Pope Francis, who said he never wanted to be earthly head of the Catholic Church and frequently governed as though he were a simple parish priest, is dead.
The 265th successor to St. Peter the Apostle exchanged time for eternity at 7:35am Rome time on 21 April, of complications arising from a respiratory infection. He was 88 years old and is survived by his sister, María Elena (77) of Argentina.
Pope Francis reigned twelve years, one month, and eight days on Peter’s throne. Outside the Western Schism, Francis was the first pope since Boniface VIII in 1294 to succeed a man—Benedict XVI—who renounced the office. (Boniface VIII succeeded Pope St. Celestine V.)
The Cardinal Camerlegno of the Roman Church, Kevin Farrell, made the announcement early on Easter Monday. “His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of His Church,” Farrell said.
“He taught us to live the values of the Gospel with fidelity, courage, and universal love, especially in favor of the poorest and most marginalized,” Farrell’s statement continued. “With immense gratitude for his example as a true disciple of the Lord Jesus,” the Camerlegno said, “we commend the soul of Pope Francis to the infinite merciful love of the One and Triune God.”
A native of Argentina and a Jesuit, Francis was also the first member of the Society of Jesus founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1540 to be elected pope, and the first pope elected from the Americas.
By the numbers, Pope Francis traveled abroad forty-seven times—most recently in December 2024—and visited more than sixty countries, including several journeys that were papal firsts, among them Iraq—in the midst of war and pandemic emergency—Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. His 2015 visit to the war-torn Central African Republic was the first pastoral visit of a reigning pontiff to an active war theatre.
Pope Francis created 163 cardinals from seventy-six countries. All told, twenty-five of whom had never before been a prelate received a red hat. He wrote only four encyclical letters—traditionally considered the most authoritative papal teaching instrument—but published seven Apostolic Exhortations, which are a genre best described as official encouragement.
Pope Francis presided over a dizzying array of Synod Assemblies—two Ordinary General, one Special, and one Extraordinary General—as well as a novel three-stage Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the subject of “synodality” itself, a leitmotiv of his pontificate that struggled to gain traction among the worldwide body of the faithful and still does not have a straightforward working definition.
His life and times were such that one may be forgiven some amazement at the fact he came to sit in Peter’s See at all, though no one should be surprised at how eventful and indeed momentous was his reign.
In many ways, indeed far too many for a full account here, the reign of Francis was one of contradictions.
Who was Pope Francis?
Early life
Born into the world Jorge Mario Bergoglio on December 17, 1936, the man who would become Pope Francis was baptized a week later, on the evening of Christmas Day. He studied with the Salesians of Don Bosco as a boy and trained as a chemical technician in his adolescence, working several years in his youth as a lab tech, during which time he reported to Paraguayan biochemist and political activist Esther Ballestrino.
Bergoglio did Ballestrino some good turns during the so-called Dirty War in Argentina—a dark chapter of the country’s history, in which a reactionary military dictatorship practiced torture as policy and murder as instrument—and Bergoglio led the Jesuits, whose company he joined in 1958, from 1973 to 1979 as provincial superior.
Chosen for the provincial superior’s role only four years after ordination to the priesthood and thrust into leadership at a time of grave national crisis, Bergoglio strongly opposed radical strains of liberation theology then current in Latin America and championed by some Jesuits, some of them leading intellectuals involved in politics.
Bergoglio’s management of the Jesuits during that critical period of Argentina’s history has been the subject of intense scrutiny and occasionally fervid debate, perhaps epitomized by the kidnapping and torture of two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics.
Yorio accused Bergoglio of abandoning him and Jalics to their captors in the Argentinian Navy by refusing to vouch for them when he had the chance. Jalics contradicted Yorio’s contention in two public statements shortly after Bergoglio’s election to the papacy. Yorio, however, died in the year 2000, and never was known to have recanted his accusations or reconciled with his erstwhile superior.
Bergoglio’s only comment for the record was to his authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin, according to whom Francis worked with quiet diligence to secure the Jesuits’ release.
“I warned them to be very careful,” Bergoglio told Rubin before his election. “[Jalics and Yorio] were too exposed to the paranoia of the witch hunt,” he said. “Because they stayed in the barrio,” Bergoglio told Rubin, “Yorio and Jalics were kidnapped.”
Jalics later spoke of a tearful reunion with Bergoglio, saying they talked of the matter, then celebrated Mass together publicly and embraced. “I am reconciled to the events,” the Associated Press quoted Jalics as saying shortly after Bergoglio became Pope Francis, “and consider the matter to be closed.”
Strained relations
After a stint as rector of the Philosophical and Theological Faculty of San Miguel from 1980 to 1986, Bergoglio made a brief foray into advanced study that took him to Germany.
While in Germany, Bergoglio planned and started a doctoral dissertation on the great 20th-century Italo-German thinker, Romano Guardini—whose works, it happens, also profoundly influenced Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI)—but Bergoglio never finished the project. Instead, he returned to Argentina and became a spiritual director to Jesuits in Córdoba.
Throughout his life as a Jesuit, Bergoglio practiced and encouraged popular piety and assiduous pursuit of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Those commitments would sign his pontificate, as well. When he became Pope Francis, he would continue his advocacy of popular devotion and would be eloquent in his appeals for more assiduous practice of the corporal and spiritual Works of Mercy.
In those regards, Bergoglio would continue to practice as Pope Francis what he had always preached, making visits to various houses dedicated to the care of the poor, the sick, the marginalized, and downtrodden in and around Rome and often on his many Apostolic journeys. As pope, he would dine with the poor and the homeless; he would visit the sick and clothe the naked, even opening laundries—some equipped with shower facilities—for the homeless in Rome and throughout Italy.
He would also pray before the icon of Our Lady, Salus populi Romani, after every Apostolic voyage of his pontificate. That ancient object of intense veneration and devotion is located in the Basilica of St. Mary Major, which the man who became Pope Francis would choose for his final resting place.
Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio SJ struggled, however, in his personal relationships with other Jesuits and eventually came to be somewhat estranged from his confrères.
Pope St. John Paul II asked Bergoglio to be an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires in 1992. Bergoglio accepted, taking his episcopal motto, Miserando atque eligendo—“Having mercy [on him], and choosing [him]”—from St. Bede the Venerable’s homily on the Gospel according to St. Matthew (Mt. 9:9-13, Hom. 21).
