VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis, historical past’s first Latin American pontiff who charmed the world along with his humble type and concern for the poor however alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and local weather change, died Monday. He was 88.
“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 Farrell mentioned from the chapel of the Domus Santa Marta, the place Francis lived.
Francis, who suffered from power lung illness and had a part of one lung eliminated as a younger man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025, for a respiratory disaster that developed into double pneumonia. He spent 38 days there, the longest hospitalization of his 12-year papacy.
He made his final public look on Easter Sunday — a day earlier than his demise — to bless hundreds of individuals in St. Peter’s Sq., drawing wild cheers and applause. Beforehand, he met U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
Francis carried out the blessing from the identical loggia the place he was launched on March 13, 2013, because the 266th pope.
From his first greeting that night time — a remarkably regular “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) — to his embrace of refugees and the downtrodden, Francis signaled a very completely different tone for the papacy, stressing humility over hubris for a Catholic Church beset by scandal and accusations of indifference.
The Argentine-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio introduced a breath of recent air right into a 2,000-year-old establishment that had seen its affect wane throughout the troubled tenure of Pope Benedict XVI, whose shock resignation led to Francis’ election.
However Francis quickly invited troubles of his personal, and conservatives grew more and more upset along with his progressive bent, outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics and crackdown on traditionalists. His best take a look at got here in 2018 when he botched a infamous case of clergy sexual abuse in Chile, and the scandal that festered beneath his predecessors erupted anew.
After which Francis, the crowd-loving, globe-trotting pope of the peripheries, navigated the unprecedented actuality of main a common faith by means of the coronavirus pandemic from a locked-down Vatican Metropolis.
“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented,” Francis advised an empty St. Peter’s Sq. in March 2020. Calling for a rethink of the worldwide financial framework, he mentioned the pandemic confirmed the necessity for “all of us to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.”
World leaders on Monday extolled Francis’ dedication to the marginalized. French President Emmanuel Macron, whose nation is essentially Catholic, wrote on X: “From Buenos Aires to Rome, Pope Francis wanted the church to bring joy and hope to the poorest. … May this hope forever outlast him.”
Flags flew at half-staff in Italy, and crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Sq.. When the good bells of St. Peter’s Basilica started tolling, vacationers stopped of their tracks to file the second on their telephones.
Johann Xavier, who traveled from Australia, hoped to see the pope throughout his go to. “However then we heard about it once we got here in right here. It just about devastated all of us,’’ he mentioned.
Francis’ demise units off a weekslong course of of permitting the trustworthy to pay their closing respects, first for Vatican officers within the Santa Marta chapel after which in St. Peter’s for most people, adopted by a funeral and a conclave to elect a brand new pope.
Reforming the Vatican
Francis was elected on a mandate to reform the Vatican paperwork and funds however went additional in shaking up the church with out altering its core doctrine. “Who am I to judge?” he replied when requested a few purportedly homosexual priest.
The remark despatched a message of welcome to the LGBTQ+ group and people who felt shunned by a church that had careworn sexual propriety over unconditional love. “Being homosexual is not a crime,” he advised The Related Press in 2023, urging an finish to civil legal guidelines that criminalize it.
Stressing mercy, Francis modified the church’s place on the demise penalty, calling it inadmissible in all circumstances. He additionally declared the possession of nuclear weapons, not simply their use, was “immoral.”
In different firsts, he authorized an settlement with China over bishop nominations that had vexed the Vatican for many years, met the Russian patriarch and charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.
He reaffirmed the all-male, celibate priesthood and upheld the church’s opposition to abortion, equating it to “hiring a hit man to solve a problem.”
Roles for girls
However he added ladies to vital decision-making roles and allowed them to function lectors and acolytes in parishes. He let ladies vote alongside bishops in periodic Vatican conferences, following long-standing complaints that girls do a lot of the church’s work however are barred from energy.
Sister Nathalie Becquart, whom Francis named to one of many highest Vatican jobs, mentioned his legacy was a imaginative and prescient of a church the place women and men existed 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,” mentioned Becquart, the primary girl to carry a voting place in a Vatican synod.
Nonetheless, a observe of criticism got here Monday from the Ladies’s Ordination Convention, which had been annoyed by Francis’ unwillingness to push for the ordination of girls.
“His repeated ‘closed door’ policy on women’s ordination was painfully incongruous with his otherwise pastoral nature, and for many, a betrayal of the synodal, listening church he championed. This made him a complicated, frustrating, and sometimes heart-breaking figure for many women,” the assertion mentioned.
The church as refuge
Whereas Francis didn’t enable ladies to be ordained, the voting reform was a part of a revolutionary change in emphasizing what the church ought to be: a refuge for everybody — “todos, todos, todos” (“everyone, everyone, everyone”). Migrants, the poor, prisoners and outcasts had been invited to his desk way over presidents or {powerful} CEOs.
“For Pope Francis, (the goal) was always to extend the arms of the church to embrace all people, not to exclude anyone,” mentioned Farrell, the Vatican camerlengo, who takes cost after a pontiff’s demise.
