Pope Francis

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope Francis stepped onto the balcony of Saint Peter's Basilica in March 2013 and greeted the crowd with one plain Italian word, "Buonasera", which means good evening. Moments later he described himself as a pope who had come almost from the end of the world. The speaker was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a son of Buenos Aires. He was the first Jesuit and the first Latin American to lead the Catholic Church. Few in the square knew much about his life before that evening. What shaped him in his early years? Why does his conduct under Argentina's military dictatorship still divide the people who knew him? And once he held power in Rome, what did he change, and where did his own judgment fail?

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• 2. From Flores to the Jesuits

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  Flores, a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, is where Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on the 17th of December 1936. He was the eldest of five children. His father, Mario José Bergoglio, was an accountant who had emigrated from Piedmont in Italy. His mother, Regina María Sívori, was a housewife born in Buenos Aires to a family of northern Italian origin. The other children were Oscar Adrián, Marta Regina, Alberto Horacio and María Elena. The family had left Italy in 1929 to escape the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini. According to María Elena, his only surviving sibling, money was not the reason for the move.

  In the sixth grade, Bergoglio attended a Salesian school in Ramos Mejía. There a Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest named Stefan Czmil became his mentor. The boy often rose hours before his classmates to serve the Divine Liturgy for Czmil. He went on to a technical secondary school and graduated with a chemical technician's diploma. For several years he worked in the food section of the Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory, under Esther Ballestrino. Before that job he had worked as a bouncer and as a janitor.

  At 21, Bergoglio survived life-threatening pneumonia and three cysts, and part of one lung was removed. Around the time he was choosing a path, he was on his way to celebrate Spring Day when he stopped at a church for confession. He came away inspired by the priest he met there. He studied at the Inmaculada Concepción Seminary in Villa Devoto, and after three years he entered the Society of Jesus as a novice on the 11th of March 1958. He later admitted that as a young seminarian he had a crush on a girl and briefly doubted his calling.

  Santiago, Chile, was where the novice studied the humanities. On the 12th of March 1960 he made his religious profession, taking the perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. That year he also earned a licentiate in philosophy from the Colegio Máximo de San José. He taught literature and psychology at a high school in Santa Fe in 1964 and 1965. In 1966 he taught the same subjects at Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires.

  In 1967 Bergoglio began his theological studies. Archbishop Ramón José Castellano ordained him a priest on the 13th of December 1969. He then served as master of novices for the province and became a professor of theology. His final stage of Jesuit training, called tertianship, took place at Alcalá de Henares in Spain. On the 22nd of April 1973 he took his final vows, including a fourth vow of obedience to the pope on matters of mission.

  July 1973 brought a heavy responsibility. Bergoglio became provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina for a six-year term that ended in 1979. That same year he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War cut his stay short. In 1980 he spent the first three months at the Milltown Institute in Dublin to learn English. He then became rector of the faculty at San Miguel, where he had once been a student.

  Peter Hans Kolvenbach, the Jesuit superior-general, replaced him at San Miguel in 1986. The order was moving worldwide toward an emphasis on social justice, and Bergoglio stressed popular religiosity and direct pastoral work. He spent several months at the Sankt Georgen graduate school in Frankfurt, weighing dissertation topics. He settled on the work of the German-Italian theologian Romano Guardini, especially a study of "Contrast" published in 1925 as Der Gegensatz. He never completed the degree, and he returned to Argentina earlier than planned to serve as confessor and spiritual director to the Jesuit community in Córdoba.

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• 3. The Slum Bishop

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  On the 27th of June 1992, Bergoglio was consecrated titular bishop of Auca, with Cardinal Antonio Quarracino as principal consecrator. He chose a motto from a homily by Saint Bede on the Gospel of Matthew: Miserando atque eligendo. It means that he saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him. The same year, Jesuit authorities asked him not to live in Jesuit residences. They cited tensions with leaders and scholars, concerns about his dissent and his views on orthodoxy, and his opposition to liberation theology. His new role as auxiliary bishop was also a factor.