Bergoglio became coadjutor archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1997 and succeeded Cardinal Antonio Quarracino in February of the next year. Later in 1998, Francis—who had served Divine Liturgy for then-Fr. Stefan Czmil, when he was a schoolboy with the Salesians—also took on the pastoral care of Eastern Rite Catholics in Argentina.
On February 21st, 2001, Pope St. John Paul II created him Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio and made him cardinal priest of St. Robert Bellarmine, a parish church located a good way northeast of Rome’s historic central district but not quite “peripheral” by Roman reckoning.
The cardinals created that day were a class featuring a veritable Who’s Who? of late 20th and early 21st-century clerics.
From the Servant of God, Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan—a hero of the faith imprisoned by Communists for years in his native and beloved Vietnam—and the long-serving Fr. Roberto Tucci SJ—for years the organizer and facilitator of Pope St. John Paul II’s globetrotting Apostolic journeys—to names like Rodriguez y Maradiaga, Errázuriz, Connell, the aforementioned Egan, Cipriani Thorne, inter alia—all those latter having in various ways and to varying degrees involvement in the crisis of abuse and coverup in the Church—and the infamous Theodore Edgar McCarrick; the men created with Cardinal Bergoglio indelibly signed and marked ecclesiastical life in the first quarter of the 21st century.
Bergoglio served on several dicasteries of the Roman Curia—the Church’s central governing apparatus—as all cardinals do, but he did not spend a great deal of time in Rome and continued to live a simple, even Spartan, life in his native Argentina, in keeping with his Jesuit vow of poverty.
Bergoglio also took the place of Cardinal Edward Egan of New York as relator general of the X Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.
Scheduled for Sept. 30th-Oct. 27th, the Synod was to discuss the role of bishops as servants of the Gospel for the hope of the world. Cardinal Egan was slated to take the lead in outlining the Assembly’s major themes, coordinating the work of the Synod Fathers, and crafting the summary statements of their discussions’ work product before giving them to the pope as final proposals.
The September 11th terror attacks made it necessary for Egan to pass on the work for the Synod Assembly, and Bergoglio stepped in, performing by all accounts admirably in the role he took up on short notice and under excruciating circumstances.
Bergoglio’s other visite lampo to Rome must have made some impression on his brethren in the College as well, since the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires reportedly garnered significant votes in the 2005 conclave that eventually elected Joseph Ratzinger.
The prevailing narrative—there is no reason to doubt it—says it was Bergoglio’s stewardship of the 2007 Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council’s (CELAM) 5th General Conference that put him on the radar as a potential leader of the global Church. The CELAM General Conference took place in Aparecida, Brazil, and produced a programmatic brief—a sort of blueprint—for continental mission apt to put the Church across Latin America in form for evangelizing action in the 21st century. Bergoglio led the drafting committee.
The Aparecida Document, as the blueprint came to be known, quickly found an audience and generated interest beyond Latin America and the Caribbean. Churchmen on every continent discovered in the Aparecida Document not only a bold and insightful vision for spreading the Gospel, but one readily adaptable and applicable to their own peculiar ecclesiastical and socio-cultural circumstances.
The Aparecida Document also contained, in nuce, ideas that the man who would become Pope Francis eventually developed and applied in several of his most important teaching documents.
Pope Francis’s 2013 Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, made no bones about its indebtedness to Aparecida. Widely held to be the very best document of his pontificate, Evangelii gaudium cited the Aparecida Document only three times, but referenced it at a key point—paragraph 124—and included at least a half-dozen other references to the 5th General Conference of the CELAM, including Pope Benedict XVI’s address to participants and other documents produced by Conference committees.
In 2015, Pope Francis released his encyclical letter, Laudato si’, on human ecology and responsible care for “our common home” as he called it, to enormous and perduring fanfare. Treated as an “environmental encyclical” by news and other media in the secular mainstream, Laudato si’ was a practical pastoral application of a powerful strain of theological thought begun under Pope St. John Paul II and continued in earnest under Pope Benedict XVI.
Laudato si’ cited the Aparecida Document sparingly—only three times—but keen readers quickly saw how the encyclical drew heavily on the Aparecida Document for its plant and program, as well as for framing and articulating the stakes involved in humanity’s efforts to practice careful stewardship of the created order.
Pope Francis’s post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation of 2016, Amoris laetitia—a document that triggered protracted debate throughout the Church, generating far more heat than light—did much the same, drawing on the Aparecida Document to address challenges to the family in modern and contemporary life.
Feb. 11th – Mar. 13th, 2013
When Benedict XVI suddenly and unexpectedly renounced the papacy in February 2013, then-Cardinal Bergoglio drew on the Aparecida Document directly when he addressed the College gathered in General Congregation, delivering a speech that convinced his brethren he was the man for the hour.
“When the Church does not come out of herself to evangelize,” Bergoglio told the cardinals, “she becomes self-referential and then gets sick.”
“Thinking of the next pope,” Bergolgio said: “He must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the Church to go out to the existential peripheries, that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from “the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.”
A few days later, on March 13, 2013, on the second round of balloting in the afternoon of the conclave’s second day—the sixth round of voting, in all—the cardinals elected Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, who took the regnal name of Francis.
“Bergoglio?” said a colleague in the Vatican Radio newsroom where this journalist was manning a desk, as Cardinal Jean Louis Tauran pronounced the formula: Annuntio vobis Gaudium magnum: Habemus papam, eminentissimum dominum, dominum Georgium Marium, Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae cardinalem, Bergoglio, qui sibi nomen imposuit Franciscum. “A … Jesuit?” my colleague said, incredulous.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio had become Pope Francis.
The pope, himself
With his unassuming Buonasera!–“Good evening!”–from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on the night of his election, when he bowed his head and asked for the prayers of the faithful gathered in the square before giving his benediction, Francis began a precedent-shattering pontificate destined from the beginning to be a lightning rod for criticism.
The first nine years of Francis’s pontificate were shared by the “silent” presence of Benedict—a promised silence honored occasionally in the breach—about which one old Vatican hand once quipped to this journalist: “The Catholic Church has had no popes, two popes, even three popes, but never until now a pope-and-a-half.”
Francis, undaunted, rather leaned into the reality of his extraordinary circumstances.
