By Catherine Pepinster

When Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires stood on the balcony of St Peter’s in Rome after being elected Pope to 1.3 billion Roman Catholics in March 2013, he told the cheering crowds that the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church had gone to the ends of the Earth to find the new pontiff.

He was a man from the periphery, and during his 12 years as Pope he made people on the periphery — people in the developing world, those whose countries were most affected by climate change, the poor of rich cities like Rome, refugees and trafficked people — his priority.

Even his papal name, Francis — chosen to honour St Francis of Assisi — reflected his commitment to the disparate and destitute, like the medieval saint.

Millions of Catholics, as well as those of other faiths and none, loved him, as he lived a life of simplicity, with a message of love and inclusion for all.

But plenty of clerics did not. Vatican officials and other priests around the world who preferred the conservative Catholicism of Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, were vehemently opposed to Francis. They considered his concern for migrants, his focus on the environment, his desire to reform the church, and his engagement with other faiths and primitive belief systems, to be dangerously radical and subversive.

Some of those who admired him were also troubled at times. A pope who promised so much and seemed such a force for progress did not always deliver. He set up safeguarding systems for reporting abuse, but individuals who led the way in the church on countering child abuse by priests, quit in frustration from the organisations that Francis set up to deal with it.

He proved to be at heart a traditionalist when it came to the role of women in the church, and though he promoted several to be Vatican officials, there was limited progress on women’s ministry.

He lambasted some world leaders for their policies and consistently spoke out against war, but he was thought to have responded slowly to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Even more concerning was his attitude to China, with which he sought to improve relations, but many saw him as naïve at best and even foolish in his assessment of the potential for religious freedom under the current Beijing regime.

There were concerns about his health. When Pope Benedict resigned at 85, saying he could not carry on as leader of the church, many thought the conclave would elect a much younger man. But they chose Bergoglio, who was 76.

In the latter years of his pontificate, Francis had several health problems and, since 2022, was seen regularly in a wheelchair, suffering from strained knee ligaments and episodes of sciatica.

In 2021, he had an operation for narrowing the large intestine, a condition requiring subsequent interventions. In March 2023 he was hospitalised after having trouble breathing and was diagnosed with acute bronchitis. On 14 February 2025, he was admitted to hospital again and found to have double pneumonia.

Early life in Argentina

Jorge Bergoglio was from a family of migrants from the Piedmont region of Italy, who had moved to Argentina to escape the fascism of Mussolini. Born in 1936, in Buenos Aires, he worked in various jobs in his youth, including being a bouncer, a janitor and a chemist, and developed a passion for football and the tango. At one time he was seriously ill and had part of his lung removed.

It was after his health scare that Bergoglio took a possible vocation to the priesthood seriously and entered a seminary in Buenos Aires. Three years later, he decided to join the Jesuit order — considered one of the most intellectual of the church — and underwent its rigorous, lengthy training for the priesthood. It was through the Jesuits that he first came to Europe, studying English in Dublin, and then spent several months at university in Frankfurt.

His progress through the ranks of the Jesuit order in Argentina was speedy. By the time he was 36 in 1973, he became provincial (leader) of the order in Argentina, but the role proved to be full of pitfalls.

In the mid-1970s, Argentina, including the Jesuit order, was riven by political factionalism, caused by the domination of the country by Peronism, a movement named after its former president, General Juan Perón. Peronism brought together the might of the military and the moral authority of the church to enforce its philosophy, something that involved suppression of its enemies. By the 1970s, Peronism was riven by internal factions, with many people killed, especially during 1974-83 in what was called the Dirty War.

A troubled Jesuit leader

Bergoglio, worried by threats to the church, considered that Peronism and the state might offer solutions to Argentina’s problems, and — concerned about left-wing challenges — cracked down on liberation theology within the Jesuit order. During his time as rector of the Jesuit seminary in Buenos Aires, he made considerable enemies in the order because of his conservatism and authoritarian style. In 1990, the leadership of the entire Jesuit order, in Rome, decided that he should be exiled to Cordoba, in the south of Argentina, and be stripped of any responsibility. He was banned from saying mass in public, could only hear confessions, and was not allowed to write letters or make phone calls.

He returned to Buenos Aires in 1992, after his appointment as auxiliary bishop, transformed by his Cordoba experience. Later, after becoming pope, he said his time as Jesuit leader was full of mistakes and Cordoba was a time of interior crisis that shaped who he was. It was as auxiliary bishop that he became the man familiar to millions as pope: more consultative, focused on direct action, engaged with the poor, and, like many others in the Catholic church, accepting ideas of liberation theology that were once considered radical, as mainstream.