  Quarracino's death on the 28th of February 1998 made Bergoglio the archbishop of Buenos Aires. He had been named coadjutor archbishop on the 3rd of June 1997, which put him in line to succeed. The shantytowns of the city, known as villas miseria, became a major focus. The number of priests assigned to them doubled under his leadership, and he visited them himself. People began calling him the "villero bishop", sometimes translated as the "slum bishop".

  Money was another early concern. Bergoglio sold the archdiocese's bank shares and moved its accounts to regular international banks. The church's high spending had nearly led to bankruptcy, and the move brought stricter fiscal discipline. On the 6th of November 1998 he was also named Ordinary for Eastern Catholics in Argentina, who had no prelate of their own church. When he was elected pope, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church said Bergoglio had understood his church's liturgy, rites and spirituality. In 2000 Bergoglio was the only church official to reconcile with Jerónimo Podestá. Podestá was a former bishop suspended as a priest after opposing the Argentine Revolution military dictatorship in 1972. Bergoglio also defended Podestá's wife against Vatican attacks on their marriage.

  Bergoglio regularly celebrated the Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual in jails, hospitals, retirement homes and slums. In 2007, shortly after Benedict XVI introduced new rules for older liturgical forms, he set up a weekly Mass in the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite. On the 8th of November 2005 he was elected president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference for three years. He was re-elected on the 11th of November 2008. When he turned 75 in December 2011, he submitted his resignation to Benedict XVI, as canon law requires. No coadjutor was waiting, so he stayed in office. As a bishop he was no longer subject to a Jesuit superior, and he stopped visiting Jesuit houses. He lived in what was described as "virtual estrangement from the Jesuits" until after his election as pope.

  On the 21st of February 2001, Pope John Paul II made him a cardinal, with the title of cardinal priest of San Roberto Bellarmino. He was installed there on the 14th of October. He received five administrative posts in the Roman Curia, including a seat on the Congregation for the Clergy and the Pontifical Council for the Family. Later that year, after the September 11 attacks, Cardinal Edward Egan returned to New York. Bergoglio replaced him as recording secretary of the Synod of Bishops. According to the Catholic Herald, he created "a favourable impression as a man open to communion and dialogue".

  Cardinal Bergoglio lived in a small apartment rather than the elegant bishop's residence. He rode public transportation and cooked his own meals. He limited his time in Rome to what he called "lightning visits". After John Paul II died on the 2nd of April 2005, he was considered one of the papabile, the men thought likely to succeed. The Italian magazine Limes later published claims from a diary said to belong to an anonymous cardinal. It said Bergoglio had won 40 votes on the third ballot and then fell to 26 on the fourth, as Cardinal Ratzinger prevailed. The journalist Andrea Tornielli noted that no Latin American candidate had received such a total before. La Stampa reported that Bergoglio made an emotional plea that the cardinals not vote for him. Tornielli said he wanted to stop the conclave from dragging on. Years later Bergoglio told Cardinal Francesco Marchisano that, had he been elected in 2005, he would have called himself John, after the pope known as the Good Pope.

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• 4. Argentina's Hard Questions

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  In 1976 the Argentine Navy kidnapped two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics. After being tortured in captivity, the two were found alive months later outside Buenos Aires, drugged and partly unclothed. Bergoglio, then their Jesuit superior, is widely reported to have failed to protect them. He is also reported to have dismissed them from the Society of Jesus days before their arrest. In 2005 the human rights lawyer Myriam Bregman filed a criminal complaint accusing him of involvement. It was eventually dismissed, but the debate continued.

  Yorio said in a 1999 interview that he believed Bergoglio did nothing "to free us, in fact just the opposite". Two days after Bergoglio became pope, Jalics issued a statement that blamed a former lay colleague. That man had become a guerrilla, was captured, and named the two priests under interrogation. A week later Jalics clarified: "It is wrong to assert that our capture took place at the initiative of Father Bergoglio... Orlando Yorio and I were not denounced by Father Bergoglio." Bergoglio told his authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin, that he worked behind the scenes for their release. He said he had approached the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, and that this may have saved their lives. He also said he had sheltered people on church property and once gave his own identity papers to a man who resembled him, so that the man could flee Argentina.