Right from the get-go, Pope Francis was determined to stay out of Benedict’s shadow and to put his own distinctive mark on the office, to which he brought a kind and degree of personality not seen in modern times.
If his immediate predecessor seemed frequently to disappear into the office, Francis made sure to stand out. Whether it was his refusal of the red mozzetta on the loggia the evening of his election—one of the traditional trappings of papal office—or his permanent refusal to adopt the red slippers it has been the custom of popes to wear for centuries, or his preference for the Santa Marta guesthouse over the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace for his residence, Francis was always very much himself.
Much hay was made and much ink spilled over Francis’s choice of footwear, but Francis himself said he preferred the orthopedic shoes his cobbler had been crafting for him for decades and wouldn’t be changing style.
Similarly, Francis described his decision to remain in the Vatican hotel as one made in function of his need for company, rather than any compunction over the opulence of the Palace. “I chose to live here,” Francis told Antonio Spadaro SJ in an August 2013 interview—the first of many with his Jesuit confrère and advisor.
“The papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace is not luxurious,” Francis said, “[b]ut in the end it is like an inverted funnel. It is big and spacious, but the entrance is really tight. People can come only in dribs and drabs, and I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.”
Francis’s commitment to personal authenticity in the Ignatian mold and his quintessentially Ignatian understanding of the “charism of office” conspired to make it so that both proponents and critics—defenders and detractors—which he had more than enough, would always see in him what they wanted to see.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the treatment of what were almost certainly the five most quoted words of the Francis pontificate: “Who am I to judge?”
The rhetorical question made Pope Francis the darling of worldwide secular media and progressive Catholics. It also helped many conservative and traditional Catholics view him with suspicion. Really, it was a remark Francis made more in explanation of his own decisions than in defense of the man who occasioned the remark.
That man was Msgr. Battista Ricca, an Italian prelate with a less-than-stellar service jacket in the Holy See’s diplomatic corps, who had been appointed to a sensitive position inside the Institute for the Works of Religion (the IOR or “Vatican Bank” in shorthand).
Pope Francis took a quick look at Ricca’s record and decided to trust him even though the Apostolic Nuncio under whom Ricca had worked in Uruguay did not, owing to serial ambiguities in Ricca’s personal moral conduct that had made him a troublesome figure and a known quantity to the local police.
Ricca was not a test case for inclusivity or a harbinger of a coming revolution in the Church’s moral teaching. Ricca was a security risk. That was not a story in which very many people were terribly interested.
One thing this journalist recalls—and as I recall, it moved me deeply—was the radiant warmth with which Francis greeted the faithful of St. Anne’s church, the Vatican City parish, where he celebrated Mass on March 17th, not a week after his election. For well over fifteen minutes, Francis shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with people of every age and sex and race and state of life in the Church, never hurrying anyone along, never brushing anyone off, smiling broadly and happily throughout.
“[A] scene that plays out every Sunday at Catholic parishes across the world,” as John L. Allen Jr. described it for the National Catholic Reporter, “but one rarely sees a pope doing it.”
“It touched me,” said my old friend—my colleague then at Vatican Radio—Charles Collins of Crux, when we were recently discussing those heady days around Francis’s election.In a sense, Pope Francis was always hiding in plain sight, but the narratives were too attractive.
Diplomacy (by other means)
Pope Francis had significant achievements on the diplomatic front—and some setbacks, as well—but both his successes and his missteps defy easy qualification according to established categories.
The maverick pope did things very much his way, for good and for ill.
On Francis’s watch, for example, the US re-established relations with Cuba after more than half a century of interruption. Both sides credited the 2014 breakthrough not only to Vatican diplomats but to Pope Francis personally. Francis had written to US President Barack Obama and Cuba’s President Raúl Castro urging them to resolve “humanitarian issues” and offering to broker talks, which took place under the auspices of the Holy See’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
“I want to thank His Holiness, Pope Francis, whose moral example shows us the importance of pursuing the world as it should be, rather than simply settling for the world as it is,” Obama said on December 17, 2014, the day the news broke.
Early in 2016, Cuba hosted an historic meeting between Pope Francis and the spiritual leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. It was the first time the leaders of their respective Churches—the Catholic and the Russian Orthodox—had ever met. They met in the VIP lounge of Cuba’s José Martí International Airport, just outside Havana, and embraced. The clerics then made more history by signing a 30-point joint declaration pledging them to work for the healing of the rift that has separated much of the Christian East and West for a thousand years.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Pope Francis first intervened directly with Russia’s ambassador to the Holy See—a move widely seen at the time as a misstep—and then with Kirill in a conference call via Zoom, during which—as Francis told Italy’s Corriere della sera afterward—Kirill basically spent twenty minutes reading Kremlin talking points from a crib sheet.
“I listened,” Pope Francis said, “and told him: I don’t understand anything about this.” Francis also told Kirill: “Brother, we are not clerics of state, we must not use the language of politics but that of Jesus.”
“The Patriarch cannot transform himself into Putin’s altar boy,” Francis told the Corriere by way of explanation. Whether it was that statement alone to cost Pope Francis a second face-to-face meeting with Kirill—then scheduled for June 14, 2022, in Jerusalem—or whether Francis had already determined circumstances made the meeting impossible, is now something for historians to debate and perhaps elucidate. The episode showed nothing, if not that Pope Francis was a man who did not mind burning political capital.
In the workaday world of international diplomacy, the Holy See, on Pope Francis’s watch, established relations with Mauritania (2015), Myanmar (2017), and Oman (2023), and finalized diplomatic relations with Palestine (in 2015).
Pope Francis’s approach to international diplomacy defies easy—or really any—categorization, a fact illustrated by his approach to diplomatically delicate humanitarian crises like that of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
After establishing diplomatic relations with Myanmar, which had been run by a military dictatorship for decades and was at the time working in fits and starts to solidify a culture of democratic rule, Pope Francis visited the country. It was November 2017, and there was a major humanitarian crisis underway.
The Rohingya people—a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority in the overwhelmingly Buddhist country—had no legal citizenship in Myanmar and had long endured cruel treatment. In August 2017—just a few months before Pope Francis’s visit—violence against the Rohingya erupted on a massive scale in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, forcing hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee their homes.
Many trekked for days through dense jungle. Others undertook perilous voyages by sea in makeshift craft across the Bay of Bengal in efforts to reach Bangladesh. Many did both. Many perished.
