VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
The Pillar [Washington DC]
April 21, 2025
Pope Francis, the first Jesuit and first Latin American to lead the Catholic Church, died Monday. He was 88.
During his 11-year pontificate, he recorded several other firsts. He was the first pope to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress, the first to call for civil union laws and approve ecclesiastical blessings for same-sex couples, and the first to visit Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, Mongolia, and Myanmar.
But while the Western media portrayed him as a revolutionary, bringing the Catholic Church hurtling into the 21st century, in practice Pope Francis often took a more evolutionary approach to change.
While critics persistently accused him of seeking to alter Catholic teaching, he seemed to aim above all at changing the Church’s culture, urging Catholics to embody what he believed were the three hallmarks of God’s presence: closeness, compassion, and tenderness. He sought also to counter what he saw as the scourge of clericalism by steadily expanding the responsibilities of lay people, including in Church governance.
When Francis was elected at the age of 76, some commentators predicted he would be an inconsequential “caretaker pope.” But he soon established himself as one of the most striking — and unusual — figures to occupy the See of Peter in the modern era.
The 265th successor to St. Peter appeared before Catholics for the first time on the evening of March 13, 2013, dressed in white, without the ermine-trimmed red cape worn by new popes. Speaking from the loggia overlooking St. Peter’s Square, he invited those gathered below to pray over him before he gave them his blessing. The next day, he was pictured settling the bill at the Rome hotel where he stayed before the conclave.
In another signal that he was prepared to break with papal custom, he announced that he would not move into the Apostolic Palace, the popes’ residence, but instead live at the Casa Santa Marta, a Vatican guest house that hosts cardinals during conclaves.
These early decisions set the tone for his unconventional papacy.
Path to the priesthood
Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio on Dec. 17, 1936, in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires. His parents, Mario Bergoglio and Regina Sívori, were immigrants from Italy.
The oldest of the couple’s five children, the future pope left school with a chemical technician’s diploma. His passions included soccer (he was a lifelong fan of the Buenos Aires club San Lorenzo de Almagro) Italian neorealist movies, and the milonga, a dance predating the Argentine tango.
His vocation to the priesthood arose one morning when he was walking past his parish church and felt inspired to enter. He saw a priest he didn’t know take a seat in a confessional.
“I felt like someone grabbed me from inside and took me to the confessional,” he recalled. “Obviously I told him my things. I confessed… but I don’t know what happened. Right there I knew I had to be a priest; I was totally certain.”
He was accepted to the Buenos Aires diocesan seminary in 1956. But at the age of 21, he suffered a life-threatening pulmonary illness. He credited his survival to a nurse who tripled his doses of penicillin and streptomycin. Surgeons removed the upper part of his right lung.
While convalescing, he decided to leave the diocesan seminary, applying for admission to the Society of Jesus. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in Córdoba, central Argentina, in 1958. He dreamed of serving as a missionary in Japan and unsuccessfully asked Fr. Pedro Arrupe, Jesuit superior general from 1965 to 1983, to consider him for the task.
He was ordained to the priesthood on Dec. 13, 1969, by Archbishop Ramón José Castellano, the archbishop emeritus of Córdoba. It was a time of tumult in the Catholic Church following Vatican Council II and the publication of the papal encyclical Humanae vitae. The Jesuit order was in the vanguard of change, especially in Latin America. It was also in crisis: Many the men present at the novitiate when he arrived a decade earlier had left.
At his ordination, his grandmother Rosa gave him a letter that he would keep in his breviary for the rest of his life. “May these my grandchildren, to whom I have given the best of my heart, have a long and happy life,” she wrote, “but if on some painful day, sickness or the loss of a loved one fills you with grief, remember that a sigh before the Tabernacle, where the greatest and most august martyr resides, and a gaze at Mary at the foot of the Cross, can make a drop of balm fall on the deepest and most painful wounds.”
Untying the knots
Shortly after he took his perpetual vows as a Jesuit in 1973, he was appointed superior of Argentina’s Jesuit province (including responsibility for neighboring Uruguay), succeeding a provincial who had been forced to step aside due to the convulsions within the order.
The province was significantly weaker than when the future pope had joined. There were more than 400 members of the Argentine province of the Society of Jesus in the early 1960s, with over 100 men in formation, including 25 novices. By 1973, there were a total of 243 Jesuits, with nine in formation and two novices.
