Bhathiya Barukanda
HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS, who died on Easter Monday, 21 April, at the age of 88, came to the papacy in 2013 in circumstances that were more unusual and unsettling than the Church had seen for centuries. Benedict XVI, in advancing age and declining health, had done what then seemed unthinkable and had resigned the papacy, preferring to live out his old age in the relative privacy of retirement. It was a stark contrast to John Paul II, whose long and painful decline towards his own death in 2005 was spent in the full glare of the media.
The conclave of 2013 was therefore highly unusual. When the cardinal protodeacon, the late Jean-Louis Tauran, painfully beset with Parkinson’s disease, appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica on the evening of 13 March, his task was relatively simple: to pronounce the traditional “habemus papam” to the crowd in the square below – and thus to the waiting world – and also to announce whom the conclave had elected. The first announcement was greeted with the usual wild cheering; the second with considerably less: “Cardinalem Bergoglio”.
It was not that the Archbishop of Buenos Aires was an unpopular choice; it was that very few people knew who he was. That situation would change over the following days, months and years; he was a candidate for whom many liberal cardinals had lobbied as they felt he would represent a necessary corrective to the Benedict years – he had in fact come close to being elected in 2005 – and who in their eyes would make the Church seem more relevant to the modern world. His choice of name said it all: “Francis”, after the enigmatic mystic of Assisi who loved nature and gave up all that he had to follow the Lord. It was a strong gesture that captured international attention.
Born on 17 December 1936, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was ten years old when Juan Perón came to power in Argentina. The charismatic demagogue relied on a cult of personality that revolved around himself and his popular wife, Eva. While a number of Catholic intellectuals commended the early programme of Peronism, Perón ruled in a personal and arbitrary fashion, often relying upon open intimidation against individuals, families, and institutions that opposed him. He was overthrown in 1956, but the preceding decade was one that profoundly affected Argentine life, and spanned the young Bergoglio’s teenage years.
Bergoglio joined the Society of Jesus in 1958, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1969. After various deployments he was elected provincial superior in Argentina in 1973 and later served as rector of the Jesuit seminary at San Miguel. He was named an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Buenos Aires in 1992, by which time his relationship with the Jesuits had become strained; he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires and Primate of Argentina five years later, and was made a cardinal by John Paul II in 2001. He left Argentina to attend the conclave of 2013; unlike John Paul II and Benedict XVI before him he never again set foot in his native land.
When he appeared as Pope on the balcony of St Peter’s without the traditional red shoulder cape and state stole, it was immediately obvious that his would be a pontificate of image and gesture. John Paul II had been a charismatic warrior and Benedict XVI a gentle scholar. Francis would be neither; rather, he would model his papacy on a down-to-earth approach of inclusion and dialogue, accessibility and immediacy, which would radiate from his robust personal humility. Many people interpreted it at the time as a development that would drag the Catholic Church, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the twenty-first century.
The archbishop who had travelled by public transport in Buenos Aires brought his preference for austerity with him to Rome. He declined to live in the historic papal apartments and chose the Casa Santa Marta instead, but still worked there. Whole sets of new vestments were commissioned to match his simple tastes, and the existing articles mothballed. As some commentators observed at the time, the emphasis on visible simplicity cost far more than if Francis had just followed the time-hallowed customs of his predecessors. Although true, it missed the point; this was a papacy that was intended to appear different to the world at large, and thus also to appeal to it. At the start all things seemed possible.
Twelve years later, however, its fruits have been very mixed. More informal than monarchical, Francis was not legalistic; when asked about homosexuality, he famously asked, “Who am I to judge?” His spontaneity could cause problems – not least for priests on the ground who would be called upon to explain the pope’s latest comments to their people in the pews. Frequently after an off-the-cuff remark that had been picked up by the media a Vatican clarification would need to be issued to emphasise that the Church’s teaching had not changed. On his way to his last World Youth Day, in Lisbon in 2023, he observed that he was still going to “stir things up”.
Such an approach was stimulating, certainly, but it could also be jarring. Frequent sharp words for the parish clergy were not always universally appreciated or well-received. Sometimes they were “rigid”, sometimes pastorally “delinquent” and sometimes “mummy’s boys”; he also called for a generation of priests who played soccer instead of going into communities to “dogmatise”. After Fr Jacques Hamel was martyred in Rouen in 2016 by Islamic extremists who slit his throat while he stood at the altar, Francis refused to attribute specific religious motivation to the murder in the course of another bewildering aeroplane interview: “I don’t like to speak of Islamic violence… There are violent Catholics!”
On other issues he was more robust. Francis’s concern for the environment resulted in a memorable encyclical, Laudato Si’, in 2015; its sequel, Laudate Deum, appeared in 2023. He was compassionately concerned for the plight of migrants, memorably visiting Lampedusa early on in his papacy, and produced motu proprio after motu proprio on a plethora of subjects close to his heart. He made good his promise to keep what he called “the Church at the peripheries” in his sights; only last year he made a gruelling pastoral visit to Asia and Oceania.
