Pope Francis, the charismatic and conciliatory Argentinian who moved to liberalize the Roman Catholic Church, dramatically reorienting the papacy’s posture toward homosexuality and modestly expanding the role of women at Mass, died early Monday, hours after making his last public appearance on Easter Sunday. He was 88.
His cause of death was not immediately released by the Vatican, but he had been receiving treatment for double pneumonia and chronic bronchitis for the past two months.
“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 early morning announcement Monday.
“He taught us to live the values of the Gospel with faithfulness, courage, and universal love, especially for the poorest and most marginalized.”
Francis made his last public appearance on Sunday, emerging to bless thousands of believers in St. Peter’s Square and then riding the popemobile through the piazza. Before that, he had met briefly with U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
A humble one-time bouncer whose playful humor and advocacy for the poor led fans to call him the “People’s Pope,” Francis had struggled with health complications throughout his life. He lost part of a lung to a severe case of pneumonia as a teenager, and had surgery to remove half of his colon in 2021. In June 2023, he underwent abdominal surgery to remove painful blockages.
To his supporters inside and outside the church, Francis was a pope for the modern age, helping to heal the reputation of an institution wracked by far-reaching sex abuse scandals. He expressed openness toward gay people, urged Muslim-Catholic collaboration, and focused intensely on the rights of refugees and the threats posed by climate change.
Still, he stopped short of making major changes to Catholic Church doctrine. Even as he rewrote Canon rules to allow women to serve communion and read at Mass, they remained barred from the priesthood.
Francis enjoyed immense popularity with rank-and-file Catholics during his 12-year papacy but struggled with conservative church hierarchy, sometimes finding himself at odds with traditional voices within the Curia. His approach infuriated some conservative Catholics, who saw him as a heavy-handed outsider. Born in Buenos Aires, he was the first pope from outside Europe in nearly 1,300 years, and was the only-ever Jesuit pope.
In his first year as pope, Francis offered a five-word stance on gay priests — “Who am I to judge?” — that jolted a church whose previous leader, the conservative Pope Benedict XVI, aggressively pushed to purge homosexuality from the priesthood.
Francis’ remark, delivered to reporters during a news conference on a papal plane, came in Italian but with the word “gay” in English. The comment would come to characterize the tenure of a voluble pope who preached compassion and worked to keep the church relevant in a changing world.
With a quick wit and spartan style, Francis cut a clear contrast to Benedict, a shy former professor from Germany who avoided extended meetings with the press and enjoyed spending time at the palatial Castel Gandolfo, the papal residence southeast of Rome.
After Benedict retired and Francis replaced him in 2013, the new pope spurned Castel Gandolfo and impressed the international media with his down-to-earth demeanor and thrifty trimmings.
Francis wore a crucifix of iron rather than gold, washed and kissed the feet of Muslim and Hindu migrants, and carried his own bag. He jokingly noted that his luggage was not the “suitcase with the codes for the nuclear bomb.”
When he was elected the 266th pope and the first from South America, he took the name Francis in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, who worked as a low-wage kitchenhand and did not pass a collection plate when he preached.
“I would like a church that is poor and is for the poor,” Francis said after he was chosen to lead the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics in March 2013.
A year later, he became the first pope in memory to make a public display of entering a confessional booth not to absolve others of sins, but to confess his own.
Francis worked toward a more inclusive church — departing from Benedict, who favored a smaller, more ideologically pure church — and took significant steps to build the institution in his own image, appointing more than 1,000 bishops and diversifying the cardinal ranks.
Conservative Catholics in America charged that Francis’ doctrine of inclusion was damaging the church and depriving the faithful.
Yet Francis did not go as far as some progressive Catholics had hoped. Calls for him to lift the requirement that priests remain celibate went unanswered. Church doctrine describing gay acts as “intrinsically disordered” also went unchanged, while the role of women at Mass remained limited.
But Francis, who found admirers in secular spheres as well as in Catholic circles, reshaped views of the church, and was seen by many as a leader of humanitarian force.
He championed and met regularly with refugees in a period when many nations were embracing far-right, inward-looking governments. He hardened the church’s opposition to nuclear weapons. He aggravated Turkey by terming the early 20th-century slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians as a “genocide.” In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, he described vaccinations as a “moral obligation.”
In 2022, he apologized for the church’s complicity in supporting a “colonizing mentality” that oppressed Indigenous people in Canada during the 18th and 19th centuries.
At the same time, critics said he sometimes fell short in his handling of the church’s myriad sex abuse scandals. In 2018, he angered victims by coming to the defense of Bishop Juan Barros Madrid of Chile, who was accused of protecting a sexually abusive priest.