Presiding over the fractious province proved extremely challenging for the 36-year-old, who was nicknamed “La Gioconda” by fellow Jesuits because of what they perceived as his Mona Lisa-like inscrutability.
Shortly after he took charge, Argentina’s Dirty War broke out. Security forces and death squads targeted opponents of the country’s military dictatorship. In an incident that would be closely scrutinized after his papal election, the Jesuit priests Fr. Orlando Yorio and Fr. Francisco Jalics were seized and tortured by the junta’s agents.
Immediately after his election, Pope Francis was branded “the pope of the dictatorship” by critics who claimed he had betrayed the priests to the authorities — or at least failed to protect them — citing testimony by Fr. Yorio, who died in 2000. But Fr. Jalics said in 2013: “The fact is: Orlando Yorio and I were not denounced by Fr. Bergoglio.” The pope’s supporters pointed out that no Jesuits lost their lives while he was provincial and argued that he had saved dozens of lives.
As superior, he sought to reform the Argentine province, starting with the formation of Jesuit students. He revised their study program, stressed pastoral outreach, and offered a deeper grounding in Ignatian spirituality.
After he ceased his service as superior in 1979, he was named rector of the Jesuit Colegio Maximo in Buenos Aires. But he fell out of favor with influential members of the Society of Jesus in Argentina and elsewhere, experiencing a period of exile that deeply marked his character.
He agreed to move to Germany in 1986 to work on a thesis on the influential Italian-born German theologian Romano Guardini, but felt homesick. During his brief stay, he made a pilgrimage to the Bavarian city of Augsburg, where he contemplated a Marian image known as “Mary, Untier of Knots,” a devotion he would later popularize.
Abandoning his doctorate, he returned to Argentina, where tensions within the Jesuit province reached a crescendo, ending in 1990 with his transfer to Córdoba, a city more than 400 miles from Buenos Aires, where he served mainly as a confessor. His supporters were also sent away and told not to contact him.
Reflecting on his soul-searching sojourn in Córdoba in his first major interview as pope, he said: “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I lived a time of great interior crisis when I was in Córdoba. To be sure, I have never been like Blessed Imelda [a goody-goody], but I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.”
The road to Rome
His exile ended in 1992, when Pope John Paul II named him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, at the behest of Cardinal Antonio Quarracino, who was named Archbishop of Buenos Aires two years earlier.
At his consecration, he handed out prayer cards depicting Mary, Untier of Knots. He took as his episcopal motto the words “Miserando atque eligendo” (“And looking at him mercifully, he chose him”), from a homily in which St. Bede described Christ’s calling of St. Matthew.
Quarracino named him as his vicar-general, making him responsible for the administration of the archdiocese — which had more than three million inhabitants — and relying on him greatly as an adviser. Suffering from ill health, the cardinal persuaded John Paul II to appoint Bergoglio in 1997 as his coadjutor archbishop with right of succession, despite opposition in the Argentine political world and Rome. The appointment surprised local observers as the 60-year-old had a relatively low public profile.
When Quarracino died in February 1998, Bergoglio immediately succeeded him. He took a distinctive approach to leadership of the archdiocese, declining interview requests and rejecting the archbishop’s official residence, opting to live in an archdiocesan curia building next to Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral. He focused on evangelization and care for the poor, and could be seen taking public transport, walking around the city’s drug-blighted villas miserias and washing Aids patients’ feet.
In February 2001, he was given the cardinal’s red hat by Pope John Paul II at a consistory in Rome, along with 36 others, including the future dean of the College of Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re, England’s Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the influential Brazilian Cláudio Hummes, and Washington’s Theodore McCarrick.
In October 2001, he replaced Cardinal Edward Egan as the general relator of a synod of bishops’ assembly in Rome after the Archbishop of New York was obliged to return home due to the 9/11 terror attacks. The post brought him into contact with Church leaders around the world, considerably raising his global profile.
Bergoglio initially declined the role of president of the Argentine bishops’ conference, but accepted in 2005 and was re-elected in 2008 for a further three-year term.
In April 2005, he took part in the conclave that elected Benedict XVI. According to later accounts, he drew the second-highest number of votes.
In 2007, he played a critical role in creating the influential Aparecida Document, a blueprint for renewed efforts to evangelize Latin America. The text said that the Church was “called to a deep and profound rethinking of its mission,” and needed to “relaunch it with fidelity and boldness in the new circumstances of Latin America and the world.”
