayeb before, in 2016, in the Vatican.
In another first, Francis, in 2015, the encyclical laudato if ‘(praise for you), in which he urged the world to address the threat of climate change and at the same time emphasize the need to rethink the economic balance between worlds.
RESPONSE TO SEXUAL ABUSE IN THE CHURCH
The issue of sexual abuses perpetrated by church officials dominated the Ture of Benedict XVI, whose papacy saw a wave of scandals.
Francis and addressing the issue of abuse in 2019 by abolishing the rule of “Pontifical Secret” in cases related to sexual violence.
This meant that the testimonies collected in the canonical process were finally made available to the legal authorities.
That same year, after the Pope himself admitted to having dismissed valid sexual abuse claims in Chile, Hey introduced a law that describes clear rules to inform child sexual abuse committed by church officials and tries to cover it.
Four years later, that rule was updated and strength to expand the category of victims to vulnerable adults, while Lypeople working for the Church could now also face the punishment. But the defenders and critics of the victims say that Francis was not far enough to guarantee justice.
“Who am I to judge?”
Francis drastically changed the tone of the church towards homosexuality, ending the vatican of the homosexual people.
“Who am I to judge?” He said in 2013, his words are a marked contrast to those of Pope John Paul II, which more than 10 years before called a march for the rights of homosexuals in Rome “a crime of Christian values.”
More recent, on his way back from a trip to South Sudan, Francis said that being Gay was not a crime.
He expressed his support for same -sex civil unions. In 2023, he hinted that he was open to review the practice of celibacy.
In December 2023, the Vatican, in a historical failure, decided that Catholic priests could administer blessings to same -sex couples, provided that the thesis did not occur in the context of civil unions or liturgies of the Church.
At the same time, the pontiff opposed homosexual marriage and abortion, and although it included women in the Vatican government, it always ruled out its becoming priests.
Through his papacy, Francis was often found under attack of conservative and progressive fields.
Those who followed the traditional doctrine saw him as a reformer too much and a socialist, while the deepest changes within the Church did not consider that he is bold enough.
Politi, the expert in the Vatican, argues that Francis’s decision not to make changes that were too radical votes of an understanding that would have torn torn torn a church already very divided. Instead, he says, Francis opted “to trigger transformation processes in his mentality through Gesturgen and words.”