Francis demanded his bishops apply mercy and charity to their flocks, pressed the world to guard God’s creation from local weather catastrophe, and challenged international locations to welcome these fleeing struggle, poverty and oppression.
After visiting Mexico in 2016, Francis mentioned of then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump that anybody constructing a wall to maintain migrants out “is not Christian.”
Whereas progressives had been thrilled with Francis’ radical deal with Jesus’ message of mercy and inclusion, it troubled conservatives who feared he watered down Catholic instructing and threatened the very Christian identification of the West. Some even referred to as him a heretic.
A number of cardinals overtly challenged him. Francis often responded along with his typical reply to battle: silence.
He made it simpler for married Catholics to get an annulment, allowed monks to absolve ladies who had had abortions and decreed that monks may bless same-sex {couples}. He opened debate on points like homosexuality and divorce, giving pastors wiggle room to discern how one can accompany their flocks, slightly than handing them strict guidelines to use.
St. Francis of Assisi as a mannequin
Francis lived within the Vatican resort as an alternative of the Apostolic Palace, wore his previous orthotic footwear and never the crimson loafers of the papacy, and rode in compact automobiles. It wasn’t a gimmick.
“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 advised a Jesuit journal in 2013. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”
If changing into the primary Latin American and first Jesuit pope wasn’t sufficient, Francis was additionally the primary to call himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the thirteenth century friar identified for private simplicity and look after society’s outcasts.
Francis formally apologized to Indigenous peoples for the crimes of the church from colonial occasions onward. And he went to society’s fringes to minister with mercy: caressing the deformed head of a person in St. Peter’s Sq., kissing the tattoo of a Holocaust survivor, or inviting Argentina’s rubbish scavengers to affix him onstage in Rio de Janeiro.
“We have always been marginalized, but Pope Francis always helped us,” mentioned Coqui Vargas, a transgender girl whose Roman group solid a novel relationship with Francis.
His first journey as pope was to the Italian island of Lampedusa, then the epicenter of Europe’s migration disaster. He persistently selected to go to poor international locations the place Christians had been typically persecuted minorities, slightly than the facilities of world Catholicism.
Pal and fellow Argentine, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, mentioned his concern was based mostly on the Beatitudes — the eight blessings Jesus delivered within 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 mentioned.
Missteps on sexual abuse scandal
However greater than a yr handed earlier than Francis met with survivors of priestly sexual abuse, and victims’ teams initially questioned whether or not he actually understood the scope of the issue.
Francis did create a intercourse abuse fee to advise the church on greatest practices, but it surely misplaced affect after a number of years and its suggestion of a tribunal to guage bishops who lined up for predator monks went nowhere.
After which got here the best disaster of his papacy, when he discredited Chilean abuse victims in 2018 and stood by a controversial bishop linked to their abuser. Realizing his error, Francis invited the victims to the Vatican for a private mea culpa and summoned the management of the Chilean church to resign en masse.
As that disaster concluded, a brand new one erupted over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington and a counselor to a few popes.
Francis had truly moved swiftly to sideline McCarrick amid an accusation he had molested a teenage altar boy within the Nineteen Seventies. However Francis however was accused by the Vatican’s one-time U.S. ambassador of getting rehabilitated McCarrick early in his papacy.
Francis finally defrocked McCarrick after a Vatican investigation decided he sexually abused adults in addition to minors. He modified church regulation to take away the pontifical secret surrounding abuse circumstances and enacted procedures to analyze bishops who abused or lined for his or her pedophile monks, in search of to finish impunity for the hierarchy.
“He sincerely wanted to do something and he transmitted that,” mentioned Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean abuse survivor Francis discredited who later developed an in depth friendship with the pontiff.
However teams that advocated for extra motion on sexual abuse expressed disappointment in Francis’ legacy.
“Pope Francis was a beacon of hope to many of the world’s most desperate and marginalized people. But what we most needed from this pope was justice for the Church’s own wounded, the children and adults sexually abused by Catholic clergy. In this realm, where Francis had supreme power, he refused to make the necessary changes,” mentioned Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the U.S.-based group BishopAccountability.
A change from Benedict
The street to Francis’ 2013 election was paved by Pope Benedict XVI’s choice to resign and retire — the primary in 600 years.
Francis didn’t shy from Benedict’s probably uncomfortable shadow. Francis embraced him as an elder statesman and adviser, coaxing him out of his cloistered retirement to take part within the public lifetime of the church till Benedict’s demise in 2022.
“It’s like having your grandfather in the house, a wise grandfather,” Francis mentioned.
Francis’ looser liturgical type and pastoral priorities made clear he and the German-born theologian got here from very completely different spiritual traditions, and Francis straight overturned a number of choices of his predecessor.
He made certain Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, a hero to the liberation theology motion in Latin America, was canonized after his case languished beneath Benedict over issues in regards to the credo’s Marxist bent.
Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the previous Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed, arguing it was divisive. The transfer riled Francis’ traditionalist critics and opened sustained battle with right-wing Catholics, significantly within the U.S.
