Born: December 17th, 1936
Died: April 21st, 2025
The late Pope Francis, whose death has been confirmed in Rome at the age of 88, was from a far country. Or, as he put it, that drizzly Rome evening in March 2013 when he was chosen as successor to Pope Benedict XVI, “it seems that my brother cardinals have gone to the ends of the Earth to get one ... but here we are.”
His casual informality, as thousands pointed their camera phones at him on the balcony at St Peter’s Basilica, set the tone for his papacy.
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Wearing a simple white cassock instead of the red ermine-trimmed cape favoured by previous popes, he also wore the same iron pectoral cross he preferred as Archbishop of Buenos Aires rather than the gold one chosen by predecessors at the Vatican.
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Clearly unscripted and very much at ease in his own skin, he began with the familiar “buona sera” and ended, after asking for prayers, with “ ... good night and sleep well”. Not quite the usual style of a pope assuming top office.
It continued at his audience with the media a couple of days later, where he went off-script regularly, discussing freely what had happened at the conclave which elected him and before which all participants are sworn to secrecy as to its proceedings. How he chose the name Francis. How in the Sistine Chapel he sat beside Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes “a good friend, a good friend! When things were looking dangerous, he encouraged me. And when the votes reached two-thirds there was the usual applause, because the pope had been elected. And he gave me a hug and a kiss, and said: ‘Don’t forget the poor!’ And those words came to me: the poor, the poor.”
That was when he was reminded of Francis of Assisi.
“That is how the name came into my heart: Francis of Assisi. For me, he is the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation; these days we do not have a very good relationship with creation, do we? He is the man who gives us this spirit of peace, the poor man ... How I would like a church which is poor and for the poor.”
This concern for creation would lead to his 2015 Laudato sí encyclical on “care for our common home”.
And there was the humour, as he faced the prospect of becoming the first Jesuit pope.
“Someone else said to me: ‘No, no: your name should be Clement.’ ‘But why?’ ‘Clement XV: thus you pay back Clement XIV who suppressed the Society of Jesus [Jesuits]!’”
As well as being the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, the first to take the name Francis, he was also 76, a man whose age suggested a short papacy. Another “caretaker pope”, then, until the church could settle down after Benedict’s shock resignation and take stock.
It had happened before. In 1958, Pope John XXIII was elected “to hold the fort” after the death of the controversial Pius XII who had been in office for almost 20 years, including all of the second World War. The election of John XXIII would allow the church a breather, or so it was thought.
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He, too, was 76 on being elected pope in October 1958, but his short papacy of less than five years, ending with his death in June 1963, was the most significant in centuries.
He opened up the church to the contemporary world and called the Second Vatican Council, probably the most important event in the Catholic Church since the Council of Trent. The latter concluded in 1563 and defined the church’s muscular response to the Reformation and so much else for 400 years.
Many would contend that the spirit of Pope John’s Second Vatican Council wilted after his death under Pope Paul VI and withered during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, right up to the election of another old man, Francis, on March 13th, 2013.
By then, it would have been known at the highest levels in the church that this newest old man was an unequivocal admirer of Pope John XXIII. Was he elected because of this? Or despite it?
It was known that in the 2005 conclave which followed the death of Pope John Paul II, the then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was running second to Cardinal Ratzinger, later elected Benedict XVI, when he made an emotional appeal to his fellow cardinal-electors at that conclave to desist from voting for him any more. They did.
He said afterwards that, had he been elected in that conclave, he would have been named John XXIV. He told the late Cardinal Francesco Marchisano, a member of the Roman Curia, “I would have called myself John, like the Good Pope; I would have been completely inspired by him.”
This inspiration is most evident in what has been the single greatest achievement of Francis’s papacy, the synodal pathway he launched in 2021 and through which he has attempted to return the church to the people and away from clericalism – not just in terms of governance but also when it comes to emphasis in its teachings. He trusted the laity when it came to reading the signs of the times and insisted “the sheep” should have a much greater say, with priests urged to become “shepherds with the ‘smell of the sheep’,” on them, grounded in their flock.
Following consultation with practising Catholics worldwide, this synodal pathway may yet turn out to be the single greatest agent of change in the church for many centuries, and certainly since the Second Vatican Council.
Within the developed world particularly, it has heard calls from Catholics for a wider embrace of humanity in all its guises, whether single and unmarried parents, LGBTQ+ people, people who are divorced and remarried. There have also been demands for full equality for women, right up to and including ordination and removal of the mandatory celibacy rule for priests.