  Alicia Oliveira, a former judge, described Bergoglio during those years as anguished and very critical of the dictatorship. She urged him to speak out, and he told her he could not. The Nobel laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel said: "Bergoglio was no accomplice of the dictatorship." Graciela Fernández Meijide of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights said she received hundreds of testimonies during the dictatorship and none mentioned Bergoglio. Ricardo Lorenzetti, president of the Argentine Supreme Court, called him "completely innocent". The historian Uki Goñi observed that the junta still had a good image in early 1976. The scale of the repression was not known until much later. In 2000, Bergoglio said the Argentine church needed "to put on garments of public penance for the sins committed during the years of the dictatorship". As head of the bishops' conference he later issued a collective apology for the church's failure to protect people from the junta.

  Fernando de la Rúa replaced Carlos Menem as president in 1999, in the middle of an economic depression. The Catholic Church criticized austerity measures that deepened poverty, and the president asked it to help bring economic and political leaders into dialogue. He claimed to have spoken with Bergoglio. Bergoglio reportedly said a meeting had been canceled by a misunderstanding. During the riots of December 2001, he asked the Ministry of the Interior to make the police distinguish rioters from peaceful protesters.

  President Néstor Kirchner attended Bergoglio's cathedral Mass for the national holiday in 2004 and heard a request for more political dialogue and less intolerance. The next year Kirchner celebrated the day elsewhere, and the cathedral Mass was suspended. In 2006 Bergoglio helped fellow Jesuit Joaquín Piña win elections in Misiones Province and block an amendment that would have allowed indefinite re-election. Kirchner regarded him as a political rival until Kirchner died in 2010. Relations with his widow and successor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, were also tense. Her government read his 2008 call for national reconciliation as support for anti-government demonstrators, and the campaign for same-sex marriage strained matters further.

  When Bergoglio became pope, Cristina Kirchner took more than an hour to congratulate him, and only in passing during a routine speech. The analyst Claudio Fantini later called her change of attitude, as his popularity grew, a "Copernican shift". On the day before his inauguration she met him privately, exchanged gifts and lunched with him. The pro-government newspaper Página 12 then removed its controversial articles about him from its website. Javier Milei called Francis an "imbecile" and a "communist turd" before winning the presidency in 2023. After taking office, Milei softened his tone and formally invited the pope to Argentina. He visited the Vatican on the 11th of February 2024, the day Francis canonized María Antonia de Paz y Figueroa, the first female Argentine saint.

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• 5. A Different Kind of Pope

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  The second day of the 2013 conclave ended on the 13th of March, when Bergoglio was elected on the fifth ballot. Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the protodeacon, announced it with the words Habemus papam. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn later recalled two signs. One was confidential and happened in the conclave. The other came from a Latin-American couple, friends of his at the Vatican, who whispered Bergoglio's name in his ear. Schönborn said: "if these people say Bergoglio, that's an indication of the Holy Spirit". Francis received his cardinals' congratulations standing rather than seated on the papal throne. On the balcony he wore a plain white cassock instead of the red, ermine-trimmed mozzetta of earlier popes. He kept the iron pectoral cross from his years in Buenos Aires instead of the gold one his predecessors wore. His first act was the Urbi et Orbi blessing for the pilgrims gathered below. Before it, he asked them to pray for Benedict XVI, whom he called the "bishop emeritus of Rome", and for himself as the new "bishop of Rome".

  Many media outlets called him the first non-European pope. In fact he was the 11th, and the previous one, Gregory III of Syria, died in 741. Francis was also the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere. His father and maternal grandparents came from northern Italy, so he was ethnically European.

  At his first audience, on the 16th of March 2013, Francis explained his name. He had chosen it in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi because of his concern for the poor. As the votes were adding up, the Brazilian Cardinal Cláudio Hummes had embraced him and whispered, "Don't forget the poor". Bergoglio had long admired the saint: "He brought to Christianity an idea of poverty against the luxury, pride, vanity of the civil and ecclesiastical powers of the time. He changed history." No pope had been called Francis before. The Vatican clarified that the name carried no number, so he was not "Francis I" unless a Francis II should follow. It was the first time since Lando in 913-914 that a pope took a name no predecessor had used. Some electors had jokingly proposed Adrian, after a reformer pope, or Clement, to settle the score with Clement XIV, who had suppressed the Jesuit order.

