The election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope in March 2013 was unexpected, even to the then cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires himself. He may have come a distant second in the previous papal conclave in 2005, but at 76 and, following the resignation on the grounds of old age of the candidate who had come first back then, the 85-year-old Benedict XVI – Bergoglio was convinced that a younger man was needed.
However, the majority of cardinals who gathered in the Sistine Chapel to vote were looking for something more than (relative) youth. Top of their agenda as they assembled was openness to fresh thinking after 35 years of no change under the almost seamless reigns of Pope John Paul II and Benedict, his erstwhile right-hand man. And so they surprised everyone by opting for Catholicism’s first Jesuit pope, the first Latin American successor to Saint Peter, and first leader from outside Europe in over a millennium.
The break with tradition that Francis, who has died aged 88 from a stroke following double pneumonia, represented even managed to trump the shock value of the resignation of Benedict, who was the first pope for 600 years to take that option rather than die in office. Immediately, Bergoglio signalled unambiguously that he intended to be a different kind of pope, one for the 21st century. He boldly chose to be known as Francis, becoming the first pontiff to take on the name of the radical saint from Assisi who had turned his back on privilege and status in this world, and lived with and for the poor. No more pomp and ceremony, the new pope seemed to be saying, but sleeves rolled up and joining the fight for social and economic justice.
On that night of his election he stepped out on to the balcony overlooking Saint Peter’s Square in simple white robes, refusing the fancy red mozzetta or cape that Benedict had sported when he had been announced as pope. When told to put on white trousers, he later remembered in his autobiography, he replied: “I don’t want to be an ice-cream seller.”
Smiling winningly, Francis described himself as an outsider, someone “from the end of the world”, who wanted to “walk together and work together” with the crowds who greeted him, rather than tell them what to do.
The excitement was palpable for believers and non-believers alike. Next, Francis declined to move into the gilded papal apartment vacated by his predecessor. Instead he was going to remain in the small room in the Santa Marta hostel in the Vatican where he had stayed during the conclave.
This personal modesty never wavered in all his years in Rome. He picked up his own phone, shunned limos and preferred to walk if possible (sciatica later caused him to use a wheelchair) – as, for example, on the day after his election when he slipped away on foot to collect his suitcase and settle the bill at the modest pensione where he had been booked in before the conclave began. If it had to be four wheels, he took a bus, or frequently squeezed his bulky frame into the papal Fiat 500 saloon.
“Bergoglio was a once-in-a-generation combination of two qualities seldom found together,” his biographer Austen Ivereigh wrote. “He had the political genius of a charismatic leader and the prophetic holiness of a desert saint.”
He set out immediately to show there was substance behind his eye-catching gestures. In his first Urbi et Orbi (To the City and the World) Easter address, he took aim at capitalism as “greed looking for easy gain” and condemned “the iniquitous exploitation of natural resources”. Next, on his way back from his first overseas trip as pope – to Brazil in July 2013 – he was asked by a journalist about his attitude to homosexuality. His predecessor had described same-sex attraction as a “strong tendency to an intrinsic moral evil”.
Francis replied: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” It was an indication of the extent of how out of touch the institution he was leading had become that no previous pope had ever even used the word “gay”. On questions of gender and sex, he remained unusually relaxed for a Catholic leader. “They are really not the most serious [sins],” he wrote in 2025.
The papacy has for centuries brought with it a place on the world stage. Francis, who from the off gave the impression of being a man in a hurry, was determined to use that platform to push a bottom-up agenda for the world. He insisted that Catholicism would henceforth be “a poor church for the poor”, and returned time and again in his pronouncements to the need to close the economic gap between developed and developing nations.
It was a crusade that saw him take a leading role in tackling the challenges faced by a warming planet, castigating and chivvying politicians who refused to grasp the threat posed to the future of humanity by climate change. His May 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’ (Praise Be to You), an impassioned cry of pain at what was happening to the Earth and especially to its poorest, most vulnerable inhabitants because climate change was going unchecked, was read widely outside the usual Catholic circles. It is held by many experts to have galvanised those who gathered in Paris at the end of that year to set a target of limiting global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees.