One of these was the notion of structural sin — that people do wrong by upholding unfair economic systems. When an economic crisis gripped Argentina in 2001, with half the population enduring poverty, Bergoglio was highly critical of how the financial markets had crippled the economy.

His empathy with those at the bottom of the economic ladder was evident in how he lived, travelling on the Buenos Aires metro and living simply. He took this approach with him when he moved to Rome after being elected pope, shunning the apostolic palace and living instead in the simpler surroundings of the Casa Santa Marta. On his first trip abroad as pope he disliked having his bags carried for him and insisted on carrying his own briefcase.

Radical Pope

That first trip took him back to Latin America for World Youth Day, held in Rio de Janeiro. During an in-flight press conference, he was asked about reports that there were groups of gay priests in the Vatican. He answered: “We must make the distinction between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of a lobby, because lobbies are not good. They are bad. If a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge that person?”

It was a response that dominated the headlines and a signal that this pope would welcome into the church those he considered excluded or marginalised. Another gesture of his that shook up the Vatican was his decision to celebrate the traditional ritual of washing people’s feet on Maundy Thursday — to commemorate Christ washing the feet of his disciples — out of St Peter’s Basilica and into a youth prison, where he washed the feet of 12 prisoners. It was a gesture of solidarity with the marginalised that he had also made in Argentina, celebrating Maundy Thursday in hospitals, jails and homes for the elderly.

While Cardinal Bergoglio had spoken of his vision of the church during the gatherings of cardinals held after Pope Benedict XVI had resigned and before the conclave, his approach to being pope nevertheless took Vatican officials and conservative Catholics around the world by surprise — and dismayed many of them. Their antipathy to him continued throughout his pontificate, making his reform agenda much more difficult to pursue.

Bergoglio — Pope Francis from the moment of his election on 13 March 2013 — had a clear agenda, in part shaped by the struggles of his predecessor, Benedict, to deal with problems in the church. Francis arrived when there was clear evidence of financial mismanagement in the Vatican and he cleared out four of the five cardinals who ran financial affairs and replaced them with his own appointments as well as bringing in lay experts to advise him. Another of his first moves was to create a Council of Cardinals to examine the structure of the Roman Curia — the governing operation of the church. Only one member of the curia was appointed while the rest were drawn from around the world and were known critics of the Vatican.

Reform of the church

The most significant moves that Francis made, however, were about calling synods, attempting to engage the laity and bishops around the world further in the Catholic church’s decision-making processes — something advocated by the Second Vatican Council, yet 60 years on from it, still not fully implemented.

This approach was particularly highlighted by the series of synods, known as the Synod on Synodality, which involved a series of sessions in Rome between 2021 and 2024, with lay people participating on an equal footing with bishops and cardinals. This was an unprecedented innovation in the Catholic church and led to a recommendation that more lay people should be involved in the decision making of their dioceses.

But far more controversial were the two sessions, of a synod on the family, held in Rome in 2014 and 2015, after consultations with the laity via questionnaires on many topics such as divorce and contraception. Thousands of pages of responses to issues about the family were received from bishops and Catholic organisations around the world, and married couples as well as cardinals were given opportunities to speak during the synod sessions.

When Pope Francis released his post-synodal response, Amoris Laetitia (the Joy of Love), he expressed particular sympathy for those who had advocated that individual parish priests should decide whether a divorced and remarried Catholic should receive holy communion.

“I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy,” he said. “I would also point out that the eucharist is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”

Limited progress on women in the church

Catholic women had welcomed Pope Francis’s election and he did initiate dialogue on the possibility of women deacons and appointed women to positions in the curia (although these tended almost always to be reliable nuns).

But his endorsement of the Catholic status quo, ruling out the possibility of women being priests, disappointed many of the women who otherwise supported his reforms. 

The Synod on Synodality consultation revealed a wide concern in the global church that the role of women should be raised. Their peripheral role, with power exercised by men, was one issue. Another issue was the declining number of male priests, which made it difficult for congregations in some regions, such as the Amazon Basin, to find clergy to lead mass.

The document considered at the three-week Synod meeting in October 2024, made no mention of female ordination to the priesthood. But it did suggest that making women deacons might recognise their ministry.

However, the issue was taken off the table as being impossible to answer at the synod, and was handed over to a study group to carry on investigating it afterwards.

At the synod, history was made when women were allowed to vote for the first time. Sister Nathalie Becquart became the first woman to vote at any Vatican meeting when she was appointed undersecretary to the synod in 2021.

Other senior appointments include Sister Simona Brambilla, prefect of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life; Sister Raffaella Petrini, secretary-general of the Vatican City State; and Sister Alessandra Smerilli, deputy of the Vatican development office. In 2020, Pope Francis appointed six women including the British former Labour minister Ruth Kelly, to the Council for the Economy that oversees Vatican finances. 