On a similar theme, members of the Synod on the Amazon met in Rome in 2019; they brought with them images of a naked pregnant woman which were placed in churches around the city. Presented as “Our Lady of the Amazon”, a row broke out after Francis referred to them as “Pachamama” – an indigenous pagan “Earth Mother” deity – and they were collected and thrown into the Tiber by a young Austrian convert. Francis, “as bishop of the diocese”, immediately asked forgiveness from those offended by the reaction.
Francis had the gift of the arresting phrase: when a gay man challenged him to address his situation, he replied that the most important thing was not that the man was gay, but that he was a human being. Like many of his predecessors he longed to be a peacemaker, but sometimes struggled to be heard on his own terms; when he urged Russia and Ukraine to find a way of settling their differences his comments were interpreted by many in Ukraine and its diaspora as advocating for the appeasement of an aggressor.
When Archbishop Konrad Krajewski, the papal almoner, was raised to the cardinalate in 2018 he gave a dinner after the ceremony for a large number of Rome’s homeless people; Francis turned up unannounced and spent the evening eating with and chatting to the guests. He also promoted women to senior roles within the Vatican, from foreign affairs to finance, which was a substantive change – although observers were surprised when he named a pro-abortion atheist and Catholics who publicly dissented from the Church’s teachings to the Pontifical Academy for Life.
Similar consternation was caused by Francis’s appointment of his fellow Argentinian Víctor Manuel Fernández as Prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith in 2023; he arrived in Rome with a reputation as a writer of erotic verse and soon became embroiled in controversy when a book of his resurfaced in which Fernández laid out with startlingly intimate detail the differences between the male and female orgasms, the working-out of God’s love in either, and how “orgasm, lived in the presence of God, can also be a sublime act of worship.”
For his part Fernández announced that he had come “to ensure that that both the documents of the dicastery and those of others ‘accept the recent Magisterium’,” and calmly explained that anyone who raised concerns about his appointment – he had also spent some time being investigated for unorthodoxy in his theological works – were the enemies of Francis and of his papacy. Fernández’s first document for Francis, Fiducia Supplicans, cited (with one exception) only Francis’s own teachings and was written vaguely enough to convey the impression, but not the fact, that same-sex relationships might receive the Church’s blessing – which was inevitably how the mainstream press reported it.
Fiducia Supplicans caused so much confusion that a number of bishops’ conferences rejected it: a dangerous moment both for the principle of the reception of the deposit of faith and the teaching office of the Successor of Peter. Having authorised the most controversial papal document since Humanae Vitae, Francis lamented, without irony, what he called “ecclesial ideologies” which caused Catholics to pursue their “own ideas or [their] own projects” rather than seeking Jesus and “the meaning of Holy Mother Church”.
Each Vatican attempt to explain the document, even those of the Pope himself, only contributed to the bewilderment. In the face of robust pushback – including from some entire bishops’ conferences – Francis told La Stampa that “those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups.” He said that he was unbothered by the risk of schism, and that “we must leave them to it and move on”. Simultaneously he made startling generalisations about the Church in Africa, calling Africans “a special case” for whom “homosexuality is something ‘bad’ from a cultural point of view”.
Other qualities which made Francis attractively informal could also be problematic in practice. Reliance on special advisers rather than traditional governance structures merely bypassed the Curia, rather than reforming it in any meaningful way. His attempts to be non-judgmental about divorced and remarried Catholics receiving Holy Communion, which he subcontracted to local priests or bishops, ran counter to Tradition and Scripture and were also met with opposition. Meanwhile, his vocal condemnation of clerical abuse was not followed through with systemic change; in the case of clerical abusers in Chile and Argentina there were real and serious errors on Francis’s part, which proved impossible to brush off despite his open willingness to acknowledge and apologise for his mistakes from time to time.
On his way back from World Youth Day in Lisbon in 2023 he insisted, after having met with abuse survivors, that “things are going well”, but many remained unconvinced. An element of personal loyalty to Francis himself, rather than to the Chair of Peter which he occupied, sometimes blurred boundaries. When it transpired that a friend of his, the controversial Fr Marko Rupnik – who had been accused of abusing dozens of women – had been quietly allowed to return to ministry in his native Slovenia, Francis chose the moment of the ensuing media frenzy to denounce what he called the “scandal” of priests wearing traditional clerical garments. The progressive Cardinal Gottfried Danneels presided for 30 years over the catastrophic decline of the Church in Belgium and was seriously implicated in the covering-up of child abuse, but nevertheless enjoyed Francis’s full confidence until his death and was even appointed to the Synod on the Family.
Bishops who tolerated “clown masses” in their dioceses, or others who encouraged their clergy to bless same-sex relationships were left untroubled; meanwhile Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler in Texas, who had been candid regarding his concerns about the direction in which Francis was leading the Church, was removed from office for “administrative” reasons. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading traditionalist, found himself regarded as Francis’s “enemy”; he was summarily evicted from his Vatican apartment and his pension was stopped.
