VATICAN CITY — He was a pope who understood the power of a simple touch: caressing the deformed head of a man in St. Peter’s Square, washing the feet of a Muslim prisoner, sinking to his hands and knees to implore South Sudan’s rival leaders to make peace.
Pope Francis charmed the world with those poignant acts of love, humility and informality, starting with his first appearance as pontiff on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica with a remarkably normal, “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) to his cheering flock below.
Francis, the first Latin American pope, died Monday at age 88. It was just a day after Francis imparted what would become his final public blessing from that very same loggia on Easter. “Brothers and sisters, Happy Easter,” he said, before embarking on what would become a final farewell to the faithful with a ride in his popemobile through St. Peter’s Square.
The Vatican said Francis suffered a stroke which led to a coma and irreverible heart failure, as he recovered from a five-week hospitalization for double pneumonia. His funeral and burial at St. Mary Major basilica across town are expected over the weekend.
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After that first rainy night of his election on March 13, 2013, Francis made even greater gestures, like bringing a dozen Syrian refugees home with him from a Greek refugee camp. Such actions won him wild popularity among progressives and signaled new priorities for the Vatican after the sometimes-troubled papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.
But Francis soon invited troubles of his own and conservatives grew increasingly upset with his focus on the poor and the environment, and his outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, at the expense of preaching Catholic doctrine. Some accused him of heresy.
His greatest test came when he botched a notorious case of clergy sexual abuse in Chile in 2018. Suddenly, the scandal that festered under his predecessors erupted anew on his watch and was used by critics to try to weaken him.
And then the crowd-loving, globe-trotting pope of the peripheries had to navigate the unprecedented reality of leading a universal religion through the coronavirus pandemic from a locked-down Vatican City.
He implored the world to use COVID-19 as an opportunity to rethink the economic and political framework that he said had turned rich against poor and rendered the Earth an “immense pile of filth.”
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“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented … all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other,” Francis told an empty St. Peter’s Square at the height of the outbreak in March 2020.
Reforming the Vatican
After Benedict’s surprise resignation and retirement, Francis was elected on a mandate to reform the outdated Vatican bureaucracy and its finances, but he went much further in shaking up the church itself without ever changing its core doctrine.
When asked about a purportedly gay priest, he replied: “Who am I to judge?”
The comment sent a message of welcome to the LGBTQ+ community and those who felt shunned by a church that had stressed conditions, rules and sexual propriety over unconditional love.
“Being homosexual is not a crime,” he told The Associated Press in 2023, calling for an end to civil laws that criminalize it. A year later, he approved church blessings for same-sex couples.
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In a similar, merciful line, Francis changed the church’s position on the death penalty, declaring it inadmissible in all circumstances. And he modified its stand by saying the mere possession of nuclear weapons, not just their use, was “immoral.”
In other firsts, he approved an agreement with China over bishop nominations that had vexed the Vatican for a half-century, met with a Russian patriarch, and charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.
South Sudan President Salva Kiir Mayardit said Monday that Francis would be remembered “as a beacon of hope, compassion and unity,” particularly for his remarkable gesture in 2019 when the pope kissed Kiir’s feet and those of his rival in begging them to make peace during a meeting at the Vatican.
Francis reaffirmed the all-male, celibate priesthood and strongly upheld the church’s opposition to abortion, equating it to “hiring a hit man to solve a problem.”
But he added women to important decision-making roles in the Vatican and formally allowed them to serve as lectors and acolytes in parishes. He allowed women to vote alongside bishops in periodic Vatican meetings, following longstanding complaints that women do most of the church’s work but are barred from its top echelons.
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Sister Nathalie Becquart, named by Francis to a high Vatican job, said his legacy was a church where men and women exist in a relationship of reciprocity and respect.
“It was about shifting a pattern of domination — from human being to the creation, from men to women — to a pattern of cooperation,” said Becquart, the first woman to hold a voting position in a Vatican synod.
A refuge for ‘everyone’
While Francis stopped short of allowing women to be ordained, the voting reform was part of a revolutionary change in his emphasis of what the Catholic Church should be: a refuge for everyone — “todos, todos, todos” (“everyone, everyone, everyone”) — not just the privileged few. Migrants, the poor, prisoners and outcasts were at his table far more than presidents or CEOs.
“For Pope Francis, it was always to extend the arms of the church to embrace all people, not to exclude anyone,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell, whom Francis made camerlengo, the official taking charge after a pontiff’s death.
Francis demanded bishops apply mercy and charity to their flocks, pressed leaders to protect God’s creation from climate disaster, and challenged countries to welcome those fleeing war, poverty and oppression.
