Pope Francis, the reform-minded Roman Catholic leader who guided the church through an era of crisis, died Monday, April 21, a day after appearing at St. Peter’s Square to offer members of the public an Easter blessing. He was 88 years old.
“Dear brothers and sisters, it is with profound sadness I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis,” Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the Vatican camerlengo, said in announcement.“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.”
Francis’ papacy marked a number of firsts: the first pope from the Americas; the first non-European pope; the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere; the first pope from the developing world; the first Pope to attend a G7 summit; the first Pope to visit Iraq; the first Jesuit pope, and the first pope to take the name Francis after Saint Francis of Assisi, who was famous for his ministry to the poor.
His papacy also reflected a first in terms of his willingness to hear out different points of view on controversial issues including marriage, sєxuality, the priesthood, and celibacy in the church that his predecessors weren’t willing to debate. While none of the major church traditions were tossed out during his tenure, and at a time when the child sєx abuse scandal that has plagued the church for years created a crisis of conscience particularly among young Catholics, Francis stood out for exuding a certain level of empathy, humility, and mercy that people felt connected to in a way they said they never felt with past popes. He served as the world’s conscience. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, he strongly urged President Vladimir Putin to “stop this spiral of violence and death” and avoid the “absurd” risk of nuclear war. During the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, he condemned the air strikes and called for peace, even keeping up his regular chats with a Catholic parish in Gaza while hospitalized for pneumonia. As TIME explained when it chose Pope Francis as its 2013 “Person of the Year,” he “changed the tone and perception and focus of one of the world’s largest institutions in an extraordinary way.”
Early life
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on December 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital city, the eldest of accountant Mario Bergoglio and Regina Sivori’s five children. His parents were Italian immigrants who fled Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, and his grandmother Rosa Margherita Vassallo di Bergoglio was active in Catholic Action, formed by Italian bishops who wanted to maintain their independence from Mussolini’s authoritarian rule. His grandmother had the biggest influence on him, according to biographer Austen Ivereigh, who wrote in Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church that “it was an austere but happy lower middle-class family life.” Grandma Bergoglio would take him to Mass, educated him about the saints and the rosary, and introduced him and his siblings to Italian literature and his favorite novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed.
His family retained their love for Italian culture, and Bergoglio grew up listening to opera and watching every Italian movie that came to town. His love for soccer dates back to this period, when he followed the small Buenos Aires soccer team San Lorenzo with his father. 
Bergoglio first contemplated the priesthood as a preteen, writing to one girl he admired, Amalia Damonte, “If I don’t become a priest, I’ll marry you.” The epiphany came a few years later, at age 16. At 9 a.m. on Sept. 21, 1953, he was en route to meet classmates from the vocational school where he studied chemistry when he passed San José de Flores Church in Buenos Aires. He went into the confessional booth, and came out of it convinced that he should become a priest. “I felt I had to enter: It was one of those things one feels inside and one doesn’t know why,” he said in a 2012 Buenos Aires radio interview. “I felt like someone grabbed me from inside and took me to the confessional,” he also said. He ended up going home instead of going out with his friends because he felt “overwhelmed.”
Despite that realization, he later admitted he continued to contemplate his future before entering the seminary. “God left the door open for me for a few years,” he says in the 2010 compilation of interviews Pope Francis: Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio by Francesca Ambrogetti and Sergio Rubin. “Religious vocation is a call from God to your heart, whether you are waiting for it consciously or unconsciously.”
On Dec. 13, 1969—four days before his 33rd birthday—he was ordained as a priest with the Society of Jesus, the largest religious order for Catholic men better known as the Jesuits. He continued his studies at University of Alcalá in Spain, and then returned to Argentina to a seminary in the city of San Miguel, where he oversaw the new seminary students and taught theology.
Before the Papacy
As pope, he was noted to have an openness to his decision-making that differed from his papal predecessors. His style can be traced back to moments when he made unpopular decisions in Argentina, which led to a personal evolution.