Pope Francis condemned the violence and appealed for recognition of their rights.
In his Angelus address of Sunday, Aug. 27, 2017, Pope Francis decried “sad news of the religious persecution of our brother and sister Rohingya,” expressing his “closeness to them,” and asking that people everywhere pray “the Lord to save them, to arouse men and women of goodwill to help them, who give them full rights.”
The world waited to hear what Pope Francis would say—or not—when he visited Myanmar later that same year.
Pope Francis made meeting with Rohingya a condition of his travel, but he never mentioned the sorely tried people by name during his three-day visit to Myanmar from November 27-30, the first leg of an Apostolic journey that also took him to neighboring Bangladesh—where many of the Rohingya had fled. It was in Bangladesh, in fact, that Pope Francis met Rohingya refugees.
Pope Francis faced criticism in the press for his decision not to mention the Rohingya by name in Myanmar, but explained his decision to reporters during the in-flight presser en route to Rome at the end of his journey.
“I try to say things step by step and listen to the answers until the message arrives,” Pope Francis told reporters on the plane. “For [an] example [from] daily life,” he continued, “an adolescent boy or girl can say what they think, but slamming the door in the face of the other, the message doesn’t arrive—it closes.” One imagines a national leader is not flattered by comparison with a petulant teenager, but that’s how Pope Francis rolled.
“I would have been slamming the door,” had he used the name, Rohingya, Pope Francis also said. “I had the satisfaction of dialogue,” Francis said, “of letting the other speak, saying what I had to say, and in this way, the message arrived.”
There were other episodes during his pontificate—for example, when Pope Francis called Turkish efforts to exterminate Armenians in the aftermath of World War I a genocide—that showed Francis was not afraid to call a spade a spade or to put himself in hot water by doing so. Francis made that remark while visiting Armenia in June 2016.
It also bears mention that Pope Francis had already visited Türkiye in 2014 and had plans to visit the country again in 2025 to mark the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea with the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I of Constantinople, with whom Francis generally enjoyed cordial relations and close collaboration.
(To be perfectly frank, books have been written and more could—should—be written about the relationship of the two men, but there is not space for anything approaching a proper exploration of their friendship here.)
This journalist also recalls another episode from July 2020—the Covid Summer—when Hong Kong was in turmoil over efforts by the Communist government on China’s mainland to crush democracy and impose a harsh rule on the island in defiance of promises and treaty agreements.
On the morning of Sunday, July 5th, journalists on the Vatican beat heard from comms channels inside the Vatican, which suggested Pope Francis would use his traditional Sunday Angelus address to speak of the Hong Kong crisis. The noonday prayer of Marian devotion came and went, and the pope’s remarks bookended the prayer with it, and there was no mention of Hong Kong.
It seemed at the time that Pope Francis either made a last-minute judgment call of his own accord or else allowed someone to convince him not to mention Hong Kong, after all. One also may have wondered whether Francis wasn’t playing his cards cannily—perhaps too cleverly by half—counting on the benefit of the press corps’ collective “What the what?” without the cost of saying the thing that would rouse Chinese ire at a delicate moment.
Suffice these few examples to illustrate how much there is—and will be for many years—to unpack in Pope Francis’s legacy.
Opening doors, closing doors – ad intra and ad extra
Much will be said, as well—and rightly so—about Pope Francis’s other ecumenical and interreligious efforts and commitments, especially his 2020 encyclical letter, Fratelli tutti, on fraternity and social friendship—a powerfully challenging document chock-full of vintage Francis. His Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, jointly signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al Azhar (the Sunni Muslim world’s leading intellectual institution and highest legal authority), Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, on February 4th, 2019, is another.
Doubtless an extraordinary achievement of interreligious dialogue—one that served as the intellectual blueprint for the Abrahamic Family House, a unique structure that opened in 2023 in Abu Dhabi, UAE, which includes a synagogue, a church and a mosque—the Document and the Abrahamic Family House built to advance the vision of harmonious coexistence articulated in the historic 2019 Document remain highly controversial.
“The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings,” the Document declared. Some observers—especially though by no means exclusively on the Catholic side—never could wrap their heads around that notion as expressed, that is, without qualification.
Pope Francis, however, appeared happy to let people either criticize him for imprudence or decry him as a traitor to the Gospel or else elaborate an orthodox construction on their own.
Pope Francis the man was a figure of astounding complexity and deep mystery, at once disclosing and revealing himself in the myriad unscripted words and surprise decisions—some of them effecting seismic shifts, as Charles Collins of Crux aptly put it in relation to a 2025 letter rebuking the immigration policy of US President Donald Trump—not only in the pontificate but in the papal office.
Such marvels were almost commonplace throughout his pontificate.
Pope Francis, for example, ended one long-standing schism that divided several bishops in China from the Church of Rome, restoring communion broken in the wake of China’s Communist revolution in 1949. Francis also exacerbated relations with traditional Catholics, issuing a draconian fiat—Traditionis custodes—by which he erased a liberalizing measure of his immediate predecessor that for fourteen years had been slowly reintegrating traditional worship—and traditionalist worshippers—into the life of the Church.
The deal with China over the appointment of bishops was highly controversial and—the pope and the Vatican admitted as much—highly imperfect. The Vatican’s objectives were to repair the schism and, in the secular sphere, in essence to prevent systematic persecution of the Church and the faithful by a powerful and motivated post-industrial 21st-century totalitarian technological surveillance state.
This journalist recalls the emotion with which Pope Francis, during the 2018 Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, introduced the two Synod Fathers from China, Bishop John Baptist Yang Xiaoting of Yan’an, and Bishop Joseph Guo Jincai of Chengde.
“[F]or the first time, we have also with us two bishops from mainland China,” Pope Francis said. “We offer them our warm welcome,” he continued, “the communion of the entire episcopate with the Successor of Peter is yet more visible thanks to their presence.”
Whatever the judgment of history shall be on Pope Francis’s deal with the Chinese government, that moment happened.
Another salient example could be how Francis made enormous strides in ecumenical relations with the Coptic Orthodox Church, taking a bold step with enormous potential to influence the cause of Christian unity for the good. A little more than half a year later, Francis allowed the publication of a document that quickly set those relations back and strained others with large swathes of the universal Church.