He turned 75 in 2011, the age at which diocesan bishops typically present their resignations, but remained in post as Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
A surprise election
When the 85-year-old Benedict XVI dramatically resigned in 2013, many considered the 76-year-old Cardinal Bergoglio too old to be in the running to succeed him. The German pope had indicated that he wanted to make way for a younger, more vigorous figure to tackle the Vatican’s ills.
But the Argentine impressed his fellow cardinals with a speech at a pre-conclave meeting urging Catholics to go out “to the peripheries” and avoid the trap of a “self-referential Church.”
He was elected pope on March 13, 2013, on the fifth ballot. When he appeared on the balcony above St. Peter’s Square, his opening words were “Brothers and sisters, good evening!” He called for prayers “for the whole world, that there may be a great spirit of fraternity.”
A few days after being elected, he explained that he had chosen the name Francis in honor of St. Francis of Assisi and dreamed of a “a poor Church, for the poor.”
Rather than moving into the apostolic palace, he chose to remain in the Casa Santa Marta. He clarified that the decision was not taken on the grounds of austerity but for what he called “psychiatric reasons”: That it would not be good for him to live alone. He later posted a sign on the door of his suite with the injunction “No whining.”
Francis quickly became known and loved for his attention to those “on the peripheries.” A few weeks after his election, he celebrated Holy Thursday Mass at a prison in Rome, washing and kissing the feet of 12 inmates as part of the liturgy. His pontificate was marked throughout by spontaneous and heartfelt encounters with marginalized people.
Another hallmark of Francis’ papacy was his tendency to set aside prepared texts to deliver off-the-cuff remarks at papal events. He frequently told crowds gathered before him that he wanted to speak to them “from the heart.”
The pope’s informal communication style also included lengthy press conferences during return flights from international travels. Journalists frequently asked for the pope’s commentary on current political and ecclesial events, which typically generated global headlines, along with criticisms that his words were ambiguous or confusing.
The ‘Amoris’ controversy
The criticisms reached a peak with Francis’ publication of the 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia. Addressing the pastoral care of families, the document largely dealt with ideas such as love, vocation, and coping with suffering within marriage and family life.
But one footnote in the document’s eighth chapter, which focused on the accompaniment of those in “irregular situations,” drew significant controversy over its apparent suggestion that some Catholics who were divorced and civilly remarried without an annulment might be able to receive the Eucharist.
“In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments … I would also point out that the Eucharist ‘is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak,’” the footnote said.
Months after the document’s publication, four cardinals wrote to Pope Francis asking five questions — known as dubia (the Latin for “doubts”) — about the interpretation of chapter eight.
Cardinals Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra, and Joachim Meisner, appealed to the pope “to resolve the uncertainties and bring clarity.” Francis declined to respond, leaving the debate over Amoris laetitia to rumble throughout his pontificate, with the document’s implementation varying across the world.
The battle against abuse
In 2019, the pope promulgated Vos estis lux mundi, a set of canonical policies for investigating allegations of abuse, misconduct, or administrative negligence on the part of bishops. In 2023, he issued an updated version, which expanded the policies to include lay leaders of international associations recognized by the Holy See.
Vos estis was applauded as an important step forward in fighting abuse in the Church, creating a mechanism to hold bishops and other leaders accountable for failures in dealing with allegations. But critics argued that the protocols still fell short, in part because of a lack of transparency surrounding the investigations carried out under its purview.
In the U.S., several bishops were the subject of Vos estis investigations. A few were formally exonerated following Vos estis probes, and one was permitted to resign after he was found guilty of administrative misconduct. But the results in several other cases were not made public, and it was unclear if the cases were concluded.
Francis was often accused of employing double standards in abuse cases, showing leniency toward his allies, such as the disgraced Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta and the mosaic artist Fr. Marko Rupnik. While he acknowledged mistakes — for example, during a 2018 visit to Chile, when he described a bishop accused of a cover-up as a victim of slander — he insisted that, overall, the Church was making progress in the struggle against abuse, which he argued was a society-wide issue.
One of Francis’ most enduring contributions was his creation in 2014 of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, led by Boston’s Cardinal Seán O’Malley. The body promoted safeguarding around the world, including in the developing world, but suffered from underfunding, internal disputes, and obstruction within the Roman Curia.
