VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff in history, who captivated the world with his humble style and concern for the poor while also unsettling the conservative sector with his criticisms of capitalism and climate change, died on Monday. He was 88 years old.
The bells rang in the towers of the churches throughout Rome after the announcement, which was read by Cardinal Kevin Ferrell, chamberlain of the Vatican, from the chapel of the Domus Santa Marta, where Francis lived.
“At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the Father’s house. His whole life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and his Church,” Ferrell announced.
Francis, who suffered from a chronic lung disease and had part of a lung removed in his youth, was admitted to Gemelli Hospital on February 14, 2025, due to a respiratory crisis that resulted in bilateral pneumonia. He spent 38 days in the hospital, the longest hospitalization of his 12-year papacy.
However, he left on Easter Sunday —a day before his death— to bless thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square and surprise them with a ride in the popemobile around the square, which elicited cheers and enthusiastic applause.
From his first greeting as pope - a casual “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) - to his welcoming of refugees and the oppressed, Francis set a different tone in his papacy, emphasizing humility over pride in a Catholic Church plagued by scandal and indifference.
Who was Pope Francis?
Jorge Mario Bergoglio S.J. was born in Buenos Aires on December 17, 1936, and he was the 265th pope of the Catholic Church and the head of State of Vatican City, since March 13, 2013, choosing the name Francis I.
After the death of Pope John Paul II on April 2, 2005, Bergoglio was considered one of the candidates to take the place of the Supreme Pontiff, a position for which Joseph Ratzinger was elected, who adopted the papal name Benedict XVI.
Bergoglio was president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference for two terms. Prevented by the statute from assuming a new term, during the 102nd plenary assembly of that organization, the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe de la Vera Cruz, José María Arancedo, was elected to succeed him.
When John Paul II died, there were 117 cardinals under 80 years old eligible to vote for a new pope, including Cardinal Bergoglio, who reportedly managed to secure 40 votes out of the 77 required to be elected (placing second behind the one who was elected and became Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger).
After that rainy night on March 13, 2013, the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio brought a breath of fresh air to an institution 2,000 years old that had seen its influence decline during the troubled pontificate of Benedict XVI, whose surprising resignation led to the election of Francis.
However, the new pope soon found himself in trouble and conservatives became increasingly upset with his progressive tendencies, his approach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, and his crackdown on traditionalists.
His greatest challenge came in 2018, after mishandling a controversial case of clerical sexual abuse in Chile, when the scandal that had been brewing with his predecessors erupted again under his supervision.
Then, the globetrotting pope, who was beloved by the crowds, had to navigate an unprecedented reality as he led a universal religion during the coronavirus pandemic from a closed Vatican City.
Francis implored the world to use COVID-19 as an opportunity to rethink the global economic and political framework that, he said, had pitted the rich against the poor.
“We have realized that we are in the same boat, all fragile and disoriented,” said Francis in an empty St. Peter’s Square during a solitary prayer in March 2020. He also emphasized that the pandemic has shown the need for “everyone to row together, each one with the need to console the other.”
Reforming the Vatican
Francis was elected with the mandate to reform the Vatican’s bureaucracy and finances, but he went beyond that and shook up the Church without changing its core doctrine.
“Who am I to judge?” he responded when asked about a priest allegedly being gay.
The comment sent a message of welcome to the LGBTQ+ community and to those who felt rejected by a Church that had emphasized certain rules of sexual behavior over unconditional love.
“Being homosexual is not a crime,” he told The Associated Press in 2023, calling for an end to civil laws that criminalize homosexuality.
By emphasizing mercy over morality, Francis changed the position of the Church on the death penalty, declaring it inadmissible in any circumstance. He also modified the Church’s position by declaring that the mere possession of nuclear weapons - not just their use - was “immoral.”
In other milestones, he approved a controversial agreement with China on the appointment of bishops that had irritated the Vatican for half a century, became the first pope to meet with a Russian patriarch, and forged new relationships with the Muslim world by becoming the first pontiff to visit the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.
Francis reaffirmed that only celibate men could be priests and maintained the Church’s opposition to abortion, a procedure he likened to “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”
A change after Benedict
The path to Pope Francis’ election in 2013 was paved by the remarkable decision of Pope Benedict XVI to resign and retire - the first in 600 years - and created the unprecedented reality of having two popes living in the Vatican.
Francis did not shy away from Benedict’s potentially uncomfortable shadow, but rather embraced him as a wise elder statesman whom he turned to for advice and persuaded to come out of his secluded retirement to participate in the public life of the Church.