A few years into the priesthood, in 1973, he became the leader, or Provincial, of the Jesuits in Argentina at just 36 years old. Soon after, he was embroiled in a crisis that could have jeopardized his career amid one of the most tumultuous periods in Argentina’s history.
During the so-called “Dirty War” from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s that took place in Argentina, two Jesuits serving in slums—Father Orlando Yorio and Father Francisco Jalics—were among those seen as rebels. After a military coup on March 24, 1976, overthrew the country’s president and replaced it with a military dictatorship, Yorio and Jalics were kidnapped for five months and subjected to torture. Bergoglio was accused of not doing all he could to protect them, though he testified in a court case that stemmed from the kidnapping that he did meet military officers privately and pressed for their release. 
“My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he said as he reflected on that period in an interview with the Jesuit and Catholic magazine America published in September 2013 after becoming pope.
His leadership style was further shaped while serving as rector of the Colegio de San José in Buenos Aires from 1980 to 1986. There, he had his students work on farms—harvesting crops and milking cows to feed the city’s poor—but he grew unpopular among those who emphasized more classroom time. He was eventually forced out of the role, and relocated to Córdoba in 1990, where the 53-year-old spent two years living in a tiny room in a Jesuit residence, essentially in exile. It was “a time of great interior crisis,” he said.
In June 1992, Pope John Paul II named Bergoglio auxiliary bishop in Buenos Aires, on the recommendation of the city’s archbishop Antonio Quarracino, to whom he had grown close. He succeeded Quarracino upon his death in 1998, became a cardinal in 2001 and president of the Argentine bishops conference in 2005. He was Buenos Aires archbishop until Pope Benedict XVI resigned.
Setting a new tone as Pope
On Feb. 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope to announce his resignation in about 600 years, since Gregory XII in 1415. The College of Cardinals elected Bergoglio on March 13th on the fifth ballot in one of the fastest papal conclaves.
“Clearly the Cardinals were looking for something and someone different, and so his very otherness may have been appealing,” James Martin, the Jesuit priest and editor-at-large at America, wrote for TIME.com two days after Bergoglio was elected pope. “Particularly in light of the Vatileak scandals, the Cardinals may have been searching for someone who could take a fresh look at things and move the bureaucracy in a new direction. On the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, as he addressed the crowd, Pope Francis joked about his Latin American origins. It seemed, he said, that the Cardinals had to go to the ‘ends of the earth’ to find a Pope. But often someone from the margins is just what the center needs.” 
Initially there was concern about whether he could breathe new life into the church if he was missing a lung—the Vatican clarified that part of his lung was removed after a bout of severe pneumonia when he was a 21 year old seminary student—but Francis hit the ground running. His actions in his first year made clear that business as usual was not going to be sufficient. For example, within his first year as Pontiff, a commission to investigate the Vatican bank was created. The commission conducted an audit, which led to the bank’s first financial report in 125 years.
He was also seen as more openminded—less doctrinaire—on pressing lifestyle questions among churchgoers. While Pope Benedict described homosєxuality in 2005 as “an objective disorder” and “a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” Francis made headlines in 2013 for saying, “If someone is gαy and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” In December 2023, Pope Francis approved a new rule allowing priests to bless same-sєx couples, though that didn’t mean the Vatican approved of same-sєx marriage. Throughout his papacy he maintained that gαy marriage is not marriage. In his first major document on family issues, the 2016 Amoris Laetitia, he stated that “de facto or same-sєx unions, for example, may not simply be equated with marriage.”
In a move toward reform, the document also represented a milestone for encouraging church communities to be more welcoming of divorced people. He also loosened red tape in the process for couples seeking annulments. Though the document maintained that divorced Catholics who remarry without an annulment aren’t supposed to receive communion at Mass, he reiterated in a footnote a line he has said in the past, that “the Eucharist is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” He also wrote that “No one can be condemned forever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel! Here I am not speaking only of the divorced and remarried, but of everyone, in whatever situation they find themselves.”
