Pope Francis smiled a lot, easily and broadly. He thrived on direct, informal encounters: phone calls, penned notes, hugs, audiences with small groups. He was impatient with protocol: he carried his own overnight bag, bused his own tray at the cafeteria, and answered reporters’ questions in his own words, extemporaneously. He was attentive, determined, testy, mercurial, sometimes deliberate, sometimes in a hurry, hard to read, and hard to pin down. Elected to the papacy at the age of seventy-six, Francis brought those character traits to the office for twelve years, until his death on Monday, and over time they were more sharpened than altered. That seems the most significant aspect of his time as Pope. Through sheer personableness, he took Roman Catholicism back to street level and brought the papacy down to earth, much the way that John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council, had done six decades ago. In spite of Church scandals involving clerical sexual abuse and Vatican finances and open resistance from doctrinal and liturgical traditionalists, he remained a man who wasn’t defined by his role.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that Benedict XVI resigned unexpectedly—the first Pope to do so in six centuries—and Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected Pope. That was March, 2013, and the images from Francis’s first weeks in office are still fresh in mind: returning to the hotel where he’d stayed prior to his election to pay his bill, setting up residence in a plain modern guesthouse rather than the Apostolic Palace, trading the papal Mercedes-Benz for a Fiat. This Pope was new in many respects: the first Jesuit Pope, the first Pope from the Americas, the first to take the name Francis, after the Italian saint known for his embrace of poverty and his care for the natural world.
The years that followed were defined by a series of striking acts: the Pope answering a reporter’s question about gay clergy with the offhand “Who am I to judge?” Visiting refugee camps on Lampedusa and Lesbos and returning with a dozen refugees on the papal plane. Addressing a joint session of Congress. Issuing “Laudato Si’,” a landmark encyclical about the climate emergency. Celebrating a Mass in the Philippines attended by six million. Visiting the Central African Republic during a civil war. Presiding over a Vatican summit on clerical sexual abuse, and defrocking a prominent cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, who was accused of multiple acts of abuse (which he has denied). Paying a visit to Benedict, the Pope emeritus, whose largely silent presence in a monastery behind St. Peter’s (until his death, in 2022) came to symbolize the depths of traditionalist opposition to Francis’s approach. Warning about the Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s anti-immigration proposals (we should “not raise walls but bridges”). Showing up at Russia’s Embassy to the Holy See in an aggrieved response to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Calling out Israel’s air strikes in Gaza for their harm to unarmed civilians. Authorizing priests to bless gay Catholic couples informally. Declaring the second Trump Administration’s program for mass deportations of migrants and refugees a “crisis” and indirectly rebuking Vice-President J. D. Vance for invoking Catholic theology in support of it; on Easter Sunday, the Pope met briefly with Vance, before offering a blessing to the faithful from St. Peter’s Basilica.
Francis’s actions point to his main achievement: after a third of a century of leadership by Pope John Paul II and Benedict—men whose certainty about the state of the Church and the world made them implacable and controlling—Francis showed that Catholicism is an institution changing in spite of itself. For Catholics who saw his predecessors’ stress on inalterable absolutes as a weakness, not a strength, his recognition of social change and his willingness to foster progress in the Church came just in time.
Five months into his pontificate, Francis sat for a series of interviews with the Italian Jesuit Antonio Spadaro. Much had already been reported about his upbringing as a son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, his early plan to become a chemist, and his love of tango. But the interview revealed Francis as a complex, brooding figure—a Catholic whose deep faith seemed personal more than theological or institutional, and a cleric who was at once self-critical and critical of the Church he had been elected to lead. He acknowledged that, as a young provincial, or director, of the Jesuits of Argentina, he was “authoritarian,” often making hard decisions “abruptly and by myself.” And he offered an intuition about the Church’s purpose and way of doing things. Already, he had declared that the Church “is called to go outside of itself and go to the peripheries, not just geographic but also the existential peripheries . . . of sin, of pain, injustice, ignorance” and had framed an approach to borders, migration, and refugees rooted in the Gospel imperative to welcome the stranger. Now he envisioned the Church as a “field hospital” that “focusses on the essentials, on the necessary things,” and which strikes a balance among its moral teachings rather than presenting positions on issues such as abortion, contraception, and gay marriage as “a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.”
The extemporaneous encyclical, as the interview came to be called, was striking in its candor. At a moment when the Vatican was typically seen, say, in “The Da Vinci Code” (and still, in “Conclave”) as an underworld of sinister glamour, here was a Pope speaking the language of belief with unstuffy eloquence. It may be that it all raised expectations that weren’t possible for any Pope to meet—especially among more progressive Catholics, who hoped that he would enact long-sought Vatican approvals of divorce and remarriage and the ordination of married men to the priesthood. (He acted fitfully in these areas.) But it is just as likely that intensive renewal efforts were out of character for him. By definition, his charisma and one-on-one personal style could not be taken to scale: the very qualities that made him an attractive figure kept him from reinvigorating Catholicism along the lines he envisioned.
Francis himself acted on his intuition. By appointing a group of advisory cardinals, he made the papacy more consultative; through trips to Georgia, Japan, Iraq, and Mongolia (countries where Catholics are tiny minorities), he faced the Church outward toward other religions. With “Laudato Si’ ” and a 2020 encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,” he stressed that climate disasters, recessions, and pandemics affect poor people most harshly. A relative outsider to the Vatican when he was elected, he internationalized the College of Cardinals, streamlined the Roman Curia (and named women to several key roles), reopened dialogue on admitting women to the diaconate (a liturgical role short of priesthood), and held a monthlong synod in Rome to initiate Catholic leaders into consultative decision-making (during which a top deputy indicated that Francis was no longer considering the prospect of female deacons).
Those efforts didn’t take root in the Church as a whole, though. That was due, in part, to the legacy he inherited from two traditionalist Popes, the narrowness of the clergy and the bishops they had appointed, and sharp drops in Mass-going and church affiliation in nominally Catholic populations. It was due, especially, to the ongoing revelations of decades of clerical abuse—of how blithely the Catholic hierarchy worldwide had enabled clergy to sexually abuse countless young people, nuns, and Indigenous people entrusted to the Church’s care. The breaking waves of reportage, investigations, lawsuits, and bankruptcies upended the Church. The crisis involved Francis directly at several points, such as when he derided the claims of victim-survivors in Chile, only to reverse himself (“I was part of the problem”).
Then there was the resistance from conservative clergy and bishops, the most outspoken of whom branded Francis guilty of “heresy” and his pontificate a “catastrophe.” In this country, the hard right found affinities with some members of the Catholic hierarchy. The conspiracy-minded Vatican diplomat Carlo Maria Viganò, following his retirement, found sympathy in the U.S.; a screed in which he called on Francis to resign drew the support of two dozen American bishops. The traditionalists seized on limits that Francis placed on the use of the Latin Mass to stir up the feeling that he was betraying the Church. The rollback of Roe v. Wade by a Supreme Court that included five Catholic conservatives enabled the Catholic right to cast Francis’s openness as not just heterodox but foolish—an undoing of the “culture warrior” approach at the moment of its greatest success.
