Pope Francis, Humble and Charismatic First Latin American Pontiff, Dies at 88

Pope Francis was the first Latin American pope in history. He was loved by many for his humble personality and care for the poor, but conservatives didn’t like him because he spoke out against capitalism and climate change. He died Monday. Eighty-eight.

After the news, church bells rang all over Rome. Cardinal Kevin Ferrell, the Vatican’s chief chaplain, read it from the chapel of the Domus Santa Marta, where Francis lived.

“Francis, the Bishop of Rome, went back to the home of the Father at 7:35 this morning.” And Ferrell said, “He gave his whole life to serving the Lord and his Church.”

Francis had long-term lung disease and had surgery to remove part of one lung when he was young. On February 14, 2025, he was taken to Gemelli hospital for a breathing crisis that turned into double pneumonia. It was the longest hospital stay he had in his 12 years as pope—38 days.

But on Easter Sunday, the day before he died, he came out to bless thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square and drive his popemobile through the square, which got huge cheers and praise. Before that, he had a short meeting with U.S. JD Vance is the vice president.

Francis gave the blessing from the same loggia where he was first seen by the public as the 266th pope on March 13, 2013.

From his very normal first greeting that night, “Buonasera” (Good evening), to his support of refugees and the downtrodden, Francis set a very different tone for the papacy. He stressed humility over arrogance for a Catholic Church that was facing scandal and charges of not caring.

A breath of fresh air was brought into the 2,000-year-old institution by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was born in Argentina. It had lost some of its power during the troubled reign of Pope Benedict XVI, whose sudden exit led to Francis’ election.

But Francis soon caused problems of his own, and conservatives got more and more angry with his progressive views, his efforts to reach out to LGBTQ+ Catholics, and his crackdown on traditionalists. His biggest test came in 2018 when he messed up a well-known case of priest sexual abuse in Chile. The scandal that had been building up under his predecessors broke out again while he was in charge.

Next, Francis, the crowd-loving, world-traveling pope from the edges, had to lead the world’s faith through the coronavirus pandemic while Vatican City was locked down. This was a first for any pope.

He asked everyone to use COVID-19 as a chance to rethink the political and economic system that, in his view, had turned rich people against poor people.

In March 2020, Francis spoke to an empty St. Peter’s Square and said, “We have realised that we are all on the same boat—we are all weak and lost.” But he also said that the pandemic showed that “we all need to row together, each of us needing to comfort the other.”

Many people who knew and worked for Francis were sad and quiet at the Vatican on Monday. At the same time, St. Peter’s Square was full of tourists, as it always is on the day after Easter. At first, a lot of people didn’t know the news, but some could tell something was going on because there were so many TV teams there.

Matthew Bruni, a spokesman for the Vatican, wiped tears from his eyes as he talked to reporters in the press room.

After the death, faithful people will have weeks to pay their last respects, first to Vatican officials in the Santa Marta church and then to everyone else in St. Peter’s. There will then be a funeral and a conclave to choose a new pope.

Changes for the Vatican

Francis was chosen with a promise to change the Vatican’s finances and bureaucracy. Instead, he shook up the church even more without changing its core beliefs. “Who am I to judge?” “I told them about a priest who was said to be gay,”

The comment made the LGBTQ+ community and people who felt rejected by a church that put more emphasis on sexual propriety than on love that doesn’t depend on conditions feel welcome. In 2023, he told The Associated Press, “Being gay is not a crime.” He called for an end to civil rules that make it illegal.

Francis changed the church’s view on the death penalty by saying it is always wrong. He did this by emphasising mercy. He also said it was “immoral” to own nuclear weapons, not just to use them.

He also made history by agreeing to a deal with China on bishop nominations that had been a problem for the Vatican for decades. He also met the Russian patriarch and started new relationships with Muslims by travelling to the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.

He reaffirmed that the priesthood is made up of only men who are celibate. He also supported the church’s stance against abortion, saying that it was like “hiring a hit man to solve a problem.”