He also aimed to more fully acknowledge women in the church, hailing “unknown and forgotten” mothers and grandmothers and the “genius” of female saints. In January 2019, he appointed the first woman to hold a senior managerial position in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State office by naming layperson Francesca di Giovanni to be a point-person for diplomatic relations. His 2018 Apostolic Exhortation (meaning a statement issued by a pope) “Gaudete et Exsultate” (“Rejoice and Be Glad”), featured women in a way that some papal watchers found progressive—such as by acknowledging that “unknown or forgotten women … sustained and transformed families and communities”—but he took them down a peg by also writing, “Their lives may not always have been perfect, yet even amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord.” 
Thus, Jamie L. Manson, a self-described queer Catholic pundit at National Catholic Reporter, argued the pope was merely “reasserting … his belief that women’s most essential vocation, and her true path to holiness, comes in motherhood and nurturing her family.”
He was also firm that priests are supposed to be men. He expressed some openness to female deacons—and in August 2016 created a commission to explore that option—but a couple of months later he maintained, “On the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the last word is clear.” He was also tentatively open to the idea of allowing married men to become priests in areas where they’re desperately needed, and in October 2019 a meeting of bishops convened by Pope Francis endorsed this exact idea in the Amazon region. But the pope tabled that proposal in a letter revealed in February 2020.
The next month, Pope Francis found himself leading a global church during a global pandemic. On Mar. 27, 2020—with the Vatican in lockdown, and church services livestreaming worldwide—the Pontiff delivered a special blessing to an empty, rain-covered St. Peter’s Square, urging Catholics feeling “afraid and lost” to maintain their faith.
Addressing the sєx abuse crisis
The child sєx abuse scandals have been a black eye on the Catholic Church over the past two decades, and the issue was far from resolved during Pope Francis’s tenure. He faced accusations that he didn’t do enough or was still part of an antiquated system that protected accused priests at the expense of victims.
About a year into his papacy, he claimed that “no-one else has done more” than the church in cracking down on pedophiles in the clergy, hailing its “transparency.” During his first meeting with the people who had been sєxually abused by priests in July 2014, he characterized those clerics as a “sacrilegious cult.”
As bombshell revelations about victims continued, it became clear that the pope’s “legacy is at stake” with his approach to the sєx abuse scandal “and the viability of the Catholic Church itself,” as Christopher J. Hale, who helped run Catholic outreach for President Barack Obama put it in a Feb. 2018 op-ed for TIME. 
Hale’s op-ed came on the heels of the pope’s first visit to Chile the month prior, when he came under fire for standing by Juan Barros, the Chilean bishop he appointed to head the diocese of Osorno, Chile; Barros was accused of covering up for his mentor Rev. Fernando Karadima, who, in 2011, was found guilty of sєxually abusing minors in Chile and sentenced to a “life of prayer and penitence. Francis said he was “convinced” of Barros’ innocence in this matter and called the accusations that Barros covered up for Karadima “calumny” and said “there is not a single proof against him.” He called for a Vatican investigation. After listening to dozen of testimonies, he publicly apologized in April for “serious mistakes” in reading the situation. “I was part of the problem,” Pope Francis reportedly told Chilean victims of sєxual abuse who visited the Pope at the Vatican in May 2018. Barros resigned the next month.
He did take decisive actions on the issue over the next year. He made history in February 2019 by de-frocking Theodore McCarrick, an ex-cardinal accused of sєxual abuse. It appeared to mark the first time a cardinal has been expelled over such allegations, and the first time an American cardinal has been banned from the priesthood. To enable clergy to report sєx abuse claims to law enforcement, he also nixed a 2001 decree that had allowed church officials to classify sєx abuse allegations as “pontifical secrets”—the most secretive of church doings.