Liturgical crackdown
Following colon surgery in July 2021, Pope Francis published the apostolic letter Traditionis custodes, imposing stringent restrictions on the celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, also known as the Traditional Latin Mass. Under the new regulations, priests were obliged to seek permission from their bishop to celebrate the Latin Mass, which was no longer allowed to take place in a parochial church.
The document followed a 2020 questionnaire sent to the world’s bishops by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith asking about positive and negative aspects of the celebration of the older liturgical form. It was widely expected that the pope would make modest alterations to Summorum pontificum, the 2007 apostolic letter issued by Benedict XVI to allow for a greatly expanded use of the Traditional Latin Mass. But the sweeping changes announced by Francis came as a shock to much of the Catholic world.
Francis argued that while Summorum pontificum had “intended to recover the unity of an ecclesial body with diverse liturgical sensibilities,” it had been “exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.”
The crackdown was controversial. Some bishops moved to completely end the celebration of the Extraordinary Form within their dioceses, while others invoked their own authority as shepherds of the local church to grant dispensations to the new regulations. The Vatican sought progressively to tighten the restrictions, insisting bishops were required to ask Rome before issuing dispensations.
Catholics with traditionalist sensibilities lamented what they saw as the destruction of communities that flourished under the provisions of Summorum Pontificum, with some taking part in public protests, especially in France.
Pope Francis sought to outline a positive liturgical vision in his 2022 apostolic letter Desiderio desideravi, which stressed the importance of silence, wonder, and deeper formation.
Synodal ways
An idea that gradually came to stand at the center of the pontificate was “synodality,” a neologism signaling an attempt to invigorate local Churches by promoting discussion and collaboration between clergy, laity, and the Bishop of Rome.
In an address marking the 50th anniversary of Paul VI’s institution of the Synod of Bishops in 2015, Francis noted that he was committed to enhancing the consultative body.
“It is precisely this path of synodality which God expects of the Church of the third millennium,” he said.
In 2021, he opened a global “synodal process,” an unprecedented three-year undertaking that began with a listening exercise in dioceses described as the biggest consultation exercise in Church history.
The initial stage, which suffered from low participation in many countries, was followed by continental assemblies. The final phase consisted of assemblies of the world’s bishops in Rome in 2023 and 2024, with significantly more lay participation than at previous assemblies. The “synod on synodality” ended with a final document calling for increased lay participation in Church decision-making processes, which Pope Francis decided to adopt into his own ordinary papal magisterium.
In some quarters, the initiative generated expectations of sweeping changes to Catholic doctrine and practice. Such expectations were particularly high in Germany following a multi-year “synodal way” in which bishops and select lay people passed resolutions favoring women deacons, a re-examination of priestly celibacy, lay preaching at Masses, same-sex blessings, and “gender diversity.”
But Pope Francis frequently criticized the German initiative and sought to distinguish it from the global process, which he insisted was “a journey in accordance with the Spirit, not a parliament for demanding rights and claiming needs in accordance with the agenda of the world.”
‘Who am I to judge?’
Pope Francis underlined that he would be taking a different approach to homosexuality than his immediate predecessors during an in-flight press conference at the end of his first foreign trip, to World Youth Day in Brazil.
Asked about his attitude toward a reputed “gay lobby” at the Vatican, he replied: “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?”
The remark made international headlines and was hailed by many as a sign that the pope wanted to change Church teaching on sexuality. The pope later explained that he was stressing that people should not be marginalized or defined by their sexuality.
The now-famous phrase “Who am I to judge?” became a rallying cry among those hoping the pope would lead the Church in a more progressive direction. Other Catholics voiced frustration with the pope’s improvisational style, complaining that it lent itself to confusion and a lack of clarity on moral questions.
In a documentary broadcast in 2020, Francis recalled that he had advocated civil union laws for same-sex couples while serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. In 2023, he endorsed the decriminalization of homosexuality worldwide.
He also praised the work of New Ways Ministry — whose co-founders Sister Jeannine Gramick and Fr. Robert Nugent were prohibited by the Vatican in 1999 from engaging in pastoral work with homosexual persons — and of the U.S. Jesuit Fr. James Martin.
In December 2023, Pope Francis approved the publication of a Vatican doctrine office declaration approving brief, spontaneous blessings for same-sex couples and couples in “irregular situations.”
The document provoked a major backlash, especially among African Church leaders, who later announced they had received an exemption from blessing same-sex couples as the practice would be “in direct contradiction to the cultural ethos of African communities.”