None of this is to suggest that Francis was any more liberal in his beliefs than his predecessors, rather that his style was one of frayed edges allowing room for an ever-present, always-required compassion.
It was an approach best summarised by his question: “Who am I to judge?” when asked in 2013 about the church’s attitude to gay people. “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?“ he said then.
Also in 2013, just months into his papacy, he defined this approach thus: “The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars. You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds ... And you have to start from the ground up.”
He was not interested in a tidy church with tidy teachings but favoured instead one that was as messy as life itself, an institution that existed alongside and which dressed effectively the very real wounds of the living wherever they are found.
It was also the case that he could be messy himself in the use of language, speaking off-the-cuff and leaving it to his communications staff to clarify later what he meant.
Neither was he afraid to be wrong, admit it, and ask forgiveness. All in public. He was not afraid to learn on the job and to be seen to do so. An example of this occurred in 2018 when he admitted to “grave errors” of judgment in a clerical sexual abuse scandal in Chile.
He invited the abuse victims he had discredited to Rome to ask their forgiveness.
“I recognise and so I want it to be faithfully transmitted that I have incurred grave mistakes of judgment and perception of the situation, especially due to the lack of truthful and balanced information,” he wrote then.
“From now on I ask forgiveness of all those I offended and I hope to be able to do it personally in the coming weeks,” he said. This lack of “truthful and balanced information” at the Vatican itself greatly delayed the implementation of many of his attempts to successfully ensure the Roman Curia addressed the clerical child abuse scandal within the church internationally as radically as he wished.
He did not have a great relationship with that Curia, which he addressed critically for the abuses, clericalism and careerism within, and which he excoriated publicly and without equivocation, particularly in the early years of his papacy.
He attempted to sideline the Curia from the start by creating his own handpicked Council of Cardinals to advise him on all matters soon after he became pope.
His entire papacy was an attempt to move power from the centre of the church to the margins and marginalised. As though to emphasise this, he opted to live modestly in the Santa Marta guest house at the Vatican rather than in the Apostolic Palace.
He chose to be a kind of outsider pope at the Vatican, a champion of the marginalised, those on the periphery, the excluded. It was why he appointed so many cardinals from areas of the world not represented before in the College of Cardinals, while simultaneously reducing the influence of European cardinals.
Being the son of (Italian) emigrants himself, he had very strong views on migration. One of the first acts of his papacy was a visit to the small island of Lampedusa between Italy and Tunisia where thousands of people attempted to enter Europe, many drowning in the Mediterranean as they did so.
He condemned “global indifference” to their plight and threw a wreath in the sea in memory of the many people who have drowned trying to get there.
This stance brought him into direct conflict very early on with the new Trump administration in Washington whose actions on the deportations he decried in a letter to the US Catholic bishops in early February 2025 where he warned that the forceful removal of people purely because of their illegal status deprived them of their inherent dignity and would “end badly”.
He was born in Buenos Aires. His father Mario was an accountant employed on the railways and his mother, Regina Maria Sívori, was dedicated to raising their five children.
He graduated as a chemical technician and in 1958 began training to be a Jesuit. In 1969 he was ordained, making his final profession as a Jesuit in April 1973 and becoming Provincial of the Jesuits in Chile that July, a role he held until 1979.
He returned to academic life in 1980 after spending three months at the Jesuits’ Milltown Institute in Dublin learning English, a language he never mastered.
He became Rector of the Colegio de San José, as well as parish priest, in San Miguel. In March 1986 he finished his doctoral thesis in Germany before returning to the Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires.
In 1992 he was appointed an Auxiliary of Buenos Aires, becoming Coadjutor Archbishop in 1997 and Archbishop and Primate of Argentina in 1998.
In 2001, he became a cardinal and was soon a member of five Vatican Congregations in the Roman Curia. In all of these roles, he became known for his humility, for living simply, for his commitment to social justice and his conservatism on matters of church teaching. None of this changed when he became pope.
It seems extraordinary now that when he reached the age of 75, in December 2011, and as is mandatory for all bishops, he submitted a letter of resignation to the Vatican.
He was still waiting for its acceptance and the appointment of a successor when Pope Benedict resigned in February 2013. And although he was still under 80 when the 2013 conclave took place, and so eligible to vote, it is unlikely he would have been elected pope were he no longer Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
He suffered various ailments in his final years and was slowed by a bad knee, respiratory problems that affected his voice. He appeared in his wheelchair to bless the faithful in St Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday 2025.
He died at 7.35am on Easter Monday at his residence in the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta.
