Francis: The pope from ‘end of the world’ who shook up the Church

He faced a furious conservative backlash nonetheless.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who died on Monday aged 88, established many firsts during his 12-year leadership of the Catholic Church under the name of Pope Francis.

He was the first pope from Latin America, the first Jesuit, and the first to be named after St Francis of Assisi, a medieval monk who lived in poverty and sought to rid the Catholic Church of corruption.

He was also the first pontiff – at least in modern times – to face open calls for his resignation and accusations of heresy from disgruntled traditionalists.

Pope Francis has faced multiple health challenges in recent years. At a young age, he had his right lung partially removed, making him particularly vulnerable to respiratory illnesses.

He has been hospitalized several times for mainly lung-related conditions. His most recent hospital stay began on February 14 and lasted more than a month, when he was first diagnosed with bronchitis, then with a complicated respiratory ailment and finally with double pneumonia.

When he was elected, on March 13, 2013, Francis quipped that he came “almost from the end of the world.” Three days later, he said he wanted to lead “a poor church, for the poor.”

He took command at a time of deep crisis: his predecessor, Benedict XVI, was the first pope to resign in almost 600 years, in the wake of the global clergy sex abuse scandal and the VatiLeaks affair which exposed alleged cronyism and infighting within the Vatican’s walls.

Early in his papacy, Francis’ unusually free remarks and unorthodox displays of humility made him immensely popular, particularly among those who were not usually close to the Catholic Church.

The Argentine-born pope took up residence in a Vatican guest house rather than in a palatial apartment, shunned some of the most ornate papal garments, and picked an ordinary hatchback, rather than a limousine, as his official car.

In July 2013, he famously said of homosexuals: “If a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge?”

Months later, he made the front cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

But as his papacy progressed, Francis’ popularity waned, as he proved to be less radical than some progressives had imagined him to be. At the same time, the pontiff faced a furious conservative backlash.

Francis made “mercy” a key tenet of his papacy. He saw this as meaning that the Catholic Church had to focus less on the strict enforcement of its doctrine and more on reaching out to those who stray from it.

This informed the 2016 papal document known as Amoris Laetitia, which eased a long-standing ban on Communion for remarried divorcees, much to the chagrin of traditionalists who felt it undermined Catholic dogma on the indissolubility of marriage.

In their outraged response to Amoris Laetitia, arch-conservatives went so far as to accuse the pope of heresy. Opposition to Francis’ relatively flexible pastoral approach was so strong that it fuelled talk of a schism.

Traditionalists often looked to the late Benedict XVI as an alternative source of papal authority. But apart from the occasional incident in which the retired German pontiff’s remarks were seen as critical of his successor, the previous pope remained loyal.

Francis said he had had a good relationship with Benedict, following the retired pope’s death, which contradicted claims that there had been tension between the two in the nearly 10 years following Benedict’s resignation.

He lamented the idea that observers were attempting to drive a wedge between the two shortly after the pope emeritus’ death at the end of 2022. “I believe that the death of Benedict has been instrumentalised,” Francis said.

Francis, who was born in Buenos Aires on December 17, 1936 to Italian immigrant parents, held strong views on social and environmental justice, earning him the “Marxist” sobriquet in US right-wing circles.

He cried out against Mediterranean migrant deaths, called climate change deniers “stupid,” and denounced US President Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall along the Mexico border to stop migrants coming in as “not Christian.”

In terms of concrete reforms, however, Francis’ legacy is mixed.

Pope Francis was the first pope to appoint women to senior roles in the Vatican. In June 2022, he introduced reforms to allow lay people, and thus also women, to head dicasteries, which are like ministries in the Vatican.

On the issue of whether women should be allowed to serve as deacons however, Francis did not budge.

In an interview with Argentinian news website Infobae in March 2023, Francis declared his openness to revising the celibacy rule for priests, yet no concrete measures were pushed through during his tenure.

Francis ignored demands for a rule change on both divisive issues coming from a 2019 summit of bishops from the Amazon region.

Under his watch, limited progress was made in addressing the decades-old scandal of paedophile priests. New papal laws made it compulsory for clergy and leaders of international associations to report cases of abuse and cover-up to their church superior – although not to the police.

Francis also struggled in his attempts to reorganize the Vatican’s central bureaucracy, the Roman Curia, with delays in the drafting of a new Vatican constitution. As for the Vatican’s finances, he only partially succeeded in making them more transparent.

One notable misstep was his appointment of controversial Australian Cardinal George Pell as the Vatican’s de-facto finance minister. Pell was forced to resign over allegations of child abuse that eventually earned him a conviction and a six-year jail sentence. That verdict was later overturned after he spent 400 days behind bars and Francis spoke out against the “injustice” the former cardinal had faced.

The late pope led the Catholic Church through turbulent times, most notably during the coronavirus pandemic.

Francis, who was known for going deep into crowds to be close to the people, was forced to keep his distance from his supporters for almost two years. He presented his usual public masses to a lonely St Peter’s Square.

The coronavirus pandemic also plunged the Vatican into financial troubles, leading Francis to cut the salaries of senior clergy and scrap rules that granted Vatican members free accommodation.

On foreign policy, one of Francis’ achievements was a landmark 2018 deal which ended decades of hostility between China and the Vatican. Some, however, criticized this as a sell-out to Beijing’s communist regime.

In 2016, in a wide-ranging interview with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, Francis was asked how he would have liked to go down in history.

He responded, “I have not thought about it, but I like it when someone remembers someone and says: ‘He was a good guy, he did what he could, he was not so bad.’ I would be happy with that.” (dpa/NAN