Conservatives oppose Francis
By then, conservatives had already turned away from Francis, betrayed after he opened debate on permitting remarried Catholics to obtain the sacraments in the event that 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 day by day Il Foglio a number of months into the papacy, reflecting the unease of the small however vocal traditionalist Catholic motion.
Those self same critics amplified their complaints after Francis’ authorized church blessings for same-sex {couples}, and a controversial accord with China over nominating bishops.
Its particulars had been by no means launched, however conservative critics bashed it as a sellout to communist China, whereas the Vatican defended it as the very best deal it may get.
U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a figurehead within the anti-Francis opposition, mentioned the church had change into “like a ship without a rudder.”
Burke waged his opposition marketing campaign for years, beginning when Francis fired him because the Vatican’s supreme courtroom justice and culminating along with his vocal opposition to Francis’ 2023 synod on the church’s future.
Francis finally sanctioned Burke financially, accusing him of sowing “disunity.”
Francis insisted his bishops and cardinals imbue themselves with the “odor of their flock” and minister to the trustworthy, voicing displeasure once they didn’t.
His 2014 Christmas deal with to the Vatican Curia was one of many best public papal reprimands ever: Standing within the marbled Apostolic Palace, Francis ticked off 15 illnesses he mentioned can afflict his closest collaborators, together with “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” lusting for energy and the “terrorism of gossip.”
Attempting to remove corruption, Francis oversaw the reform of the scandal-marred Vatican financial institution and sought to wrestle Vatican bureaucrats into monetary line, limiting their compensation and talent to obtain items or award public contracts.
He licensed Vatican police to raid his personal secretariat of state and the Vatican’s monetary watchdog company amid suspicions a few 350 million euro funding in a London actual property enterprise. After a 2 1/2-year trial, the Vatican tribunal convicted a once-powerful cardinal, Angelo Becciu, of embezzlement and returned blended verdicts to 9 others, acquitting one.
The trial, although, proved to be a reputational boomerang for the Holy See, displaying deficiencies within the Vatican’s authorized system, unseemly turf battles amongst monsignors, and the way the pope had intervened on behalf of prosecutors.
Whereas incomes reward for attempting to show the Vatican’s funds round, Francis angered U.S. conservatives for his frequent excoriation of the worldwide monetary market.
Financial justice was an vital themes of his papacy, and he didn’t conceal it in his first assembly with journalists when he mentioned he needed a “poor church that is for the poor.”
In his first main instructing doc, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis denounced trickle-down financial theories as unproven and naive.
“Money must serve, not rule!” he mentioned in urging political reforms.
Some U.S. conservatives branded Francis a Marxist. He jabbed again by saying he had many mates who had been Marxists.
Soccer, opera and prayer
Born Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the eldest of 5 kids of Italian immigrants.
He credited his religious grandmother Rosa with instructing him how one can pray. Weekends had been spent listening to opera on the radio, going to Mass and attending matches of the household’s beloved San Lorenzo soccer membership. As pope, his love of soccer introduced him an enormous assortment of jerseys from guests.
He mentioned he obtained his spiritual calling at 17 whereas going to confession, recounting in a 2010 biography that, “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 however switched to the Jesuit order in 1958, interested in its missionary custom and militancy.
Round this time, he suffered from pneumonia, which led to the removing of a part of his proper lung. His frail well being prevented him from changing into a missionary, and his less-than-robust lung capability was maybe liable for his whisper of a voice and reluctance to sing at Mass.
On Dec. 13, 1969, he was ordained a priest, and instantly started instructing. In 1973, he was named head of the Jesuits in Argentina, an appointment he later acknowledged was “crazy” given he was solely 36. “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he admitted in his Civilta Cattolica interview.
Life beneath Argentina’s dictatorship
His six-year tenure as the pinnacle of the order in Argentina coincided with the nation’s murderous 1976-83 dictatorship, when the navy launched a marketing campaign in opposition to left-wing guerrillas and different regime opponents.
Bergoglio didn’t publicly confront the junta and was accused of successfully permitting two slum monks to be kidnapped and tortured by not publicly endorsing their work.
He refused for many years to counter that model of occasions. Solely in a 2010 licensed biography did he lastly recount the lengths he used to avoid wasting them, persuading the household priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to name in sick so he may have fun Mass as an alternative. As soon as within the junta chief’s dwelling, Bergoglio privately appealed for mercy. Each monks had been finally launched, among the many few to have survived jail.
As pope, accounts started to emerge of the many individuals — monks, seminarians and political dissidents —whom Bergoglio truly saved throughout the “dirty war,” letting them keep incognito on the seminary or serving to them escape the nation.
Bergoglio went to Germany in 1986 to analysis a never-finished thesis. Returning to Argentina, he was stationed in Cordoba throughout a interval he described as a time of “great interior crisis.” Out of favor with extra progressive Jesuit leaders, he was finally rescued from obscurity in 1992 by St. John Paul II, who named him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. He grew to become archbishop six years later, and was made a cardinal in 2001.
He got here near changing into pope in 2005 when Benedict was elected, gaining the second-most votes in a number of rounds earlier than bowing out.