  On the night of his election, Francis took a bus back to his hotel with the cardinals instead of riding in the papal car. The next day he visited Cardinal Jorge María Mejía in the hospital and chatted with patients and staff. He met the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel standing, although a chair was provided, and returned to the Domus Sanctae Marthae guesthouse on a minivan. He went to collect his belongings from the guesthouse where he had stayed during the conclave and insisted on paying the bill. His inauguration took place on the 19th of March 2013 in Saint Peter's Square, on the Solemnity of Saint Joseph.

  Domus Sanctae Marthae became his home. Francis declined the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace and received visitors in a suite there. No pope since Pius X had lived outside the apartments. His piscatory ring was silver rather than gold. He still appeared at the palace window for the Sunday Angelus. Besides his native Spanish, he spoke fluent Italian and German. He was conversant in Latin, French, Portuguese and English, and he understood Piedmontese and some Genoese Ligurian. For his first Easter address the Vatican had prepared greetings in 65 languages. He chose not to read them, since he felt at ease in Italian.

  Francis spoke often against "clericalism", which dwells on priestly status and authority. He said the church's shepherds should have the "smell of the sheep". On his first Holy Thursday as pope he went to the Casal del Marmo detention facility in Rome. There he washed and kissed the feet of ten male and two female juvenile offenders. No pope had included women in the ritual before, though he had done so as archbishop. One of the boys and one of the girls were Muslim.

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• 6. Reforming Rome

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  Several million euros in bonuses, paid to Vatican employees whenever a new pope was elected, were abolished by Francis. He gave the money to charity instead. He also ended a €25,000 annual bonus for cardinals who served on the Board of Supervisors of the Vatican bank. On the 13th of April 2013, he named eight cardinals to a Council of Cardinal Advisers to help revise the organization of the Roman Curia. The group included several known critics of Vatican operations and only one member of the Curia.

  The Institute for the Works of Religion, informally the Vatican Bank, had long faced allegations of corruption and money laundering. In Francis's first months it promised greater transparency. He appointed a commission to advise him on reform, and the firm Promontory Financial Group investigated all customer contacts. In January 2014 he replaced four of the five cardinal overseers whom Benedict XVI had confirmed in his last days. Ernst von Freyberg was put in charge. The monitoring body Moneyval felt more reform was needed, and Francis showed some willingness to close the bank if reforms proved too difficult. He said he was determined to end corruption but was not very optimistic, because it was a human problem dating back centuries. On the 1st of June 2021 he issued Pascite gregem Dei, which strengthened penalties in Vatican law for sexual abuse and financial crimes.

  Francis created 163 cardinals from 76 countries across ten consistories. His first consistory, in February 2014, was a rare occasion on which he appeared publicly with Benedict XVI. After the 2024 consistory, 110 cardinals appointed by Francis were young enough to vote in a conclave. Only 24 created by Benedict XVI and six created by John Paul II were still eligible. He chose many cardinals from developing countries, some among the world's poorest. He named fewer Curia officials and dropped the custom of always making certain prominent archbishops, such as the Patriarch of Venice and the Archbishop of Milan, cardinals. Where Benedict preferred academically inclined churchmen, Francis favored those with a pastoral focus on the poor and marginalized.

  In January 2014, Francis announced he would appoint fewer monsignors. He would give only the lowest of the three remaining ranks, chaplain of His Holiness, and only to diocesan priests aged 65 or older. As archbishop he had never sought the title for any of his priests. He is believed to have linked it with clerical careerism.

  Francis oversaw synods on the family in 2014, on youth in 2018, and on the Amazon region in 2019. In 2019 his apostolic constitution Episcopalis communio allowed a synod's final document to become magisterial teaching with his approval alone. It also let laypeople send input directly to the synod's secretary general. On the 4th of October 2023 he convened the opening of the Synod on Synodality. Some described it as the culmination of his papacy and among the most important events in the church since the Second Vatican Council. He called for decentralization away from Rome and made women full members of the church's dicasteries.

