Pope Francis delighted and challenged Catholics across the world ...Middle East

Pope Francis has died aged 88, the Vatican has announced.

The pontiff, who was Bishop of Rome and head of the Catholic Church, became pope in 2013 after the resignation of his predecessor Benedict XVI.

In recent years, he had struggled with ill health and spent 38 days in hospital from 14 February after being admitted for bronchitis treatment.

After being discharged on 23 March, he welcomed King Charles and Queen Camilla at the Vatican two weeks ago before greeting crowds at the Easter Sunday Service in his final public appearance.

Pope Francis was one of the most popular popes of recent times. Yet while many ordinary Catholics in the pew loved him for his concern for the environment and the plight of migrants, a loud conservative faction dogged his efforts at reforming the Roman Catholic Church.

Even those who admired him had to acknowledge that he did not always deliver. He failed to ensure the Catholic Church had a robust safeguarding system to protect children against sexual abuse by priests. And although he promoted a few women to be Vatican officials, he did not budge on women’s ordination.

While he was liked for his message of peace, many thought him naïve at best and even foolish in his dealings with China, failing to help those who fell foul of the Beijing regime’s oppressive take on religion.

Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936 in Buenos Aires, the child of an Italian migrant couple. He worked in various jobs in his youth, including being a bouncer, a janitor and a chemist. He developed a passion for football and the tango.

But Bergoglio eventually chose the priesthood and joined the Jesuit order – considered one of the most intellectual of the Church. Aged just 36, he became provincial (leader) of the order in Argentina in 1973, and was quickly considered a highly controversial figure.

His conservative, authoritarian style concerned the leaders of the Jesuit order in Rome so much so, that in 1990 they stripped him of his responsibilities and banished him for two years to Cordoba, in the south of Argentina.

Exile transformed him. When he returned to Buenos Aires two years later, after being appointed as an auxiliary bishop, he was a different man – more consultative, focused on direct action, and recognising the merits of liberation theology. In 1998 he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires, and was then appointed a cardinal in 2001.

He was elected pope by his fellow cardinals in 2013, after the shock resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, and took the papal name of Francis, to indicate that, like St Francis of Assisi, his priorities were the poor and God’s creation.

He inherited a church in turmoil, riven by factions – the crisis over the sexual abuse of children by priests, and scandals over money and the Vatican Bank. He cleared out four of the five cardinals who ran financial affairs in the Vatican and replaced them with his own appointments, and brought in lay experts to advise him.

He also created a Council of Cardinal Advisers to examine the Roman Curia – the governing operation of the Roman Catholic Church. He made considerable use of synods, calling them to further engage the laity and bishops around the world in the Catholic Church’s decision-making.

His synod of 2023, examining the future structure of the Church, gave lay people unprecedented voting powers and revealed a desire of Catholic women around the world to be given a greater role in the Church.

There was a sympathetic reaction, underlining his understanding of people’s troubles. After a synod on the family in 2014 and 2015 and a suggestion that parish priests should individually decide whether divorced and remarried Catholics should receive Communion, he said that that “the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy”.

“The Eucharist is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak,” he added. But conservative cardinals said he was causing Catholics confusion.

Conservatives also raised their eyebrows when he was asked about the gay community. “If a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge that person?” he said.

But the landmark document of his papacy was not about sex. It was about the planet. Laudato Si’, published in 2015, was a critique of consumerism, environmental degradation and global warming, and urged people to take “swift and unified global action” to care for what he called “our common home”.

The Pope was also influential on other global matters. He helped to broker full diplomatic relations between America and Cuba, which he himself had visited in 2015, and spoke out against the death penalty, committing the Catholic Church to its global abolition.

However, his most controversial engagement on the world stage was over China.

In 2018, the Chinese government and the Vatican signed an agreement that allowed Beijing to have more control over the so-called underground Church – the one that comes under the jurisdiction of Rome. The deal also allowed the Vatican to have more control over the appointment of bishops in the state-approved Patriotic Catholic Church.

Because it allowed the Chinese government to recommend bishops before they were appointed by the Pope (although he can veto them) many thought it was a sell-out by the Vatican, giving China considerable power over a religion.

The pact was renewed twice in 2020 and 2022, but by the end of 2022, the Vatican showed signs of becoming disillusioned by Beijing, accusing it of installing a bishop in a diocese that the Church did not recognise.

Hopes that Pope Francis’ would deal effectively with child sexual abuse in the Church were not fulfilled despite a promising start.

In 2014, he set up the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, an advisory body within the Vatican, to evaluate the Church’s work and initiate reforms. But some of its members became increasingly disillusioned about the extent to which the Church was willing to change and quit.

They included the Jesuit priest Hans Zollner, one of the foremost experts on sexual abuse, who left in 2023, protesting at shortcomings in the Commission’s accountability, transparency, competence and responsibility.

Throughout his pontificate, Pope Francis was both vilified and praised for his management of the Church and his interventions on the global stage. Sometimes he was accused of naivety, and considering people in too positive a light. Sometimes he was accused of being too biased towards left-wing politics.

But how he lived struck a chord with countless people, as did what he said. The Church, he said, should be like a field hospital after battle, tending to people’s wounds.

At the start of the Covid pandemic he stood, completely alone, in St Peter’s Square and reflected on the world’s fears.

“Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities; 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,” he said.

The pandemic, he said, was “a time to choose what matters and what passes away, a time to separate what is necessary from what is not”.

The man from Argentina had an uncanny ability to speak the language of people across the world, reconnecting many to their faith. It was his greatest gift as pope.

Catherine Pepinster is a former editor of The Tablet, the Catholic weekly

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