What women should do

On the other hand, he gave women more power in important decisions and let them be lectors and acolytes in churches. After hearing for a long time that women do a lot of work for the church but aren’t allowed to hold power, he let women vote with the bishops at regular Vatican meetings.

Francis gave Sister Nathalie Becquart one of the top jobs in the Vatican. She said that his legacy was a vision of a church where men and women treated each other with respect and equality.

Becquart, who was the first woman to vote in a Vatican synod, said, “It was about changing a pattern of dominance from human being to creation and from men to women to a pattern of cooperation.”

The church as a safe place

Francis did not let women become priests, but the move to allow women to vote was a big step forward in focussing on what the church should be: a safe place for everyone (or “todos, todos, todos”), not just the lucky few. His table was much more often filled with migrants, the poor, prisoners, and outcasts than with leaders or powerful CEOs.

The camerlengo, who takes over after a pontiff dies or retires, said, “For Pope Francis, it was always to open the church’s arms to everyone, not to shut anyone out.”

Francis told his priests to be kind and merciful to their flocks. He also asked everyone to protect God’s creation from climate disaster and urged countries to take in people who are fleeing war, poverty, and oppression.

In 2016, Francis went to Mexico and said of the U.S. Donald Trump said that anyone who builds a wall to keep immigrants out “is not Christian.”

Progressives loved Francis’s strong focus on Jesus’ message of love and acceptance, but conservatives were worried that he was weakening Catholic teaching and putting at risk the West’s very Christian character. Some people even called him a heretic.

A few cardinals spoke out against him. When he was upset, Francis generally responded with silence, which was his usual response.

He made it easier for Catholics who were married to get their marriages cancelled. He also said that priests could forgive women who had abortions and bless same-sex couples. He let people talk about things like divorce and homosexuality. Instead of giving pastors strict rules to follow, he gave them room to figure out how to help their flocks.

We can learn from St. Francis of Assisi.

Francis stayed in a hotel in the Vatican instead of the Apostolic Palace. He also drove a small car and wore his old orthotic shoes instead of the red loafers that the pope wore. It wasn’t just a trick.

In 2013, he told a Jesuit magazine, “It’s clear to me that what the church needs most right now is the power to heal wounds and warm the hearts of the good.” “The church is like a field hospital after a battle to me.”

Francis was not only the first Latin American and Jesuit pope, but he was also the first person to name himself after St. Francis of Assisi, a friar from the 1300s who was known for his simplicity, message of peace, and care for nature and society’s rejects.

Francisco went out of his way to find people who were jobless, sick, disabled, and homeless. He told Indigenous people that he was sorry for the church’s wrongdoings from the time of colonisation onwards.

He also had to go through a lot of pain. In 2021, he had surgery to remove part of his stomach. In 2023, he had more surgery to fix a painful hernia and get rid of scar tissue from the surgery. He had bad knees and used a wheelchair or cane all the time starting in 2022. He also had bouts of coughing.

He went to the edges of society to show kindness, like when he caressed a man’s badly deformed head in St. Peter’s Square, kissed a Holocaust survivor’s tattoo, or asked trash collectors from Argentina to join him onstage in Rio de Janeiro.

“We’ve always been on the outside, but Pope Francis has always helped us,” said Coqui Vargas, a transgender woman from Rome whose community formed a special bond with Francis during the pandemic.

His first trip as pope was to Lampedusa, which was the centre of Europe’s migration problem at the time. Instead of going to the places where most Catholics live, he always picked to visit poor countries where Christians were often attacked as minorities.

He cared about the poor and powerless because of the Beatitudes, which are the eight gifts Jesus gave in the Sermon on the Mount for people who were humble, merciful, poor in spirit, and others. Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an Argentine friend, agreed.

“What do the Beatitudes have to do with this pontificate?” “Because they were the foundation of Jesus Christ’s own plan,” Sánchez said.

Slip-ups in the sexual abuse case

But it was more than a year before Francis met with women who had been sexually abused by priests. At first, victims’ groups wondered if he really knew how bad the problem was.