“It’s like having your grandpa at home, a wise grandpa,” he said.
Francis also praised Benedict XVI’s decision to retire and said that he “opened the door” for others to follow his example. This fueled speculation that Francis might also retire, but after Benedict’s death, he stated that the papacy is a lifetime job.
Pope Francis’s more relaxed liturgical style and pastoral priorities made it clear that he and the theologian born in Germany came from very different religious traditions, and in several cases, Francis directly overturned decisions made by his predecessor.
He made sure that Archbishop Óscar Romero, a hero for the liberation theology movement in Latin America, was canonized after his case languished under the papacy of Benedict due to concerns about the Marxist inclination of his creed.
He also reinstated restrictions on the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed, arguing that the Tridentine rite had divided the Church. The decision angered Francis’ more traditionalist critics and sparked what became a season of conflict between right-wing Catholics, particularly in the United States, and the Argentine pope.
Conservatives distance themselves from Francis
By then, the conservatives had already distanced themselves from him, feeling betrayed after the opening of a debate on the divisive issue of allowing remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments if they did not obtain an annulment.
“We don’t like this pope,” said a provocative headline in the conservative Italian newspaper Il Foglio, reflecting the concern of the small but expressive traditionalist Catholic movement that was pampered by Benedict.
Those same critics amplified their complaints when Francis approved ecclesiastical blessings for same-sex couples and the controversial agreement with China on the appointment of bishops. The details of this agreement were never made public, but critics accused him of betraying those who practiced Catholicism clandestinely in China and remained loyal to the Holy See during decades of persecution. Meanwhile, the Vatican defended it as the best deal it could achieve before China completely closed the door.
The American cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the main opponents of Francis, said that the Church had become “a ship without a rudder.”
Burke waged his opposition campaign for years. It began when Francisco fired him as prefect of the Supreme Court and culminated when he spoke out at Francisco’s synod regarding the future of the Church in 2023.
On two occasions, he joined other conservative cardinals to formally ask Francis to explain himself on matters related to doctrine that reflected a more progressive tendency, including the possibility of blessing same-sex couples and his approach to divorced Catholics who had remarried civilly.
Francis eventually imposed economic sanctions on Burke, accusing him of sowing “disunity”. It was one of several personnel moves he made both in the Vatican and around the world to shift the balance of power from doctrinal leaders to those more pastoral.
Francis insisted that his bishops and cardinals immerse themselves in the “smell of their sheep” and attend to the faithful. He made it known to those who did not do so that he was displeased.
His 2014 Christmas speech at the Vatican Curia became one of the greatest papal reprimands in history: standing in the marble Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace, Francis listed 15 ailments that, he said, can affect his closest collaborators, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s”, the thirst for power, and “gossip terrorism”.
Trying to eliminate corruption, he oversaw the reform of the Vatican Bank and sought to fight against bureaucrats and bring them into line, limiting their compensation and ability to receive gifts or award public contracts.
It also authorized the Vatican police to carry out raids on its own Secretariat of State and the financial surveillance agency due to suspicions of an investment of around 350 million euros (approximately 365 million dollars) in a real estate company in London. After a two-and-a-half-year trial, the Vatican court convicted former powerful cardinal Angelo Becciu of embezzlement and issued mixed sentences against nine other individuals, acquitting one.
However, the trial ended up being a sort of reputational boomerang for the Holy See, demonstrating deficiencies in the Vatican legal system, territorial disputes among bishops, and the ways in which the pope had intervened in the case on behalf of the prosecutors.
While he gained praise for attempting to revamp the Vatican’s finances, Francis drew the ire of American conservatives for his frequent criticisms of the global financial market, which favors the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
Economic justice was one of the most important topics of his papacy, and he did not hide it in his first meeting with journalists when he said he wanted a “poor Church that is for the poor.”
In his first major teaching document, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis denounced trickle-down economic theories as unproven and naive, stating that they are based on a mentality “where the powerful feed off those without power” without taking into account ethics, the environment, or even God.
“Money should serve, not rule!” he said as he asked political leaders to reform the system.
He further explained this message in his encyclical “Laudato Si”, in which he denounced the “structurally perverse” global economic system that, he said, exploited the poor and risked turning the Earth into “an immense pile of filth”.
Francis was labeled as a Marxist by some American conservatives. He rejected the label and said he had many Marxist friends.