Conservative opposition

The publication of Amoris Laetitia in 2016 led to an extraordinary attack by four conservative cardinals who published dubia, or doubts, consisting of five questions about the document, which they said had caused “grave disorientation and confusion”. Supporters of Francis said Amoris Laetitia caused no problems because it was in line with Catholic teaching. Francis chose to ignore the dubia, but it was indicative of the opposition he faced from conservative factions in the church.

This opposition was evident again when Francis organised a synod on the Amazon region in Rome in 2019, and more than 180 bishops and cardinals from nine Amazonian countries as well as tribal leaders discussed how to protect better the rainforest and how to minister to its indigenous people. Among the most contentious proposals were ordaining married men to help with the acute shortage of priests (Catholic priests are celibate unless they have converted from another denomination and are already married) and whether women could be ordained deacons.

However, the most clearcut opposition to Francis’s engagement with the ideas discussed at the synod came when indigenous statues brought to the synod were stolen from a church where they had been featured in Catholic-cum-indigenous services and thrown into the Tiber. The theft was celebrated by conservatives as a strike against paganism. Cardinal Gerhard Muller, a former doctrine chief who was sacked by Francis in 2017, said it had been a great mistake to allow the idols into the church. Francis, meanwhile, apologised to the synod delegates for what had happened.

The green Pope

The Amazon synod also highlighted Pope Francis’s concern for the plight of the planet, most notably expressed in his 2015 encyclical, or teaching document, Laudato si’, in which he critiqued consumerism, environmental degradation and global warming, urging people to take “swift and unified global action” and that care for what he called “our common home” — the planet — was part of the church’s approach to social justice. Francis perceived the plight of the planet as caused by people no longer seeing God as the creator, but he was also concerned about the impact of environmental degradation on the poorest people.

Laudato si’ was, to Francis, one of the most important landmarks of his pontificate, and he would give copies to his visitors. It was welcomed by large numbers of Catholics around the world who were concerned about climate change which had become a key issue for many of its aid organisations, alongside poverty in the developing world. But it alarmed many of the Pope’s critics, who saw it as another instance of Francis straying from church teaching and dabbling in politics and economics. But his supporters saw it as following a trajectory of Catholic social teaching, also endorsed by Francis’s more conservative predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Refugees and migrants

Laudato si’ undoubtedly won Francis fans among liberals and Greens beyond the Roman Catholic Church, as did his continuing critique of consumerism and his concerns for refugees and marginalised people.

Throughout his pontificate he spoke out about their treatment and the need for them to be welcomed. On several occasions, he visited places where refugees and migrants arrived in Europe after fleeing across the Mediterranean from war-torn parts of Africa and the Middle East.

His empathy for the plight of migrants and refugees, in part shaped by his family’s personal experience, and his conviction that Christians must respond to their needs with love and care, brought him into conflict with Donald Trump, during both his US presidencies.

Francis spoke out during Trump’s first term against his plans for a wall between Mexico and the US, with his concern particularly focused on the plight of children. Then, soon after Trump’s second inauguration as president in 2025, Francis wrote a letter to the US Catholic bishops, which was clearly a rebuke to the president.

He warned: “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defencelessness.”

He also took on the vice-president, J. D. Vance, a Catholic convert who had spoken of there being an order of love — an ordo amoris — in Catholic theology, which means people put family first, followed by neighbours, fellow citizens and lastly others. Francis advised meditating on the parable of the Good Samaritan, and its message of love that is “fraternity open to all”.

The China controversy

Francis was also influential on other matters on the world stage, including helping to broker full diplomatic relations between America and Cuba, which he had visited in 2015, and speaking out against the death penalty, committing the Catholic church to its global abolition. While it was almost inevitable that Francis would be criticised by conservatives for these initiatives, his more progressive supporters were also deeply concerned about his engagement with China.

For decades, two Catholic churches existed in China: the so-called underground Catholic church, which is under the jurisdiction of Rome, and the Patriotic Catholic Church, which comes under the auspices of the communist regime. In 2018, the Chinese government and the Vatican signed an agreement that allowed Beijing to have more control over the underground church and allowed the Roman Catholic Church to have more control over the appointment of bishops.

This means in practice that the Chinese government is allowed to recommend bishops before they are appointed by the Pope — although he can veto them — and was seen by many as a sell-out by the Vatican, giving China considerable power over a religion. Critics of the deal were shocked that the Catholic church in China said it would “persevere to walk a path suited to a socialist society, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party”. The pact was renewed three times in 2020, 2022 and 2024, the final deal lasting for four years.