In May 2023, Pope Francis enrolled in the Roman Martyrology the names of twenty-one Coptic Christians martyred in Libya in 2015, giving them a date on the Roman calendar of saints and allowing Catholics to honor them publicly in the Catholic liturgy each year on February 15th, the anniversary of their martyrdom in 2015 at the hands of terrorists belonging to the so-called Islamic State.
The Coptic Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria had already canonized the Martyrs of Libya. Almost immediately after their canonization, shrines and other celebrations and commemorations of the martyrs could be found in Catholic churches as well as Coptic and other Orthodox churches and Protestant communities around the globe, including in Rome.
Observers appreciated the care with which both men acted. Francis, in essence, merely recognized the juridical act of Pope Tawadros by which the martyrs were canonized. Pope Francis took his step with the explicit placet of Pope Tawadros and the vociferous approval of Coptic Catholics.
The document—Fiducia supplicans, on the blessing of couples in “irregular unions” including same-sex unions—quickly became nothing more than a careless white paper, but not before the Coptic Orthodox suspended ecumenical relations with Rome (later restored, but the damage was done). The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church refused to implement Fiducia supplicans, and a large contingent of African bishops rejected the document out of hand.
More broadly, Pope Francis preached “synodality” and a “healthy decentralization” of power in the Church, but governed autocratically and arguably did more to concentrate power in the person of the Roman pontiff than anyone in centuries to hold the office.
Pope Francis’s 2016 document overhauling the organization of women religious, Vultum Dei quaerere, and the 2018 instruction implementing the overhaul, Cor orans, are an example. They subjected religious houses and congregations—and the women in them—to more rigorous Vatican scrutiny and more direct Vatican control than ever previously countenanced.
Another is the series of changes Pope Francis made to Church law between 2016 and 2022, culminating in a new requirement: Diocesan bishops must now obtain “written license” from the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life—the curial department responsible for overseeing religious orders and congregations—before establishing new religious houses within their dioceses.In essence, Francis changed the law so local bishops need to ask permission from the Vatican—and obtain it in writing—before they exercise a governing power that is theirs and always has been.
Do as I say: Pope Francis between teaching and governing
More broadly, Pope Francis preached against a dour disposition but rarely smiled. He frequently decried meanness of spirit, gossip, and name-calling, and was also an inveterate master of invective who never forgot a slight—real or perceived—and preferred a “kitchen cabinet” coterie of unofficial and semi-official counselors to the persons he put in the Roman offices that existed for the purpose of advising him (and executing his decisions).
“Realities are greater than ideas,” was a keystone phrase in Pope Francis’s 2013 exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. It became one of the great refrains of his pontificate. Several of Francis’s reforms, however, appeared to have a vision of how he would like things to be as their guiding principle rather than a clear and clear-eyed view of how things really were.
Mitis iudex Dominus Iesus, the 2015 motu proprio reforming the canons governing marriage nullity trials and tribunals, is one example. In the reform law, Pope Francis made much of the need for bishops—who hold judicial authority theologically and canonically but usually delegate judicial power to trained experts in canon law, even when the bishop possesses the necessary training—to act as judges in a newly created “brief process” to be used in certain qualifying cases.
Mitis iudex also ordered that care be taken to keep trial costs low and even free of charge to the faithful.
Many dioceses have heavy backlogs of cases. A streamlined process could help with that. Bishops, however, are already busy men. Not all of them have the requisite training or experience even if they do have the paper. Also, lawyers—many of them lay persons these days—need to make a living, while competent psychological and other expertise as may be required during any given trial does not come cheap.
Implementation of the reforms has been difficult logistically, structurally, financially, as well as in terms of personnel and structure of judicial systems. Perhaps paradoxically, Italy has experienced significant difficulty implementing the changes, owing in no small part to the regional structure of its ecclesiastical tribunal system, for which the country received special provision in law.
Pope Francis as governor
Pope Francis inherited a dysfunctional central government in dire need of reform, a financial repair project only just begun, however painstakingly, and in need of both visionary energy and hard-nosed realism to see it through, and a full-blown crisis in the culture of the Church’s hierarchy that was desperately in need of renewal.
Pope Francis’s preferred mode of governance was personal rather than institutional.
Many observers—including this one—even found his approach to be anti-institutional, with his early preference being for direct involvement in the work of government on granular levels. “Hands-on” leadership was one way Francis’s style of governance was described, but in reality Francis preferred to govern without the benefit of his Curia.
For a while, that was perfectly understandable and even prudent—the Roman Curia was in shambles when Pope Francis came to the office—arguably even necessary. The last years of Pope St. John Paul II’s reign had seen the physically weak and sickly saint more and more removed from the day-to-day drudgery of government. Often, the sainted pontiff did not govern at all but left the machinery to his subalterns.
“When cat’s away, mice will play,” goes the old children’s rhyme. The dancing mice of the Roman Curia had themselves a ball and kept it going through the next pontificate. Benedict XVI’s reign saw such turmoil that even the cardinals themselves had worked themselves into an appetite for reform by the time it became their turn to elect Benedict’s successor.
It’s not that willingness to sidestep protocol and govern by force of personality cannot ever be a good thing. It can be indispensable in times of crisis. Governing by force of personality, however, requires more than a strong hand. It requires that the governed really trust the governor.
Pope Francis inherited a Vatican in circumstances intolerable and untenable. The cardinal electors chose him as the one to put things in order. Students of human nature and will tell you—rightly—that the choice of a man for any such or similar work is never universally informed by a belief in his capacity to carry it out, nor is it in every case motivated by the desire to see him succeed.
It is inevitable in any institution that some stakeholders should desire to see the man chosen for its leadership fail in his objectives. Envy and personal ambition, as well as distaste for the chosen leader’s modes and orders of government and principled opposition to his particular and determined ends, will all be found in some measure. When the leader’s work is not merely the government of a society but the reform of it, these and other motors of aversion and opposition will be greater in presence and more intense in activity.
Pope Francis was bound to encounter resistance, in short. Francis knew it. The cardinals knew it. Francis knew the cardinals knew it. The cardinals knew Francis knew it.
Almost before he even stood on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis faced the first fundamental choice of his pontificate: between swift, decisive action and slow, painstaking work for incremental change.
Pope Francis chose to do both.