Reforming the Vatican
Most observers believed that Francis was elected with a dual task: Reforming the Roman Curia, the Catholic Church’s central government, and cleaning up the Vatican’s murky finances. He pursued both goals with determination but took a step-by-step approach that saw many setbacks.
One of his signature achievements was the promulgation of a new Vatican constitution, Praedicate evangelium, in March 2022 after a nine-year gestation overseen by the Council of Cardinals, an advisory body that he established months after his election.
The constitution said that “any member of the faithful” could, in theory, lead a Vatican dicastery or office, depending on its precise competence. It created a new Dicastery for Evangelization that was listed first among the dicasteries, ahead of the once-dominant Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Francis established a new Secretariat for the Economy in 2014, led by the bullish Australian Cardinal George Pell and entrusted with “oversight for the administrative and financial structures and activities of the dicasteries of the Roman Curia, the institutions linked to the Holy See, and the Vatican City State.”
But figures in the powerful Secretariat of State saw the body as a threat to its traditional financial autonomy and pushed back. The pope appeared to side at one point with the resistance, when the Secretariat of State suspended a major internal audit.
After it emerged that the Secretariat of State had lost millions following a dubious investment in a luxury London property, the pope sought to strip the dicastery of its financial funds and real estate assets, in a major blow to its prestige.
The property fiasco led to a long legal process dubbed the Vatican’s “trial of the century,” involving the principal figures in the deal, including Cardinal Angelo Becciu, previously the second-ranking official at the Secretariat of State, who resigned from office and lost his rights as a cardinal at the pope’s behest in 2020.
Care for migrants
Francis was among the world’s most prominent advocates of the dignity of migrants and refugees. He signaled it would be a priority of his pontificate when he made his first trip as pope to Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa, the destination of tens of thousands of African migrants. There, he criticized what he called “the globalization of indifference.”
At a 2016 Mass in Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city located at the U.S. border, he lamented “the human tragedy that is forced migration.” Months later, he made a joint visit with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. The trip highlighted the human toll of the European migrant crisis, driven by events including the Syrian Civil War.
In 2025, he issued a letter to the U.S. bishops criticizing mass deportations announced by the Trump administration.
War and peace
Throughout his pontificate, Francis took an active interest in international affairs, seeking to deploy the Holy See’s diplomatic resources to further peace and reconciliation around the world, with mixed results.
In 2014, the pope successfully encouraged U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro to forge a deal to begin normalizing relations between the two countries.
In 2015, Francis published the landmark encyclical Laudato si’, which influenced that year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, which adopted a binding international treaty on climate change.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he took the unusual step of visiting the Russian embassy to the Holy See to raise his voice for peace. At times, his comments on the conflict offended both the Russian and Ukrainian governments, but they continued to work behind the scenes with him over prisoner swaps and responded respectfully to his peace overtures.
The bloodshed in Eastern Europe seemed to confirm his long-held conviction that the world was witnessing a “piecemeal World War III,” fought often out of the sight of the global media in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
Overtures to the Islamic world
In inter-religious relations, Pope Francis prioritized dialogue with the Islamic world. In the early years of his pontificate, Islamist violence was rife in Europe and Middle East.
He deplored the attacks, but refused to equate them with Islam, insisting they were absurd and blasphemous attempts to justify murder in God’s name, and suggesting that “in nearly all religions there is always a small fundamentalist group.”
But he also highlighted the sacrifices of Christians murdered by Islamists, supporting the beatification cause of Fr. Jacques Hamel, who was killed while celebrating Mass in France in 2016, and adding the 21 Coptic Orthodox martyrs beheaded on a Libyan beach by Islamic State militants to the Roman Martyrology.
During a 2019 visit to the United Arab Emirates, Francis signed the Document on Human Fraternity alongside Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar. The text, seen as a milestone in Catholic-Muslim relations, invited “all persons who have faith in God and faith in human fraternity to unite and work together.”
In 2021, Pope Francis paid a historic visit to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of Shia Islam’s most senior religious authorities, in the Iraqi city of Najaf.
Ecumenical openings
Francis made significant efforts to deepen ties between the Catholic Church and other Christian communions both East and West.
He enjoyed an affectionate bond with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and appeared frequently alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury, respectively the heads of the world’s second- and third-largest communions after Catholicism.
He also reached out to Protestant communities, asking forgiveness of Italy’s Waldensians for the “unchristian-like and even inhuman attitudes and conduct” of Catholics in past centuries. He marked the 500th anniversary of the Reformation with a trip to historically Lutheran Sweden.