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After visiting Mexico in 2016, Francis said of then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump that anyone building a wall to keep migrants out “is not Christian.”
While progressives were thrilled by Francis’ focus on the core of Jesus’ message of mercy and welcome for marginalized souls, it troubled conservatives who feared he watered down Catholic teaching and threatened the very Christian identity of Europe and the U.S. A few cardinals openly challenged him.
Francis usually responded to conflict with his typical answer: silence.
He made it easier for Catholics to get a marriage annulment and allowed priests to absolve women who had abortions. He divided the church by opening debate on issues such as homosexuality and divorce, giving pastors wiggle room to discern how to accompany their flocks rather than handing them strict rules.
“I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he told a Jesuit journal in 2013. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”
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St. Francis of Assisi as a model
Francis lived in the Vatican hotel instead of the Apostolic Palace, wore his old orthotic shoes and not the red loafers of the papacy, and set an example to the clerical classes by using compact cars. It wasn’t a gimmick.
If his election as the first Latin American and first Jesuit pope wasn’t enough, Francis also was the first to name himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century friar known for personal simplicity, a message of peace, and care for society’s outcasts and nature.
Francis sought out those who suffer: the unemployed and sick, the disabled and homeless, the elderly and imprisoned. Those encounters provided poignant images of his papacy, such as in 2013, when he embraced a man with neurofibromatosis, the condition associated with the “Elephant Man,” Joseph Carey Merrick.
“We have always been marginalized, but Pope Francis always helped us,” said Coqui Vargas, a transgender woman whose Roman community forged a unique relationship with Francis during the pandemic.
And he himself suffered: Part of his colon was removed in 2021 and he needed more surgery in 2023 to repair a painful hernia and remove intestinal scar tissue. By 2022, he regularly used a wheelchair and cane because of bad knees and bouts of bronchitis.
His priorities also informed his travel: His first trip outside Rome as pope was to the Italian island of Lampedusa, then the epicenter of Europe’s migration crisis. He consistently visited poor countries where Christians were often-persecuted minorities, rather than centers of global Catholicism.
Francis’ friend and fellow Argentine, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, said concern for the poor and disenfranchised formed the core of his pontificate, based on the Beatitudes -- the biblical blessings that Jesus delivered in the Sermon on the Mount for the meek, the merciful, the poor in spirit and others.
“Why are the Beatitudes the program of this pontificate? Because they were the basis of Jesus Christ’s own program,” Sánchez said.
Missteps on sexual abuse scandal
But over a year passed before Francis met with some of the church’s most wounded souls -- survivors of priestly sexual abuse -- and victims’ groups questioned whether he understood the scope of the problem.
Francis created a sex abuse commission to advise the church, but it later lost its influence and its recommendation for a tribunal to judge bishops who covered for predator priests went nowhere.
He made up for it with new legal provisions to hold the hierarchy accountable after he endured the greatest crisis of his papacy in 2018, when he discredited Chilean victims of abuse and stood by a controversial bishop linked to their abuser, Chile’s most notorious pedophile. After Francis realized his error, he invited the victims to the Vatican for a personal mea culpa and had the leadership of the Chilean church resign en masse.
Another crisis erupted surrounding ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington and counselor to three popes.
Francis actually had sidelined McCarrick after the church received an accusation he had molested a teenage altar boy in the 1970s. But Francis nevertheless was accused by the Vatican’s onetime U.S. ambassador of having rehabilitated McCarrick early in his papacy.
Francis eventually defrocked McCarrick after the Vatican determined he sexually abused adults as well as minors.
A change from Benedict
Francis’ 2013 election was paved by Benedict XVI’s decision to resign and retire -- the first in 600 years. It created the unprecedented reality of two popes living in the Vatican until Benedict’s death on Dec. 31, 2022.
Francis didn’t shy from that potentially uncomfortable shadow but embraced Benedict as an elder statesman and adviser whom he coaxed out of his cloistered retirement to participate in the public life of the church.
“It’s like having your grandfather in the house, a wise grandfather,” Francis said.
Francis praised Benedict’s decision to retire, saying he “opened the door” for others. That fueled speculation that he, too, might retire, but after Benedict’s death, he made clear the papacy is generally a job for life.
Francis’ looser liturgical style and pastoral priorities made clear he and the German-born theologian came from very different religious traditions, and Francis overturned several of Benedict’s decisions.
He made sure that Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, a hero to the Latin American liberation theology movement, was canonized after his case languished under Benedict over concerns about the credo’s Marxist bent.