Reforming the Roman Curia
Always a man who preferred informal channels and personal sources of information and counsel, Francis—who also came from a Jesuit leadership culture that practiced top-down decision making informed, theoretically, by broad consultation—created a semi-official Council of Cardinal Advisors exactly one month after his election. Francis tasked the eight men he put on it with drafting a new fundamental law for the whole Roman Curia.
When Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone stepped down as Secretary of State, Francis replaced him with then-Archbishop Pietro Parolin and added Parolin to the Council.
Everything was on the table. Everything was up for grabs. Nobody quite knew which departments would be folded into which others, which would be absorbed and which expanded, whose budget would be slashed, whose staff eliminated.
Everyone was on tenterhooks.
In his first Christmas address to the officers of the Roman Curia, Pope Francis implicitly criticized curial staffers. “People who work with competence, precision and self-sacrifice in the fulfilment of their daily duties,” are always needed, Francis said. Then, Francis chided his closest collaborators for their tendency to gossip. His remarks made something of a splash.
The next year, however, Pope Francis opened a broadside: A list of fifteen ills plaguing the Roman Curia and its officers, the diseases presenting the more seriously the higher one went in the ranks.
The very first ill Francis named was that of “thinking we are ‘immortal’, ‘immune or downright ‘indispensable’.” Curial officials are nothing if not subtle readers, but there was nothing subtle about that or any other part of Francis’s message that day.
“Brothers,” Francis said when he had concluded his list and description of the ills, “these diseases and these temptations are naturally a danger for each Christian and for every curia, community, congregation, parish and ecclesial movement; and they can strike at the individual and the community levels.”
The reform of the Curia was still six years off. Curial officials—high and low and middling—watched and waited and wondered what was coming. They received little in the way of guidance and less in the way of encouragement.
Reform, piecemeal
“Reform on the go,” Francis and his chief lieutenants sometimes called it. “Trial and error,” was another descriptor.
By 2017, Fr. Antonio Spadaro SJ—for much of Francis’s pontificate a close advisor, occasional mouthpiece, and reliable cheerleader—was proffering the idea that Francis’s piecemeal and scattershot approach to reform was in fact programmatic, i.e., that the “trial and error” was the program.
In an insightful talk little noted outside the Spanish-speaking world when Spadaro gave it in November of 2017, Spadaro described the Holy Father’s thought as “open and incomplete,” and his reform efforts as “based on the success-error dynamic,” which inevitably “destabilizes whoever seeks certainties,” insofar as “discernment is not based on human certainties, but on enabling the unfolding of God’s will in history.”
It was a line Spadaro had been honing for some time.
In November 2016—almost exactly a year before Spadaro gave the “open and incomplete” speech—Spadaro told RNS: “The way that Francis makes decisions is not to make plans and proposals, with big things to do here and little things there.”
“[Francis] understands what to do by walking along the way,” Spadaro told RNS. “So, it’s unpredictable, even for [Francis] himself,” Spadaro said. “[H]e is leading by opening processes,” Spadaro also said, noting as well how Francis “has no sense of hurrying at all because he knows the church is up to God.”
Buenos Aires-on-Tiber
People working in every department and at every level in the Roman Curia, along with leaders throughout the global Church and the faithful on every continent, were restless and growing impatient.
Work has always been slow and difficult in the Curia—basically, a very big and very old chancery that has existed in one form or another ever since the first time St. Peter looked to his left or his right and asked for someone to take a letter—but four years was a very long time to go with one’s head on a block.
Curial types—especially the workaday folks who actually did things—were understandably sore.
As 2017 drew to a close, this journalist predicted 2018 would likely be the year in which Pope Francis should have to decide whether “to use his immense talents, charisma, and strength of personality to harness and direct the energies of the Curia and the Church in a manner consistent with the best angels of her tradition, or whether he will continue to channel his efforts into a project that appears to have as its only overarching vision the remaking of Rome into a sort of Buenos Aires-on-Tiber.”
The new Apostolic Constitution reforming the structure of the Roman Curia, Praedicate Evangelium, would be another four years in coming.
From a mandate for reform to personal rule
When it finally appeared in 2022, the core concern with Praedicate Evangelium variously articulated by churchmen and observers across the spectrum of opinion in the Church was that it did not account for an ineluctable fact: The Roman Curia is and always must be a bureaucracy.
The Curia must therefore have the form and the controls suited to that type of institution. Pretending the Curia is or ever could be anything other than a bureaucracy is dangerous, at best, but that is what observers feared the new law would do.
Whether Francis gave the Church a central governing apparatus in form for action at the present moment in history and into the future is impossible to say with absolute certainty.
Along the way to reform of the bureaucracy, Francis dedicated himself to the spiritual care—the reform and conversion—of the bureaucrats themselves. They—the bureaucrats, high and low—privately bristled at the rough treatment Francis regularly gave them. Morale flagged and remained low even years after the paper reform came into effect.
The fact of the matter is that Francis preferred personal to institutional rule.
This preference gave him enormous personal freedom in an office traditionally bound by all sorts of guardrails, safeguards, dividers, and retainers. It unleashed enormous energy and allowed Francis to garner and keep enormous popular goodwill around the globe, bolstered by a friendly press and news media invested in the narrative of the maverick Jesuit reformer, unfiltered and unrestrained.
That narrative was never so much false as incomplete. There was a downside to it, little discussed because little observed, and understood even less, even by those who observed it.
Pope Francis was a master of the grand gesture, as evidenced by the iconic images that capture moments of his pontificate from beginning to end. He also practiced kindness and fellowship with great alacrity and diligence, making friends and keeping in touch with them throughout his pontificate, while also continuing to cultivate relationships of long standing with people from his former life.
Only a little of this side of Francis came before the broad public, but when it did it rightly engendered strong measures of admiration even among his critics.
As a governor, however, Pope Francis appeared frequently unable to get out of his own way.
A gathering storm
The crisis of clerical sexual abuse in the Church—and the leadership crisis of its coverup—had long since exploded into worldwide scandal. In 2018—a watershed year in Francis’s pontificate and in the life of the Church—the crisis and the scandal collided in the person of Pope Francis.
In his address of the crisis, Pope Francis started strong and enjoyed surprising goodwill.
Pope Francis created the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors in 2014, to great fanfare and such friendly media coverage as no pope had enjoyed in more than a decade.