Championing climate change
Living up to Francis of Assisi’s recognition as the patron saint of ecology and the poor, the pope released a groundbreaking June 2015 climate encyclical Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, arguing climate change was undeniable and disproportionately impacting developing countries. It came ahead of the Paris climate accords. Addressing a community of the faithful divided on whether humans caused climate change or whether climate change is a serious problem, the 184-page document said humans feel “entitled to plunder her [the Earth] at will” and described climate change as “one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day” and “a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods.”
Top economist and sustainable development expert Jeffrey Sachs described it as playing a “huge role” in getting predominantly Catholic nations onboard with the Paris Agreement, according to Ivereigh.
The ‘world’s parish priest’
His modest lifestyle was also part of his appeal. Dating back to taking public transportation as archbishop in Buenos Aires and opting for apartment living, as pope he chose to live in a penthouse apartment in Saint Martha’s house, adjacent to Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, because he thought the Apostolic Palace was too extravagant. He was nicknamed the “world’s parish priest” for his modesty, and he demonstrated it with acts including washing the feet of a dozen local inmates in the walk-up to Easter—noting that bishops must be servants. On Sep. 4, 2016, he proclaimed Mother Teresa, famous for serving the poor in Calcutta, India, a saint. 
Just as Saint Francis of Assisi traveled to Egypt to try and stop the Crusades, Pope Francis traveled to the region to promote tolerance between Christians and Muslims. In February 2019, he became the first pope to visit an Arab Gulf state by going to the United Arab Emirates and leading what is believed to be the largest act of Christian public worship on the Arabian peninsula. He and Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar and the equivalent of the Pope to Sunni worshipers, co-signed a landmark “The Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together” in an effort to set a new tone for peaceful relations between Islam and Christianity, the world’s biggest religions, at a time when the migrant crisis exacerbated anti-Muslim sentiment that escalated after the September 11th terror attacks.
Pope Francis also tried to repair the church’s relations with indigenous groups. In July 2022, he embarked on a week-long “pilgrimage of penance” in Canada, publicly apologizing for residential boardings schools run by church missionaries, notorious for decades of physical and emotional abuse. “I’m here to remember the past, and to cry with you,” he told an audience of indigenous Canadians and survivors, before receiving a high honor usually reserved for indigenous chiefs.
Pope Francis sets Instagram record—and becomes ‘cool’
He embraced social media to reach worshippers worldwide. He was the first Pope to host a Google Hangout and when he joined Instagram in 2016, he set a record for most followers gained in a single day after racking up over 1.4 million followers in less than 12 hours. His presence on social media earned him a reputation as a “cool” pope. “People will approach me to say, ‘I’ve been away from the Church for a year but Pope Francis is drawing me back,’ or ‘I’m not a Catholic, but I sure love this pope,” as Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, put it in a 2018 interview. “He’s helping people take a fresh look at the Catholic Church.” At the same time, he recognized that social media theoretically makes it easier to put a message out to worshippers—even as he fretted about shorter attention spans. “The technological and cultural shifts that have marked this period of history have made the transmission of faith increasingly difficult,” he says in Ivereigh’s book. 
In October 2019—six years after becoming pope and at age 82—he took steps seen as shoring up his legacy: appointing 13 new cardinals on a similar wavelength in terms of policy priorities, and hailing from diverse countries like Morocco, Indonesia, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He even talked openly about dying. On a 2014 flight from South Korea to the Vatican, in response to a question about how he feels about global fame, he told reporters, “I try to think of my sins, my mistakes, not to become proud. Because I know it will last only a short time. Two or three years and then I’ll be off to the Father’s house.” Of course, he lived longer, but in a video message to a gathering of youth in Mexico City in October 2019, he talked about a more timeless philosophy of death as a reality check and making the most of what you do while alive: “It is death that allows life to remain alive! … It is a slap in the face to our illusion of omnipotence.”