He also promoted what he called the “ecumenism of blood”: The convergence of Christians under the threat of persecution in regions such as the Middle East.
He became the first pope to meet with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, signing a joint declaration with Patriarch Kirill during their meeting at José Martí International Airport in Havana, Cuba, in February 2016.
Relations with Kirill soured amid the Ukraine war after the pope said that he had warned the patriarch not to become “Putin’s altar boy.” But lower-level contacts between Rome and Moscow Patriarchate resumed not long after.
Relations with the US Church
Pope Francis traveled to the U.S. in 2015, directly after a visit to Cuba. He became the third pope to visit the White House, where he was welcomed by President Barack Obama. He made a historic address to a joint session of Congress. canonized the Spanish missionary Junípero Serra, spoke at the UN General Assembly in New York, and celebrated the closing Mass of the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia.
The spotlight fell on relations between the U.S. Church and the Vatican in 2018, following the emergence of sexual abuse allegations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. The influential former Washington archbishop resigned from the College of Cardinals and was later dismissed from the clerical state. The Vatican faced intense pressure to clarify what it knew and when about the allegations against McCarrick, which dated back decades but did not stop his ascent in the Church.
In 2020, the Vatican took the unprecedented step of releasing an almost 500-page report describing the extent of the Holy See’s knowledge about McCarrick during the papacies of Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. The report defended Francis against claims that, after his election, he had ignored restrictions on McCarrick’s ministry quietly imposed by Benedict XVI. It insisted that the Vatican’s decision to allow McCarrick to continue visiting China, where he had established strong links, “did not require any modification of the indications previously conveyed by the Congregation for Bishops, since the indications had always allowed McCarrick to undertake activities with the Holy See’s permission.”
In November 2018, the Vatican intervened to stop U.S. bishops from voting on an episcopal code of conduct and the creation of a lay-led body to investigate complaints against bishops. The bishops were steered instead toward a “metropolitan model,” in which metropolitan archbishops would oversee investigations into complaints against bishops within their provinces. A similar model was ultimately adopted at the Universal Church level in the document Vos estis.
In 2021, the Vatican blocked a U.S. bishops’ conference statement on incoming President Joe Biden, which lamented that America’s second Catholic president intended “to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender.”
The Vatican intervened again later that year in a debate among the U.S. bishops about “Eucharistic coherence,” which touched on whether Catholic politicians who supported legal abortion should receive Communion. The Vatican stressed the importance of consensus within an episcopate intractably divided over the issue.
Amid these tensions, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, emerged as a uniquely outspoken episcopal critics of Pope Francis. In a canonically rare step, the pope removed Strickland, who had accused Francis of “undermining the Deposit of Faith,” from his post in 2023.
Francis made significant appointments in the U.S. Church that were widely perceived as an attempt to tilt the episcopate in a “progressive” direction. He gave red hats to bishops closely associated with his program, such as Cardinal Blase Cupich and Cardinal Robert McElroy, while passing over other candidates occupying traditional U.S. “cardinalatial” sees.
Historic trips, new cardinals and encyclicals
Francis traveled to more than 40 countries, continuing late into this papacy when he was largely confined to a wheelchair. A Mass he celebrated in the Philippines in January 2015 was the largest papal event in history, with more than 6 million participants. With his 2015 trip to the Central African Republic, he became the first pope to visit an active war zone. He was also the first to visit Iraq, spending several days there in March 2021.
By December 2024, Francis had appointed more than three-quarters of the cardinals eligible to vote in a future conclave. He oversaw a shift in the demographics of the College of Cardinals, appointing members from more than 20 countries that had never before had cardinals — including Brunei and Papua New Guinea — while declining to give red hats automatically to the archbishops of cardinalatial sees such as Milan and Paris. His pontificate therefore marked a notable shift in influence from the northern to the southern hemisphere.
Pope Francis published four encyclicals: Lumen fidei (completing a text by Benedict XVI), Laudato si’, Fratelli tutti — an impassioned appeal for greater fraternity — and Dilexit nos, inspired by devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Other major works included the exhortations Evangelii gaudium, which set out an evangelizing program for his pontificate, and Querida Amazonia, which called for the development of “a Church with an Amazonian face,” close to the imperiled region’s Indigenous peoples.
Pope Francis was born on Dec. 17, 1936. He died April 21, 2025, at the age of 88.