By 2017, however, two founding members of the Commission had resigned in frustration over lateral resistance from curial departments and leading figures, chronic failures of organization, low funding, and little support beyond words from the top.
Several scandals of abuse and cover-up came through the years to touch Pope Francis very closely, as well, not only of minors but also of vulnerable adults.
Pope Francis appointed Bishop Juan Barros to the small see of Osorno, Chile. Francis made the appointment over and against the express reservations of the Chilean, and despite his knowing Barros was tainted by his relationship with then-Fr. Fernando Karadima (already convicted of abuse crimes by a Vatican canonical tribunal and sentenced to a life of penance, largely on the strength of testimony given by the very men Francis had accused of slander), at the time Chile’s most notorious abuser-priest.
Pope Francis would eventually laicize Karadima, but not before much else happened.
In Osorno and throughout Chile, months of resistance to the Barros appointment had soured relations between the Church and the people. Though the Vatican never said so publicly, Pope Francis’s 2018 visit to the country was in part to mend fences. While in Chile, however, Francis accused victim-advocates of slandering Barros and then doubled down on his accusation during the in-flight press conference on the return trip to Rome.
Faced with furious backlash and under intense press scrutiny, Pope Francis eventually ordered a full investigation of the Chilean Church, which uncovered a massive cover-up of rampant abuse. He apologized to the victims and to the victim-advocates he had accused of calumny, and he even secured resignations from the entire Chilean episcopal bench. Francis, however, only accepted a comparative handful of the resignations—and he staggered the ones he accepted.
Having created the conditions for a major house cleaning, Francis chose not to exploit the opportunity fully.
The story of Bishop Juan Barros was the first crisis to explode into worldwide scandal on Pope Francis’s watch, but it would not be the last.
Later in 2018, Pope Francis secured the resignation of Theodore Edgar “Uncle Ted” McCarrick from the College of Cardinals after the Archdiocese of New York announced McCarrick had been credibly accused of abusing a minor. The senior leadership of the Church in the United States asked Pope Francis to investigate the entire hierarchy, in which McCarrick had wielded considerable influence as a money-raiser and power broker for decades.
Francis refused, preferring to conduct an internal investigation of McCarrick’s whole career that culminated in a report criticized for its opaque methodology and incomplete conclusions. In the meantime, McCarrick had been found guilty of abuse and laicized.
In late February 2019, Church leaders gathered in Rome at Pope Francis’s behest for a four-day meeting—the first of its kind—on child protection. Some months later, Francis issued Vos estis lux mundi, a sweeping reform law that—on paper, at least—streamlined the process of investigation and prosecution of abuse and cover-up crimes.
A potentially powerful tool for uprooting entrenched corruption, punishing malfeasance, and repairing a broken leadership culture, Vos estis appears to have been used only very sparingly. In any case, Pope Francis did not use the law regularly or transparently.
Zanchetta, Rupnik, Ricard
A mere list of the other abuse and cover-up scandals directly involving Pope Francis would run to some considerable length, while even a mere rehearsal of their contours would be prohibitively lengthy.
L’Affaires Zanchetta and Rupnik are two cases requiring at least some mention, as well as the case of Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard.
Pope Francis heard allegations against Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, appointed by Francis to the diocese of Orán in Francis’s native Argentina in 2013, of serious ambiguities in his sexual behavior, backed by evidence in the form of pornographic images discovered on Zanchetta’s cell phone. The first set of allegations reached Francis no later than 2015. Francis summoned Zanchetta and his accuser to Rome, where Zanchetta “defended himself well,” according to Francis, so Francis let him return to Argentina in peaceful possession of his see.
More allegations reached Pope Francis, who eventually had Zanchetta resign for “health reasons” and sent him for psychological evaluation, after which Francis created the job of “assessor” for Zanchetta inside the Holy See’s sovereign asset manager, APSA.
The public scandal of the Zanchetta business unfolded largely between 2019 and 2022.
Zanchetta would eventually be tried and convicted in Argentinian criminal court and sentenced to more than four years in prison for continuous aggravated sexual abuse perpetrated against two of his seminarians. The Vatican under Francis never disclosed the results of its own investigation into the Zanchetta matter, nor did the Vatican say whether Zanchetta ever faced canonical trial for his misdeeds.
Even more serious than the Zanchetta Affair is the ongoing scandal of the disgraced former celebrity artist-priest and olim Jesuit, Marko Rupnik, accused of sexually, psychologically, and spiritually abusing dozens of victims—most of them women religious—over a period spanning several decades, much of which he spent in Rome.
Rupnik has never been tried for his alleged crimes of abuse, even though the Jesuits and Vatican investigators compiled mountainous evidence and Vatican prosecutors believed there was a case against him, because the Vatican department responsible for bringing the case to trial decided not to waive the statute of limitations.
A secret Vatican tribunal did find Rupnik guilty, in 2020, of “absolving an accomplice in a sin against the Sixth Commandment”—technical language describing a cleric who absolves someone with whom he had some sort of sexual liaison—and ratified the excommunication Rupnik incurred when he committed that crime. The excommunication was lifted almost as soon as it was imposed.
Why that case proceeded to trial and a guilty verdict, while the others did not, remains a mystery.
The Jesuits expelled Rupnik for disobedience, not for his alleged serial depredations, but Rupnik found a bishop in his native Slovenia willing to take him on. When news of that development reached the public, it sparked incandescent global outrage. Pope Francis ordered Rupnik’s case reopened, but Francis died before any conclusion was reached.
Marko Rupnik is still a priest in good standing.
Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard was once the Archbishop of Bordeaux and had been a powerful member of several Roman dicasteries. Ricard was the man Pope Francis chose— in February of 2022—to investigate the Foyers de Charité, after it emerged that one of the Foyers’ co-founders, André Marie Van Der Borght, was an abuser. Ricard resigned the post “for health reasons” in mid-March of that same year, after only a few weeks in the job.
The Vatican imposed some restrictions on Ricard’s ministry sometime in the Spring of 2023, after Ricard admitted to molesting a fourteen-year-old girl, but did not inform the public. The French La Croix published the news in September 2023, shortly after Pope Francis returned from a visit to the French port city of Marseilles.
Ricard, a self-confessed child molester, nevertheless remained a cleric despite his admission and even kept his red hat.
