The Vatican said on Monday in a video statement that he had died.
The polarization was fiercest in the United States, where conservative Catholicism often blended with well-financed right-wing politics and media outlets.
The intensity of conservative animosity to the pope was laid bare in January 2023 when it emerged that the late Australian Cardinal George Pell, a towering figure in the conservative movement and a Benedict ally, was the author of an anonymous memo in 2022 that condemned Francis’ papacy as a “catastrophe”.
Francis appointed nearly 80% of the cardinal electors who will choose the next pope, increasing, but not guaranteeing, the possibility that his successor will continue his progressive policies. Some Vatican experts have predicted a more moderate, less divisive successor.
He put more women in senior Vatican roles than any previous pope but not as many as progressives wanted.
His inability to help bring an end to the war in Ukraine was a great disappointment. From the day of Russia’s invasion in February 2022, he made appeals for peace at nearly every public appearance, at least twice a week.
He made frequent appeals for the release of hostages taken by Hamas militants but increased criticism of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza ahead of the January 2025 ceasefire agreement in the Israel-Hamas war that erupted in October 2023.
Conservatives were unhappy with the pope from the start because of his informal style, his aversion to pomp and his decision to allow women and Muslims to take part in a Holy Thursday ritual that previously had been restricted to Catholic men.
Their spiritual gurus were Pell and U.S. Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, who once famously compared the Church under Francis to “a ship without a rudder”.
They spoke at conferences where participants openly referred to Francis as the precursor of the Antichrist and the end of the world.
But a year after Benedict’s death, Francis lost his patience with conservative ringleaders, stripping Burke, who was rarely in Rome, of his Vatican privileges, including a subsidized apartment and a salary.
Conservatives were also rattled by his decision to declare capital punishment inadmissible in all cases, his frequent attacks on the arms industry, and his calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDALS
Francis summoned almost 200 Church leaders to a summit in February 2019 on child sex abuse by the clergy, issued a landmark decree making bishops directly accountable for sexual abuse or covering it up, and abolished “pontifical secrecy” for abuse cases. Victims’ groups said this was too little, too late.
But he also said the pandemic offered a chance for a great reset, to narrow the gap between rich and poor nations. “We can either exit from this pandemic better than before, or worse,“ he said often. He criticized “vaccine nationalism,“ saying poor countries should be given priority.
Francis moved to clean up the Curia, the staid central administration of the Roman Catholic Church that was held responsible for many of the missteps and scandals that marred Pope Benedict’s eight-year pontificate.
In 2020, he took drastic action by firing Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who was accused of embezzlement and nepotism and was also enmeshed in a scandal involving the Vatican’s purchase of a luxury building in London. Becciu has denied any wrongdoing.
Francis brought the Catholic Church’s dialogue with Islam to new heights in 2019 by becoming the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula, but conservatives attacked him as a “heretic” for signing a joint document on inter-religious fraternity with Muslim leaders.
FROM BUENOS AIRES TO THE VATICAN
He attended a technical high school and worked for a while as a chemical technician at a food laboratory. After he decided to become a priest, he studied at the diocesan seminary and in 1958 entered the Jesuit religious order.
While still in the seminary, his vocation was thrown into crisis when he was “dazzled” by a young woman he met at a family wedding. But he stuck to his plans and after studies in Argentina, Spain and Chile, he was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1969, rapidly rising to head the order in Argentina.
The Vatican has denied accusations by some critics in Argentina that Francis stayed silent during the human rights abuses or that he failed to protect two priests who challenged the dictatorship.
A SIMPLE START
“Brothers and sisters, good evening,“ were his first words from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, departing from the traditional salutation “Praised be Jesus Christ!”.
He took the name Francis in honour of Francis of Assisi, the saint associated with peace, concern for the poor, and respect for the environment.
Gone too were the plush red “shoes of the fisherman” used by his predecessors. He kept the same simple black shoes he always used and wore $20 plastic watches, giving some away so they could be auctioned off for charity.
MODEST LIVING
The Santa Marta residence, a modern building with a common dining room, became the nerve centre of the more than 1.3 billion-member Roman Catholic Church.
The bulletproof papal limousine was dispatched to the Vatican Museums and Francis took to being driven around Rome in a blue Ford Focus with no security features.
“In this globalised world we have fallen into the globalisation of indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others. It doesn’t regard us. It doesn’t interest us. It’s not our business,“ he said.
The year 2018 was Francis’ “annus horribilis” - chiefly because of the simmering crisis around Church sex abuse.
His comments were widely criticised by victims, their advocates and in newspaper editorials throughout Latin America.
Soon after he returned, he sent the Church’s top sexual abuse investigator to Chile.
That May, all of Chile’s 34 bishops offered their resignations en masse. The pope accepted seven resignations over the next few months. He later defrocked the two other bishops and the priest at the centre of the abuse scandal.
“With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them,“ Francis wrote in a letter to all Catholics on August 20, 2018.
Francis defrocked McCarrick in February 2019, making him the highest-profile Church figure to be dismissed from the priesthood in modern times.
WORLDWIDE PRESTIGE
He made more than 45 international trips including the first by any pope to Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Myanmar, North Macedonia, Bahrain and Mongolia.
In 2018, he led the Vatican to a landmark deal on the appointment of bishops in China, which conservatives criticized as a sell-out by the Church to Beijing’s communist government.
In the 2018 interview with Reuters, he said then U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement had pained him “because the future of humanity is at stake”. The pope and Trump were at odds over many issues, mostly immigration.
He visited the Greek island of Lesbos and brought a dozen refugees to Italy on his plane, and asked Church institutions to work to stop human trafficking and modern slavery.
During a trip to Sicily in 2018, he appealed to “brothers and sisters of the Mafia” to repent, saying the island needed “men and women of love, not men and women ‘of honour,‘” using the term mobsters apply to themselves.
THE FRANCIS EFFECT
His desire to connect extended to telephone calls. He became known as the “cold call pope” for phoning people unannounced, usually after they had written to him about a problem or he had heard that they had been touched by tragedy.
He also sought more openness with journalists. On one freewheeling encounter on the way back from Brazil in 2013, the pope, responding to a question about gay priests, offered an answer that made world headlines.
The comment did not mark a change in Church teaching that calls homosexual acts sinful, but it became emblematic of his preference for mercy over condemnation.
From the start, Francis sent clear signals to priests and bishops about the type of Church he wanted.
“If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy and people say ‘what are we going to do?’ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing. This is our crisis today. A Church that is poor and for the poor has to fight this mentality,“ he said early in his papacy.
In the 2018 interview with Reuters, Francis said he did not miss Argentina. “I only miss the street. I am a ‘callejero’ (a man of the streets). I really would like to be able to do that again, but I can’t now.”
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