Pope Francis has died at the age of 88.
Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was born on December 17, 1936 and was elected the 266th pope of the Catholic Church on March 13, 2013. The former archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, he was the first pope from the Western Hemisphere and the first to take the name “Francis” upon his election, in honor of the 13th-century Italian monk Francis of Assisi.
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Francis’s death comes after a series of health struggles, and his final public appearance on Easter Sunday. Earlier in the day he met with Vice President JD Vance to exchange ‘Easter greetings.’ In 2021, he was treated for intestinal inflammation known as diverticulitis, undergoing surgery that removed part of his colon. In the years since he has undergone several hospitalizations due to illness and periodically canceled public appearances. He had been seen using a wheelchair in the months leading up to his death.
Francis succeeded Pope Benedict XVI in 2013 after Benedict became the first pope to resign in 600 years. The two became the first pair of living popes, one reigning and the other emeritus, since 1377 and the first two to live in the Vatican at the same time until Benedict’s death in 2022. Throughout his pontificate, Francis lived in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican’s guest house, rather than the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace.
Declining to live in the papal apartments proved to be one of a number of deviations Pope Francis made from previous customs, changes that began when he first appeared on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica following his election by the College of Cardinals. Francis appeared only wearing a white cassock, while his predecessors had appeared wearing a red cape-like vestment called a mozzetta and a red stole. Francis donned the stole only briefly when he blessed the crowd for the first time.
The moment touched off a nearly 12-year papacy that marked a sea change for the Catholic Church. Francis quickly became a media darling as he grappled with the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, changed the church’s public teaching on the death penalty, restricted the use of the traditional Latin mass, encouraged environmental and climate change awareness, increased the role of women in the church, and offered a softer tone when articulating traditional Catholic teachings on homosexuality.
On a flight returning to Rome from a visit to Brazil in 2013, months after he became pope, Francis infamously remarked that “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” when asked his opinion about homosexual men in the ranks of the Catholic clergy.
In 2023, Francis stirred even more controversy when he declared that individuals in same-sex relationships could receive blessings from priests, a move that was widely interpreted as a liberalization of the church’s attitude towards same-sex couples. He later clarified that any blessings could not give any appearance of blessing the same-sex relationship.
But Francis continually disappointed his most liberal cheerleaders who had expected he would revise Catholic teachings on a number of hot-button issues, including the prohibition on the ordination of women to the priesthood, and the immorality of abortion and contraception. Meanwhile, his handling of the sex abuse scandal within the church drew stinging rebukes from numerous sources, including from within the Catholic hierarchy.
In 2018, Francis accepted the resignation of Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., from membership within the College of Cardinals after allegations surfaced that he had molested a 16-year-old boy while serving as a priest at a New York parish. McCarrick was ultimately stripped of his status as a priest and later faced criminal charges, but Francis was roundly criticized for not acting sooner, including by the former Vatican ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano.
Francis also faced significant criticism for his handling of abuse accusations leveled against the Rev. Marko Rupnik, a Slovenian priest, who continued to work in the Vatican amidst allegations that he had sexually abused nuns. Rupnik was allowed to continue working in the Vatican despite an ongoing investigation into his conduct.
Francis repeatedly clashed with the more traditional factions within the Catholic Church. In 2021, he issued a papal directive— entitled Traditiones Custodes or “Guardians of Tradition,” that restricted the celebration of the traditional Latin mass that had been the normal Catholic mass for centuries until the Second Vatican Council called for a modification of the Mass in the 1960s on the grounds that it was harmful to the unity of the church.
The Latin Mass had largely fallen into disuse since the contemporary Mass was promulgated in 1970 by Pope Paul VI. But in 2007 Benedict XVI issued the document Summorum Pontificum “of the supreme pontiffs,” that said it could be celebrated by any priest, in any church, at any time. The widespread permission led to an explosion of the availability of the Latin Mass throughout the world, especially in the United States, where it was offered by more than 600 parishes by 2021.
Francis’s Traditiones Custodes removed the permission given by Benedict, and restricted the Latin Mass from being celebrated in parish churches, a move that was praised by Francis’s liberal supporters and lamented by conservatives.
During his pontificate, Francis presided over the canonization of numerous saints. He famously presided over the first canonization Mass ever held on U.S. soil when he canonized the Spanish missionary Junipero Serra in 2015 on the campus of Catholic University of America in Washington D.C.
On April 27, 2014, Francis canonized his predecessors John Paul II and John XXIII before an estimated crowd of 500,000 people in St. Peter’s Square. On Sept. 4, 2016, he canonized Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
But perhaps the most enduring image of his papacy will be when he stepped out to bless a deserted and rain-drenched St. Peter’s Square on the night of March 27, 2020 as lockdowns from the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill.
“Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities,” the pope said at the time. “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.”
As a head of state, Francis played a major role in diplomatic and geopolitical affairs. He is credited with playing a key role in the warming of relations between the United States and Cuba, and under his watch, the Vatican established diplomatic relations with Palestine. In 2022, Francis made an unannounced visit to the Russian embassy to the Vatican to plead for peace following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
During his pontificate, Francis made apostolic visits to numerous countries, including Israel, South Sudan, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates. In 2015, he visited the United States and delivered an address to a joint session of Congress where he urged a broader acceptance of immigrants and called for a “renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity.”
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“On this continent, thousands of persons are led to travel north in search of a better life for themselves and for their loved ones, in search of greater opportunities,” Francis said at the time. “Is that not what we want for our own children? We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation.”
Even in recent months Francis has not shied away from international politics. He recently called the humanitarian situation stemming from Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza “shameful” and made a point of calling the only Catholic church in Gaza every day.
With the death of Pope Francis, the Catholic Church enters a period of mourning that ends as the College of Cardinals convenes in the Sistine chapel in the Vatican for the conclave to elect a new pope to lead the Catholic Church.