In 2016 Cardinal Burke had been among the cardinals who wrote to Francis asking for clarification about the intentions of Amoris Laetitia, a 2016 document so loosely worded as to be capable of a number of different interpretations about the Church’s pastoral response to Catholics who had been divorced and civilly remarried without an annulment. As different dioceses began to implement its instructions in different ways, Francis calmly rose about the fracas by refusing to acknowledge their questions.
After Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025 some commentators detected a game of tit-for-tat; when an outspoken Francis-critic, Brian Burch, was named as the new American ambassador to the Holy See Francis sent one of his protégés, Cardinal Robert McElroy – a noted liberal regarded by many to have been too close for comfort to the scandal surrounding former-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick – to be Archbishop of Washington. Francis’s regular and outspoken commentary about American political life may yet make it difficult for his successor to build bridges with the present US administration.
Francis’s spontaneous style sometimes degenerated into coarseness; in 2023 a group of Spanish seminarians were startled to find the Sovereign Pontiff effing and blinding on the subject of career-minded clergy, while in 2024 the Vatican issued an apology after he was said to have descried “faggotry” in seminaries during a meeting of the Italian bishops’ conference. On other occasions a very hot temper bubbled up from below. Videos continue to circulate of Francis shouting and striking a woman’s hand when she sought to hold onto his, and of him refusing to let a queue of people kiss the apostolic ring, with its associated indulgence. He often seemed impatient of this honour paid by others to his holy office; Queen Sofia of Spain, exercising her privilège du blanc and wearing a towering Spanish veil, was less easily rebuffed.
Surely the defining element of his papacy will be the controversial foray into synodality, however, which neatly summed up Francis’s strengths and weaknesses. It has been a vast listening exercise and an opportunity for the people of God to have their say about the Church. The problem is that some modernisers consider that if a majority criticise Church teaching, then the Church must change. That they were allowed to believe this from the outset is unfortunate, to say the least; the mismatch between expectations and reality may well yet be damaging. The exclusion of the parish clergy from the synodal process – on whom inevitably fell the burden of the management of expectations raised and to whom belongs the pastoral care of bruised and disappointed parishioners – was baffling.
Appropriately for a Jesuit, Francis’s yearning to find a way for the Church to minister in China was very real, yet there continue to be serious concerns about the deal that was struck in the Sino-Vatican Pact; in practice it has meant voluntarily betraying the interests of those who kept the faith alive in the darkest days and subjecting the official church to the godless priorities of the Chinese Communist Party. When Cardinal Joseph Zen rushed to Rome to plead for a reconsideration of the matter, he was refused an audience. The Vatican has received little in return for its own willingness to compromise.
Bizarrely, for all his talk about subsidiarity, Francis reopened the liturgy wars that Benedict XVI had brought to a close. Most traditionalist Catholics are loyal to the pope, but under Francis they were treated as if they were a faction to be suppressed rather than a community with a legitimate desire for dignified worship in the Tridentine Rite; he even claimed that the vestments of their priests “sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation [and] behavioural difficulties”. Given all the challenges facing the Church, it exposed a strange set of priorities; it also represented an odd exception to the principle that a local bishop is best placed to understand and order the life of his diocese.
In many ways Francis’s pontificate was exhilarating; he seemed totally untroubled by the fact that during most of it his immediate predecessor was still living, and while paying Benedict regular courtesy calls exercised the Petrine Office as if he were not. At a time of extraordinary change for humanity, as galloping technological advances threatened to outstrip the world’s moral capacity to deal with them, he made the Church attractive to very many people who had been alienated from it for a variety of reasons. At the same time he regularly raised hopes of change in several directions which could never be realised and often showed a taste for the exercise of authority and power as they were dashed. Deep compassion and steely authoritarianism sometimes seemed to go hand in hand: an iron fist in a velvet glove.
Francis seemed untroubled when the President of Argentina, Javier Milei, called him an “imbecile”, a “filthy leftist” and “a malignant presence on earth”; brushing off the insults he later embraced Milei warmly at the Vatican, after which vinegar turned to honey. Elsewhere, his broad smile frequently lit up many a room and comforted many a sufferer; Francis’s unforced joy at being able to spend time and share a kind word with children, the sick and the vulnerable was palpable. His successes were real and he was very greatly loved in many quarters.
He lived long enough to give Urbi et Orbi on Easter morning, although he looked so poorly that it seemed unlikely he had much time left. Surprising to the end, he broke with tradition and met with American vice president JD Vance privately during Mass, before he appeared on the balcony.
To die in the Easter Octave is a particular grace, for pope and peasant alike. As Francis now leaves the world stage, as the Church turns to prayer and preparations are made for the funeral rites which he himself planned, it is no exaggeration to say that a remarkable – if frequently confusing and sometimes bewildering – papacy has drawn to its close. It will be for the historians of the future to evaluate the full extent of its impact in the context of what has been and what is yet to come.
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O God, Who in Thine ineffable providence didst will that Thy servant Francis should be
numbered among the high priests, grant, we beseech Thee, that he who on earth held the
place of Thine only-begotten Son may be joined forevermore to the fellowship of Thy
holy pontiffs. Through the same Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with
Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