Francis had emphasised the urgency of the task – in line with what other campaigners were saying – but he also managed to add a vital injection of hope with his insistence that concerted action could bring an earthly salvation for humankind. With his emphasis on accepting the science (he was a trained chemist) – and hence his stern rebuke to the climate change deniers and the politicians who courted them – he even managed to reset the relationship between science and religion, which had been rocky ever since Galileo fell foul of the Inquisition 400 years earlier.
That momentum continued after Paris. In 2019 he called an unprecedented synod of bishops for the pan-Amazon region. Brazil’s new hard right president, Jair Bolsonaro, had made it plain that he was happy to see the rainforest go up in flames. Francis’s response was to use the papacy’s global reach to give voice to the fears of the 33 million people living in the Amazon basin who felt themselves to be powerless in shaping their own and the planet’s future. At the gathering, the crimes and injustice meted out by politicians and multinationals were called out as destructive of livelihoods as well as of Earth’s greatest store of carbon.
For Francis, climate change, migration and global poverty were interconnected. In his first pastoral visit outside Rome following his election, he travelled in July 2013 to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa off the coast of north Africa to meet the migrants and refugees who were arriving there in ever-greater numbers. With European governments keen only to find ways of “sending them back”, Francis spoke out against such “global indifference” to their plight, and called for a “reawakening of conscience” in wealthy nations. It was a message he reiterated in two trips, in April 2016 and December 2021, to the Greek island of Lesbos, close to the Turkish coast, where migrants were once again arriving.
Overall, the pattern of his overseas trips showed him unafraid, even eager, to head for the world’s hotspots – Jerusalem (2014), Bosnia and Herzegovina (2015), Egypt and Myanmar (2017), Iraq (2021) and South Sudan (2023). He went not as a war correspondent, or as a politician polishing their all-action image, but instead in the hope that his presence might make some difference to those who were suffering, whatever their faith or none, by reassuring them the world had not forgotten them.
Yet if this outward-facing aspect of his ministry made a largely positive impact at a time when public trust in their leaders was falling to new lows, the fruits of his custodianship of the Catholic church itself were more mixed. That he managed to alienate both progressives and traditionalists in the pews reveals the middle course he tried to chart, ultimately satisfying neither group in an increasingly polarised 1.2 billion-strong institution.
While his two predecessors had been authoritarians – they knew what they thought on the most contentious matters within Catholicism and imposed that view on the church regardless of dissenters – Francis preferred to work away patiently at building consensus and accommodating a variety of perspectives. To that end, he breathed new life into the system of regular gatherings – or synods – of bishops in Rome to debate pressing matters. Under John Paul II and Benedict, these meetings went through the motions, having little influence on subsequent papal teaching.
Francis, by contrast, was at pains to listen and act, going so far in 2023 as to call a curiously named synod on synodality in his anxiety to make the process work better as a conduit between the centre and the outposts of his global church. It was part of turning the usual church structures upside down – he, the outsider in Vatican terms, promoting other outsiders to high office.
Yet the expectations created by summoning these gatherings – that the views of ordinary Catholics might be heard – proved unrealistic. Attendees were more diverse, and even included small numbers of women, who were given a vote. But when in November 2024 the synod on synodality produced its final document recommending better training for priests, more lay involvement in selecting bishops and greater transparency, the Catholic theologian and former president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, spoke for many when she condemned the text as “one big wordy yawn signifying absolutely nothing. Not one single thing has shifted even marginally.”
What Francis increasingly faced was disruption, disrespect and latterly demonisation by a well-organised, well-funded block of conservatively minded Catholics, mostly from Europe and the US, led by erstwhile insider figures such as the American cardinal Raymond Burke, who fiercely resisted even the suggestion that any reform was needed. In his handling of Burke – who shared with a significant number of American bishops a desire to see the church take sides in the “culture wars” that divide the US, up to and including banning President Joe Biden, a practising Catholic, from communion because he would not outlaw abortion – Francis showed that his appetite for rising above the fray and seeking consensus had a limit.