When the Ricard business came before the public in September 2023, it drew a pointed and direct rebuke of Pope Francis from Cardinal Séan Patrick O’Malley OFM Cap., the head of the pope’s own Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (by then occasionally styling itself in some correspondence as The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors and Vulnerable Persons).
Formerly the Archbishop of Boston, O’Malley is now past 80 years of age and emeritus, though he was still serving as head of the PCIM when Pope Francis died.
“Recent publicly reported cases point to tragically harmful deficiencies in the norms intended to punish abusers and hold accountable those whose duty is to address wrongdoing,” the PCIM stated in an unprecedented Call to Action issued in the wake of the Ricard revelations.
“We are long overdue in fixing the flaws in procedures that leave victims wounded and in the dark both during and after cases have been decided,” the PCIM said.
Just one day before Pope Francis entered hospital for the first stay of what would be his last illness, another bishop—another Argentinian associate of Pope Francis—Bishop Carlos María Domínguez of San Rafael resigned his office for unspecified “reasons of a personal nature” on February 13th, 2025.
Less than a week later, local news outlets began reporting multiple allegations of sexual misconduct from at least three different victims as the driver of Dominguez’s resignation.
Pope Francis did not create the crisis of clerical sexual abuse and misconduct. It will be up to historians to determine what role he had in its alleviation and exacerbation.
Two things, however, are certain. One is that the deep institutional and cultural roots of the crisis were laid bare on Francis’s watch. Another is that Francis, despite full-throated promises and some promising efforts, did not repair the institutional credibility gap between governors and the governed in the Church or the world.
Reform, interrupted
Another area to which Pope Francis turned himself was financial reform, a need for which had been apparent for decades. Vatican finances were part and parcel of the generally disarrayed circumstances Pope Francis inherited. It was, therefore, an implicit part of the core reform mandate he received from his erstwhile brethren in the College of Cardinals.
Pope Francis’s work to reform Vatican financial structure, operations, and culture began well. He harnessed momentum from groundwork and significant progress already made under his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Francis gave a broad mandate—with sweeping powers—to Cardinal George Pell.
Almost before Pell was able to begin his work, however, Pope Francis began to rein him in. When Pell clashed with men of the Old Guard, the pope rarely sided with Pell. The result was that Pell had his wings clipped. Pope Francis allowed his hand-picked reform agent to be thwarted and pushed to the margins, years before Pell returned to his native Australia to face trial on spurious sexual abuse charges (of which Pell would at last be acquitted by Australia’s highest court).
Pope Francis eventually replaced Pell with a priest, Fr. Juan Antonio Guerrero Alves SJ, who kept his priestly clerical rank, making it unnecessary for those in other leadership positions who outranked him—practically everyone—even to make a show of resistance to him. They could safely ignore him. The Franciscan chapter of the Vatican’s financial reform efforts was over, and the reform itself was dead in the water.
It later emerged that Fr. Guerrero—who, it happens, had resigned “for health reasons” in November 2022—was involved in the gruesome Rupnik business. Guerrero was Rupnik’s superior from 2017 until the end of 2019, when—by the Jesuits’ own reconstruction of the Rupnik timeline—there were restrictions imposed on Rupnik. Guerrero either narrowly interpreted those restrictions or applied them with laxity sufficient to allow Rupnik liberty of movement and activity in unlikely kinds and degrees.
The Pope of the grand gesture
Hailed as “the world’s parish priest” from the earliest days of his reign, Francis seemed intuitively to understand—and uncannily adroit at letting himself speak through—the power of images.
From the first time he washed the feet of prison inmates, to his sipping the maté offered him by a pilgrim in St. Peter’s Square, to his embrace of 53-year-old Vinicio Riva—a man disfigured by the neurofibromatosis (von Recklinghausen’s disease) from which he suffered—at his weekly General Audience, Francis found ways to share powerfully moving stories in living pictures.
Perhaps the most iconic images of a pontificate profuse with them were those of Pope Francis during the coronavirus pandemic.
One was of Pope Francis on pilgrimage between the icon of Our Lady Salus populi Romani in the Basilica of St. Mary Major on the Hill and the Basilica of Pope St. Marcellus I, where he venerated the crucifix carried through the city in 1522—in despite of objections raised by Rome’s ecclesiastical governors—by the faithful, who implored divine mercy and prayed for an end to the plague then ravaging the city.
The other was of Pope Francis ascending the broad steps leading to St. Peter’s Basilica, and later that evening of March 27, 2020, giving Eucharistic benediction to the city and the world.
His spur-of-the-moment jaunts into Roman streets kept his minders on their toes, and his “Mercy Friday” visits during the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy brought genuine joy to great numbers of Rome’s least fortunate.
In a thousand ways, to millions of people around the globe, Pope Francis showed the power of gestures to move hearts. The grand gesture is a powerful tool and especially useful in times of crisis. Pope Francis was a master of the grand gesture.
A personal coda: The Jesuit pope
As a journalist who believes in the watchdog function of the fourth estate and tries to practice his profession a manner tolerably consistent with his professional commitments, it has always been with the pope as governor of the Church that I have been primarily concerned.
St. Ignatius Loyola—the closest this gratefully Jesuit-educated scribbler may have to a spiritual father—desired the fellows of his Society at once to be utterly stalwart “pope’s men” and also utterly intrepid pastoral and theological operators.
Absolute and wholehearted devotion to the Petrine office was—is—the tether that maintains Jesuits connected to the universal Church as they seek God in all things and bring him to all people in every place, especially those where there is no local Church (or frequently any other structure) on which to rely.
Francis—a Jesuit at the head of the Church’s hierarchical leadership—was constantly at risk of either collapsing or exploding that fundamental Ignatian spiritual tension.
In short, Pope Francis understood notionally that he could not govern the universal Church as though it were his religious province, but frequently did attempt to govern both the Roman curia and the world’s bishops and faithful as though he were still a Jesuit superior and they his personal Jesuit assistancy.
History will judge how well Pope Francis managed the impossible burden of office he carried, but the man born to the world Jorge Mario Bergoglio contained multitudes. He dedicated himself with singular devotion to the service of God and the upbuilding of God’s Church according to light as God gave him to see.
Entrusting him to the Father of Mercies is a duty of all the baptized and indeed of every woman and man of good will, one as ought to come easily and almost naturally, under the gentle yoke of grace and our sense of fellowship.
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