Francis did set up a committee to look into sex abuse and give the church advice on how to do things right, but it lost its power after a few years, and its suggestion that bishops who covered up for predatory priests should be put on trial never came to fruition.

In 2018, he discredited Chilean abuse victims and stood by a controversial bishop who was related to the abuser. This was the worst moment of his pontificate. Francis admitted he was wrong and asked the victims to come to the Vatican for a personal “mea culpa.” He also asked the leaders of the Chilean church to quit as a whole.

Soon after that crisis ended, another one broke out over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was the former archbishop of Washington and a counsellor to three popes.

Francis quickly took McCarrick out of the picture after hearing that he had abused a young altar boy in the 1970s. But Francis was still accused by the Vatican’s former U.S. representative of making McCarrick whole again early in his time as pope.

Francis finally removed McCarrick’s cloak after a Vatican review found that he had sexually abused both adults and children. He changed church law to get rid of the pontifical secret about abuse cases and set up ways to look into bishops who abused children or covered for priests who did so. He did this to stop the hierarchy from getting away with it.

“He really wanted to do something, and he showed that,” said Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean abuse victim that Francis discredited who later became close friends with the pope.

Something different from Benedict

The choice by Pope Benedict XVI to resign and retire in 2012 paved the way for Francis’ election in 2013. It was the first time in 600 years that two popes lived in the Vatican at the same time.

Francis didn’t run away from Benedict’s shade, which could have been awkward. He treated him like an old statesman and advisor and talked him out of retiring alone and into being involved in the church’s public life.

Francesco said, “It’s like having your wise grandfather in the house.”

Francis praised Benedict by saying that he “opened the door” for other people to do the same. This led to rumours that Francis might also quit. But after Benedict’s death on December 31, 2022, he said that the pope is a job for life in general.

It was clear that Francis and the German-born theologian came from very different religious traditions because of their different liturgical style and focus on pastoral care. Francis also directly overturned several choices made by his predecessor.

The Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero was a star of the liberation theology movement in Latin America. He made sure that Romero was canonised after his case was put on hold by Benedict because of worries about the credo’s Marxist leanings.

Benedict had eased some limits on celebrating the old Latin Mass, but Francis put them back in place because he thought the spread of the Tridentine Rite was causing problems. The move angered Francis’s traditionalist foes and caused right-wing Catholics, especially in the U.S., to fight with the Argentine pope for a long time.

Conservatives are against Francis

Conservatives had already turned away from Francis after he started a debate about letting Catholics who had been married before get the sacraments again if they didn’t get an annulment, which means the church said their first marriage was illegal.

A few months into Benedict’s term, the conservative Italian newspaper Il Foglio ran a headline that said, “We don’t like this pope.” This showed how uneasy the small but loud traditionalist Catholic movement was with the new pope.

The same critics spoke out more after Francis accepted church blessings for same-sex couples and a contentious deal with China about choosing bishops.

While the details of the deal were never made public, conservatives called it a betrayal of the Catholic faith and a surrender to communist China, the Vatican supported it as the best deal it could get with Beijing.

Cardinal Raymond Burke of the United States, a leader in the movement against Francis, said the church had turned into “a ship without a rudder.”

Burke’s battle against Francis lasted for years, beginning when Francis fired him as a judge on the Vatican’s highest court and ending with his strong opposition to Francis’ 2023 synod on the future of the church.

He asked Francis, along with other conservative cardinals, to explain himself twice about doctrine issues that showed a more progressive leaning. These included the chance of same-sex blessings and Francis’s efforts to reach out to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.

In the end, Francis cut Burke off financially because he was spreading “disunity.” This was one of many changes he made to staff in the Vatican and around the world to shift power from strict leaders to more caring ones.

Francis wanted his bishops and cardinals to have the “odour of their flock” and serve the faithful. When they didn’t, he let them know he didn’t like it.

In his 2014 Christmas address to the Vatican Curia, Francis gave one of the harshest public reprimands ever. Standing in the marbled Apostolic Palace, he named 15 problems that his closest collaborators can have, such as “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” wanting power, and the “terrorism of gossip.”