Burke had held senior posts in the Vatican when Francis was elected. In November 2014, after Burke described the church as “a ship without a rudder”, the pope demoted him to a minor role as patron of the Sovereign Order of Malta. When Burke continued to make trouble there, Francis once again stepped in and removed him. For his supporters, Burke was a martyr. For most Catholics, he was a relic of the past.
In a further indication that papal patience could run out, Francis in 2021 used his apostolic letter Traditionis Custodes to restrict severely the use of the medieval Latin Tridentine mass. It had become a rallying point for traditionalists’ resistance to the changes agreed in the church as far back as 1965 at the landmark Second Vatican Council. As the first pope to have become a priest after the modernising council concluded, Francis was determined to be guided by its spirit, looking forward not back.
His critics responded by claiming that he could not make rulings on liturgy or other matters because he was not even really the pope. Citing the longstanding practice that those elected to the papacy must continue in the role until God chose to call them to heaven, they argued that Benedict XVI’s resignation was illegal and that he remained the “true” pope.
Benedict did little to encourage this – though, as his grip on life weakened, those around him were not so scrupulous, and on occasion spoke as if in his name. For his part Francis was scathing about attempts to make trouble out of the unusual circumstance of having two living popes. “I would like to say that I could speak about everything with Benedict and exchange opinions,” he remarked in 2023 shortly after the death of the pope emeritus. “He was always at my side, supporting, and if there was some difficulty, he told me, and we spoke. There were no problems.”
Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires. His father Mario’s parents had travelled to Argentina in 1929 from Portacomaro in Piedmont, northern Italy, wanting to escape a country swept up with the fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Mario married Regina Sivori in 1935. The following year, Jorge, the oldest of their five children, was born.
The family spoke Spanish at their single-storey home, 531 Calle Membrillar, in Flores, but with his grandparents – who lived just round the corner in the Almagro neighbourhood of Buenos Aires – the young Jorge learned Italian, or the Piedmontese dialect of their upbringing. His father worked for an accounting firm and, while the family was not poor, money was always tight. At school, Jorge excelled in chemistry, though he later insisted he was never top of the class. Outside it, he liked football (following a local team, San Lorenzo), tango and girls. There was even a girlfriend, Amalia Damonte.
Aged 17, he attended mass in his local church of San José de Flores and was so moved by the sermon of a visiting priest, Enrique Pozzoli, that he sought him out in the confessional. In the course of their exchange, he recalled later, he discovered his religious vocation. His mother was not pleased, he recalled. “She experienced it as a plundering.”
He fell seriously ill at 21 with pneumonia and doctors feared for his life. Three cysts were found on his right lung and part of it was removed in a brutal operation. The brush with death strengthened his determination to become a priest and he entered a Jesuit seminary soon afterwards. Mother and son were finally reconciled in December 1969 when he was ordained after 12 years’ training.
By that stage, Bergoglio was 33 and had gained a philosophy degree at the Catholic University of Buenos Aires. He taught for a while – philosophy and literature – before in 1973 he was elected as the youngest-ever provincial of Jesuits in Argentina. It turned out to be a poisoned chalice.
His six years in charge overlapped with the military junta that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983, during which period between 15,000 and 30,000 Argentinians “disappeared” or were killed. Like the country’s Catholic church, the Jesuits were divided in how to react to events. Both contained progressive elements opposed to the dictatorship and more conservative ones, including prominent military chaplains privy to human rights abuses.
Two radical priests under the provincial’s authority, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, lived among the poor in the Rivadavia shanty town in Buenos Aires. Francis ordered them to return to the order’s main house for their safety, but they refused. Shortly after they were arrested as part of a clampdown by the regime on those it regarded as subversive.
In both the 2005 and 2013 papal elections there were whispers circulating that back in 1976 Francis had failed to help the two priests in their hour of need. His response to the charges was made clear in El Jesuita, a book-length conversation with two journalists published in 2010. As provincial, he had confronted Jorge Videla and Emilio Massera, two of the three leaders of the military junta, and got the priests released after five months in captivity, blindfolded and handcuffed. While Yoria left the Jesuits soon afterwards, and accused his provincial of betrayal, Jalics stayed and remained on good terms with the future pope.