The China deal highlighted Pope Francis’s continuing desire for the church to walk alongside Catholics wherever they might be in the world, whether in his homeland of South America, or in the East or in Africa. That commitment took him to the developing world on many occasions, with his peace-making visit to South Sudan alongside Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Dr Iain Greenshields, the moderator of the Church of Scotland, in February 2023. It was an unprecedented journey of peace — and an unprecedented ecumenical mission.

Friendship with Justin Welby

Francis and Welby had been appointed within days of one another in March 2013 and forged a strong relationship throughout Francis’s pontificate. Their focus on ecumenical partnership was not, however, about the working out of theology, to enable the Anglican Communion and Roman Catholic Church to come closer together on issues such as women priests and the sharing of holy communion, but for the two churches to work in solidarity together as Christian witnesses among the poor and the marginalised.

The two leaders also shared common problems in their churches, from the treatment of gay people and women to the scandal of clerical sexual abuse — the latter causing Pope Francis to be regularly attacked over his actions, or lack of them, as well as Welby’s resignation.

The sex abuse crisis

Sexual abuse by priests on children and its cover-up caused the most concern among Catholics and others outside the church about Francis’s pontificate. It began well: in 2014 he set up Tutela Minorum, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, an advisory body within the Vatican, to evaluate the church’s work and initiate reforms. But some of its members became increasingly disillusioned about the extent to which the church was willing to change.

An abuse survivor, Marie Collins, quit the commission in 2017, citing people in the church who were trying to limit its work. Then in 2023, the commission’s credibility was dealt another blow when the Jesuit priest Hans Zollner, who is one of the church’s foremost experts on sex abuse, also quit, protesting at shortcomings in the commission’s accountability, transparency, competence, and responsibility.

This was a serious blow to Francis’s credibility as a reforming pope, especially since he had said he took personal responsibility for ridding the church of abuse. Many reports detailing decades of sexual abuse, systemic failures and cover-ups across many countries have been released since Francis became pope.

He certainly introduced reforms, however. In 2019, he put in place new rules that made it mandatory for the first time for all dioceses to set up systems for reporting abuse and cover-ups. Two years later, he had extensive revisions made to canon law to force bishops to take actions against priests who abused minors and vulnerable adults.

But Francis also defended a Chilean bishop accused of covering up a sex scandal in 2018, a decision he later described as a grave error.

There were also concerns about how much he knew of a priest, Gustavo Zanchetta, whom he appointed bishop of Oran in Argentina. After he quit over abuse accusations, Francis gave him a post in Rome. Zanchetta eventually was jailed in Argentina for 4½ years for sexually abusing seminarians but was allowed to serve his sentence under house arrest in a residence for retired priests.

The treatment of Zanchetta outraged those who believe the church’s chief problem on sexual abuse is its protection of abusers, caused by what Francis himself has called the culture of clericalism. The Zanchetta case left him open to charges of hypocrisy.

The Pope as shepherd

Throughout his pontificate, Francis was both vilified and praised for his management of the church and his interventions on the global stage: sometimes accused of naïvety, and considering people in too positive a light, sometimes as too biased towards left-wing politics. But how he lived, if not what he did, struck a chord with countless people: a simpler life, focused on Christ, not on the trappings of office, and a ready, pastoral sympathy for people’s troubles.

It was also what he said that drew people to him. The church, he said, should be like a field hospital after battle, tending to people’s wounds.

Perhaps his greatest moment came during the Covid-19 pandemic when he stood, alone, in St Peter’s Square. The Urbi et Orbi address — given to the city and the world — is usually made at Christmas and Easter by popes. But in March 2020, Francis gave a special address. In a rain-soaked, dark, piazza, he stood, reflecting on Jesus’s words to his disciples when they were out on their fishing boat on Lake Galilee during a storm: “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?”

“For weeks now it has been evening,” Francis said. “Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities; it has taken over our lives, filling everything with a deafening silence and a distressing void, that stops everything as it passes by; we feel it in the air, we notice it in people’s gestures, their glances give them away.”

Francis spoke of how things had been: we were not shaken awake by wars or injustice across the world, nor did we listen to the cry of the poor or of our ailing planet. We carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick.”

But the pandemic, he said, was “a time to choose what matters and what passes away, a time to separate what is necessary from what is not”.

It was the Pope as a great communicator. The man from Argentina, from the periphery, had an uncanny ability to speak the language of people across the world and reconnect many to their faith. It was his greatest gift as pope.

Jorge Bergolio, born 17 December 1936, Buenos Aires, elected pope 13 March 2013, died 21 April 2025