In order to get rid of corruption, Francis managed the reform of the Vatican bank, which had been involved in a scandal. He also tried to get Vatican bureaucrats to be more responsible with their money by limiting their pay and the gifts and contracts they could give out.

He gave Vatican police permission to search his own secretariat of state and the Vatican’s body that keeps an eye on money because of concerns about a 350 million euro investment in a London real estate deal. Angelo Becciu, a once-powerful cardinal, was found guilty of embezzlement by a Vatican court after a 2-and-a-half-year trial. Nine other people were given mixed rulings, and one was found not guilty.

However, the trial was bad for the Holy See’s image because it showed problems with the Vatican’s legal system, rude turf wars between monsignors, and how the pope had stepped in to help prosecutors.

While he was praised for trying to fix the Vatican’s finances, Francis made U.S. Republicans angry by often criticising the global financial market as unfair to the poor.

He didn’t try to hide the fact that he wanted a “poor church that is for the poor” when he met with reporters for the first time. Economic justice was a big part of his reign.

“The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis’s first major teaching work, called trickle-down economic theories false and naive because they are based on the idea that “the powerful feed upon the powerless” without caring about ethics, the environment, or even God.

“Money should serve, not rule!” he said in a call for government changes.

In his major environmental encyclical, “Praised Be,” he went into more detail about this. In it, he criticised the “structurally perverse” global economic system, which he said hurt the poor and could turn the Earth into “an immense pile of filth.”

Some conservatives in the U.S. called Francis a Marxist. To defend himself, he said that a lot of his friends were Marxists.

Soccer, opera and prayer

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires on December 17, 1936. He was the oldest of five children born to Italian immigrants.

He said that his religious grandma Rosa taught him how to pray. On the weekends, they listened to opera on the radio, went to Mass and watched their family’s favourite football team, San Lorenzo. Because he loved soccer as pope, people from all over the world gave him a huge collection of shirts.

In a 2010 biography, he said, “I don’t know what it was, but it changed my life.” He said he got his religious calling when he was 17 and going to confession. “I saw that they were waiting for me.”

He went to the diocesan seminary at first, but in 1958 he moved to the Jesuit order because he liked how missionary and militant it was.

He had asthma around this time, which is why the upper part of his right lung had to be taken out. His weak health kept him from becoming a missionary, and his weak lungs may have been the reason why he didn’t want to sing at Mass and had a whispery voice.

He became a priest on December 13, 1969, and started teaching right away. He was made head of the Jesuits in Argentina in 1973, a job he later said was “crazy” since he was only 36 years old. He told Civilta Cattolica, “My authoritarian and quick way of making decisions caused me a lot of trouble and led to accusations of being ultraconservative.”

Life under the regime in Argentina

During his six years as provincial, Argentina had a murderous dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. During that time, the military started a campaign against left-wing guerrillas and other people who were against the government.

People said that Bergoglio let two poor priests be kidnapped and tortured by not publicly supporting their work and not speaking out against the junta.

He wouldn’t budge on that version of events for decades. He finally talked about the great lengths he went to behind the scenes to save them in a 2010 authorised biography. For example, he got the family priest of the feared ruler Jorge Videla to call in sick so he could say Mass instead. Once Bergoglio got to the junta leader’s house, he secretly begged for forgiveness. Finally, both priests were freed; they were two of the few people who had made it out of jail alive.

Many priests, seminarians, and political dissidents were saved by Bergoglio during the “dirty war,” and stories started to come out that he helped them escape the country or let them stay hidden at the school.

Bergoglio went to Germany in 1986 to do study for a thesis that he never finished. When he went back to Argentina, he was sent to Cordoba during what he called a “great interior crisis.” More progressive Jesuit leaders didn’t like him, but St. John Paul II saved him from obscurity in 1992 by making him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. After six years, he was made archbishop, and in 2001, he was made a cardinal.

He almost became pope in 2005, but Benedict was chosen instead. He got the second-most votes in several rounds of voting before giving up.

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