In a 2018 interview Francis would describe – with a candour about his health unknown in previous popes – how the stresses and strains of leading the Jesuits through these testing times had caused him subsequently to see a psychoanalyst for six months. From the age of 10, he revealed he had suffered “melancholy spells”. She helped him, he said, with the anxiety he had been suffering over his involvement in the clandestine smuggling out of Argentina of those the military junta sought to arrest. In one case, he is said to have given a young Uruguayan man his own identity card to aid his escape.
The argument over the true extent of his involvement in these escape lines was never settled, but when Bergoglio stood down after just one term as provincial in 1979, he had made so many enemies within his order that he was sent into internal exile as rector of the Colegio Máximo in Córdoba. His relationship with the Jesuits never recovered.
One of his biographers, the journalist Paul Vallely, suggested that, in reflecting during this period of exile on his own record under the junta, Francis experienced a road to Damascus moment, and thereafter became a more radical, fearless and outspoken priest. As pope he said on more than one occasion, “the truth is that I’m a sinner” and that as provincial he had had to learn from “my errors along the way”. The pain of those memories would seem to have lasted a lifetime since, unlike John Paul II, who regularly returned to his native Poland, Francis never set foot on Argentinian soil again after his election.
His return from the wilderness certainly did not come through joining forces with the radical liberation theology priests who were so prominent in Latin America at the time (though heartily disliked in John Paul II’s Vatican). In May 1992 his ministry with the marginalised caught the eye of the conservative cardinal Antonio Quarracino, who appointed Bergoglio as one of his three assistant bishops in the Buenos Aires archdiocese.
There were certainly those in Rome who were suspicious of this bishop who spent his time in the poorest neighbourhoods and lived in a small, simple apartment near the main cathedral. But Quarracino, an old-style prince of the church, would not be contradicted and, in 1997, Bishop Bergoglio was named by the Vatican as his coadjutor – or eventual successor. In February of the following year, he took over the reins.
The new cardinal was no theologian – his approach was more homespun – but his commitment to poor people was every bit as strong as that of the liberation theologians. He would simply say he did what the Jesus of the gospels told him to do. “In Christianity,” he once remarked in a book-length interview with his friend Abraham Skorka, an Argentinian rabbi, “the attitude we must have towards the poor is, in its essence, that of true commitment. This commitment must be person to person, in the flesh. It is not enough to mediate this through institutions … They do not excuse us from our obligation of establishing personal contact with the needy.”
Francis had a clarity of thought that shaped every last aspect of his own life and ministry. It was sufficient to impress the up to a third of electors at the 2005 papal conclave who voted for him, if some reports of these secret meetings are to be believed. After the dysfunction and scandal of Benedict’s later years, when his personal butler was stealing his papers and passing them to the media, followed by the shock of his resignation, Francis’s vision of a pared-down, hands-on papacy won the cardinals round in 2013.
He immediately brought order to the chaos into which the Vatican had descended in the twilight years of Benedict’s neglect. A council of cardinals was established to tackle key areas, notably the perilous state of the Vatican’s finances. All of the nine Francis appointed had, like him, substantial experience at the coalface, as heads of large dioceses. Most were also outsiders in the overheated corridors of power at the Vatican.
Progress was made, notably on the financial front, until Francis’s Australian lieutenant, Cardinal George Pell, returned home in 2018 to defend himself against child sexual abuse accusations for which his eventual convictions were overturned. But there was so much ground to make up and so much corruption to strip out. In a much-reported 2014 Christmas “state-of-the-nation” address to the Vatican curia (civil service), Francis was at his steeliest, listing 15 “ailments” that he said plagued the church’s bureaucracy, including hypocrisy, the “terrorism of gossip”, which he said could “kill the reputation of our colleagues and brothers in cold blood”, inability “to weep with those who weep”, and “spiritual Alzheimer’s” that made leaders of senior staff forget the spirit of the gospel.