Speaking to a reporter on a trip to Chile, Francis dismissed criticism of Barros as slander, and declared, “The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I’ll speak.” His comment came during a trip centered on apologizing for sexual abuse in the church.
Francis later said he had spoken unartfully, describing his own words as a “slap in the face” to victims. But he maintained that he believed Barros was innocent. The incident appeared to undercut the force of the apology tour.
Not long before Barros resigned five months later, Francis was said to deliver a sober acknowledgement to an accuser: “I was part of the problem.”
The accuser, Juan Carlos Cruz, said he felt the apology was sincere.
VATICAN-POPE-AUDIENCE
ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images
Pope Francis arrives on wheelchair during the audience to the Participants to Plenary Assembly of the International Union of Superiors General on May 5, 2022 in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican.
The pope slowed in his later years, and was at times relegated to a wheelchair. Sometimes, intense sciatic nerve pain would sideline him from events. But he continued to travel widely into 2023.
Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio on Dec. 17, 1936, the future pope was the son of Italian immigrants and one of five siblings. His father was an accountant for the railway, his mother a homemaker.
In high school, he studied to become a chemical technician, working briefly as a chemist in a food science laboratory after graduation. He worked other jobs, too, including as a janitor and bar bouncer.
At 21, after pneumonia robbed him of part of a lung, he joined the novitiate of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit wing of the Catholic Church. Over several years, he advanced his education, studying philosophy and theology, and teaching literature.
In 1969, four days short of his 33rd birthday, Bergoglio was ordained as a priest. A brilliant student, he spent a few years in Spain, continuing his studies, before returning to Argentina, where he was elected the Jesuit provincial. Over the next three decades, he would hold various roles, including seminary rector, parish priest and professor.
AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko
This Aug. 7, 2009 file photo shows Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio giving a mass outside the San Cayetano church in Buenos Aires.
In the late 1970s, Argentina was under the heel of a military dictatorship. Bergoglio would later be criticized as insufficiently critical of the regime, and accused of failing to protect a pair of left-leaning priests who were kidnapped by the government. He would dispute the charge, saying that he privately worked to protect priests from the regime.
In the 1980s, democracy began to bloom in Argentina. Bergoglio briefly relocated to Germany to complete his doctoral thesis in theology, and then returned home before a meteoric rise.
In 1992, he was appointed an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. In 2001, he became a cardinal. By 2005, he was on the cusp of the papacy, widely thought to have come in second in the conclave following the death of Pope John Paul II. Benedict was elected pope in that conclave.
Bergoglio’s frugal lifestyle as a cardinal would be much-remarked upon when he became pontiff a dozen years later. He continued to use public transportation, cooked his own meals and lived in a modest stove-heated apartment in downtown Buenos Aires, eschewing an extravagant mansion reserved for Argentina’s archbishop.
AP Photo/Pablo Leguizamon
In this 2008 file photo, Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, second from left, rides the subway in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Bergoglio, who became pope in 2013 and took the name Francis, was known for taking the train.
Though he ridiculed the legalization of gay marriage in Argentina in 2010, panning the shift as a “destructive attack on God’s plan,” he also moved to modernize Argentina’s conservative church. He washed and kissed the feet of AIDS patients, and he chided clerics who refused to baptize children of unmarried mothers.
Even as he blasted the approval of gay marriage by Argentina’s liberal government, he infuriated some within the church by pushing to recognize civil unions for gay couples. The mixed messaging would presage his style as a pontiff whose doctrinal conservatism would blend with increasingly progressive public statements.
In February 2013, Benedict stunned the Catholic world by becoming the first pope in six centuries to retire. A month later, Bergoglio was elected pope and took the name Francis. The poor in Argentina rejoiced, calling their church’s new leader the “Slum Pope.”
Francis, then 76, said he envisioned a brief papacy for himself. In fact, he would have a longer-than-average term leading the church.
He would seek to make a divided Catholic Church more inclusive, as the world broadly grew more secular. His church would grow globally, even as its membership slid in Europe and the United States. And he would enjoy immense popularity that he sought to prevent from elevating his ego.
“I try to think of my sins, my mistakes, so as not to think that I am somebody,” Francis said at a news conference in 2014. “Because I know this will last a short time — two or three years — and then off to the house of the Father.”
Throughout his papacy, Francis often encouraged his flock to embrace the power of dreams. Critics saw in these sermons superficial, saccharine notes divorced from scripture. But the pope maintained that dreams hold the power to unlock the promise of the future.
In a speech on a trip to Cuba in 2015, Francis implored listeners to find time in their daily lives to dream of better tomorrows, and to imagine their own roles in improving the world.
“The greater your ability to dream, the farther you will have gone,” he said. “Even if life cuts you short halfway, you will still have gone a great distance. So, first of all, dream.”
With News Wire Services