In a controversial move, Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed, arguing the spread of the Tridentine Rite was divisive. That riled Francis’ traditionalist critics and opened what became sustained conflict between right-wing Catholics, particularly in the U.S., and the Argentine pope.
Conservatives oppose Francis
By then, conservatives had turned away from Francis after he opened debate on allowing remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments if they didn’t get an annulment -- a church ruling that their first marriage was invalid.
“We don’t like this pope,” headlined Italy’s conservative daily Il Foglio a few months into his papacy, reflecting the unease of the small but vocal traditionalist movement that was coddled under Benedict.
Those same critics amplified their complaints after Francis’ approved church blessings for same-sex couples, and an accord with China over nominating bishops. The details were never released, but conservative critics bashed it as a sellout to communist China, while the Vatican defended it as the best deal it could get.
U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a figurehead in the anti-Francis opposition, said the church had become “like a ship without a rudder.”
Burke waged his campaign for years, starting when Francis fired him as the Vatican’s supreme court justice and culminating with his opposition to Francis’ 2023 synod on the church’s future.
He twice joined conservative cardinals in asking Francis to explain himself on doctrine issues where the pope had showed a more progressive bent, including on same-sex blessings and his outreach to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.
Francis eventually sanctioned Burke financially, accusing him of sowing “disunity.” It was one of several moves to shift power away from doctrinaire leaders to more pastoral ones.
Soccer, opera and prayer
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, the eldest of five children of Italian immigrants.
He credited his grandmother Rosa with teaching him how to pray. Even as pope, he carried in his worn prayer book a Catholic creed she composed. Weekends in the Bergoglio home were spent listening to opera on the radio, going to Mass and attending matches of the family’s beloved San Lorenzo soccer club.
His love of soccer continued into adulthood, and he amassed a huge collection of jerseys as pope from visitors.
He said he received his religious calling at 17 while going to confession at his parish church, San Jose de Flores. “Something strange happened to me in that confession,” he recounted in a 2010 authorized biography. “I don’t know what it was, but it changed my life. ... I realized that they were waiting for me.”
He entered the diocesan seminary and in 1958 switched to the Jesuit order, attracted to its missionary tradition and militancy, being on “the front lines of the church, grounded in obedience and discipline.”
Around this time, he suffered severe pneumonia and the upper part of his right lung was removed. His frail health prevented his becoming a missionary as he had hoped, and his less-than-robust lung capacity was perhaps responsible for his whisper of a voice and reluctance to sing at Mass.
On Dec. 13, 1969, he was ordained a priest, and began teaching. In 1973, he became head of the Jesuits in Argentina, an appointment he later acknowledged was “crazy” at age 36. “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he said.
Life under Argentina’s dictatorship
His six-year tenure as provincial coincided with the start of Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, when the military launched a murderous campaign against left-wing guerrillas and other regime opponents.
Like many, Bergoglio didn’t outwardly confront the junta, and he was accused of effectively allowing two slum priests to be kidnapped and tortured by not publicly endorsing their work. Bergoglio refused to counter that version for decades.
Only in a 2010 authorized biography did he finally recount his extraordinary, behind-the-scene effort to save them, persuading the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so that he could say Mass instead. Once inside the junta leader’s home, Bergoglio appealed for mercy. Both priests were eventually released, two of the few surviving prisoners.
In 1986, Bergoglio went to Germany to research a never-finished thesis. Upon returning to Argentina, he essentially went into internal exile within the Jesuits, stationed in Cordoba during a period he called a time of “great interior crisis.”
Out of favor with the more progressive leadership of Argentina’s Jesuits, Bergoglio was eventually rescued from obscurity by St. John Paul II, who in 1992 named him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. Six years later, he became archbishop, and then cardinal in 2001.
A humble man who denied himself the luxuries that previous archbishops enjoyed, Bergoglio rode the bus, cooked his own meals and regularly visited slums.
He came close to becoming pope in 2005 when Benedict was elected, gaining the second-most votes in several rounds of balloting before bowing out.
After becoming pope, accounts began emerging more widely of the many priests, seminarians and dissidents he saved in the “dirty war,” letting them stay incognito at the seminary or helping them escape the country.
“He made me wonder if he really understood the trouble he was getting into. If they grabbed us together, they would have marched us both off,” onetime radical Gonzalo Mosca told AP in 2014, recounting how Bergoglio let him stay at the seminary and bought his plane ticket to Brazil.
It was a gesture typical of the pope.
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Associated Press writer Colleen Barry contributed from Milan. Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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