He made good on his promise to promote more women to leading roles in the Vatican, but still they remain shut out of priesthood. “The church is female – it is not male,” he wrote in his 2025 autobiography, entitled Hope. “We clerics are males but we are not the church. The church is female because she is the bride.”
A leak around the time of his 2019 synod of bishops for the pan-Amazon region suggested he might revert to the practice of the early church and admit women to the diaconate (one step down in ministry terms from the priesthood). It proved to be wishful thinking.
Francis was not someone who believed changing the laws of the church would secure its future. He feared it would lead to schism. Yet, as he found out when, before the synod on the family he called in 2015, he circulated to Catholic parishes around the world an invitation for grassroots believers to express their opinion on contentious matters, the church was already effectively in schism. The percentages of respondents endorsing its ban on artificial contraception, women’s ministry and same-sex marriage, for example, ranged from non-existent to at best a substantial minority.
Francis left Catholic teaching – and hence many faithful Catholics – in a kind of limbo between the rules and the reality of their lives. Yet, to a large extent, they were content that it be that way, since he made plain repeatedly that he felt their pain, and his leadership otherwise was so inspiring. On the one occasion when he acted in this area of personal morality – encouraging priests to allow divorced and remarried Catholics to go to communion without first having to go through an annulment process for their previous marriage – he bizarrely did it in a footnote to his April 2016 apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), which contained his verdict on the synod on the family. You could almost have missed it. Perhaps that is what he wanted, in case it caused an outcry. Many local priests certainly continued to act as if the pope had never spoken, and turned divorcees away.
If their actions revealed one of the drawbacks of Francis’s push to devolve authority away from the papacy and allow the local church to make more decisions, then on the scandal of clerical sexual abuse his efforts to control from the centre left a stain on his good name. In 2015, a former military chaplain, Juan Barros, was named as bishop of Osorno in Chile. Barros had already been implicated in the cover-up of the sexual abuse of adolescent boys by a priest, Fernando Karadima. His appointment caused a storm of protest – from local priests, parishioners and parliamentarians.
When Francis visited Chile in 2018, he dismissed the protesters and accused them of “calumny” in the full gaze of the world’s press. It caused the head of the Vatican’s own sex abuse commission to rebuke his boss publicly. Back in Rome, Francis responded by dispatching an envoy to look into the case. When his report came back siding with the protesters, Francis did a swift about-turn and described what he said on his visit to Chile as “the lowest moment” of his papacy. He summoned all the country’s bishops to Rome, and demanded their resignation for their poor handling of child abuse allegations. Some were reinstated but not Barros.
Recognising your mistake and atoning for it is, of course, to be applauded, but after all the decades of cover-up of sexual abuse by clergy, it rang hollow for many. Francis had promised to take the matter seriously, recruiting victims of predatory priests to a Vatican commission he set up to stamp out abuse, but several resigned soon afterwards, judging that he was not prepared to make the changes needed and hand oversight of the church’s handling of such cases to a completely independent body.
Francis’s vision of his role as pope was that of the servant leader, both inside the church and out, starting always with those at the very bottom and offering them practical help, while also challenging on a bigger stage the reasons why they were in such need in a wealthy world. Early in his pontificate, he told his priests to get out of their churches and on to the streets, as he himself had in Buenos Aires, rather than restrict their ministry to those who filled the pews.
It was an inspiring vision of global Catholicism as a force for good in an unequal world and drew many to him, but – like so many of his predecessors – the scale of the challenge of leading a church that houses so many points of view proved too great for any one man. By force of personality, and his evident sincerity, modesty and warmth, Francis persuaded most Catholics to root for him, whatever his errors, and so did better than most of the successors of Saint Peter. As the “man from the end of the world” would have pointed out, lasting change takes longer than the tenure of a single pope.
Two brothers and a sister predeceased him. Bergoglio is survived by a sister, María Elena.
• Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, born 17 December 1936; died 21 April 2025