  He categorically rejected ordaining women as priests. In 2016 he created a Study Commission on the Women's Diaconate to examine female deacons in early Christianity. Its report was not published, and in 2019 he said it had reached no consensus. In April 2020 he named a new commission led by Cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi. In interviews in late 2023 and 2024 he appeared to reject women deacons, saying that "holy orders is reserved for men." In January 2021 his document Spiritus Domini allowed bishops to install women as acolytes and lectors. The next month he appointed Nathalie Becquart of the Xaviere Missionary Sisters as co-undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops. He also named the magistrate Catia Summaria as the first woman Promoter of Justice in the Vatican's Court of Appeals. In April 2023 he announced that 35 women, just over 10 percent of the voters, could vote at the Synod of Bishops assembly. It was the first time women could vote at any such synod.

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• 7. Abuse and Apology

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  In 2010, then-Cardinal Bergoglio commissioned a study concluding that Father Julio César Grassi was innocent. Grassi was a priest convicted of child sexual abuse. The study said his victims were lying and the case should never have gone to trial. The Supreme Court of Argentina upheld the conviction and prison sentence in March 2017.

  Mauro Inzoli, an Italian priest accused of child sexual abuse, gave Francis an early test as pope. A church tribunal ruled that Inzoli should be defrocked, and Benedict XVI did so in 2012. Francis reversed that decision in 2014 and ordered Inzoli to withdraw from public ministry to a life of prayer. Inzoli was convicted in an Italian civil court in 2016 and sentenced to prison. In September 2017 Francis told the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors: "I did not understand these things well and chose the more benevolent of the two sentences but after two years the priest had a relapse. I learned from this." He added that the church had "arrived late" in dealing with such cases.

  In 2015 Francis supported Juan Barros, a Chilean bishop accused of covering up abuse cases. By 2018 he acknowledged "grave errors" in judgment, apologized to the victims and launched an investigation. It led to the resignations of three Chilean bishops: Barros, Gonzalo Duarte and Cristián Caro.

  Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington, was defrocked by Francis in 2019. He had kept a prominent position for decades despite reports of misconduct dating to the 1980s. After renewed allegations in 2017, Francis ordered an investigation, which found that McCarrick had molested adults and minors. McCarrick resigned from the College of Cardinals in July 2018. In November 2020 Francis authorized release of the two-year report. It largely faulted John Paul II, who appointed McCarrick archbishop in 2000. It also found that Benedict XVI's informal restrictions on him were never enforced. The report concluded that Francis, before 2017, had heard only of allegations about adults.

  In February 2019 Francis acknowledged that priests and bishops had been sexually abusing religious sisters. That month he convened a summit on clergy abuse organized by Hans Zollner. Some survivors were disappointed that it produced no concrete rules. On the 9th of May 2019 he issued Vos estis lux mundi, which set reporting duties for bishops. In December 2019 he abolished "pontifical secrecy" in abuse cases, so bishops did not need Vatican permission to hand over trial materials on request. Victim advocates praised the change, though it did not require churches to hand over documents on their own. In November 2021 he thanked journalists for uncovering abuse and "helping us not to sweep it under the carpet". He visited Ireland in 2018, the first papal tour of the country since John Paul II's visit in 1979, and apologized there and for abuses in the United States.

  Criticism continued. In November 2022 Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard of France admitted abusing a 14-year-old girl in the 1980s. Francis condemned abuse but did not strip Ricard of his cardinal's status. The case of the Slovenian priest Marko Rupnik, accused of psychological, spiritual and sexual abuse of women including nuns, drew heavy controversy. The doctrinal office first declined to prosecute, citing the statute of limitations. After public outcry, Francis ordered the case reopened. In January 2025 Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández confirmed work on an independent tribunal.

  In July 2022 Francis traveled to Canada to confront another failure. Earlier that year he had expressed "shame and sorrow" over the church's role in abuses against Indigenous peoples. Near the former Ermineskin Indian Residential School, where a search for unmarked graves had taken place, he said: "I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples." He called the Canadian church's role a "cultural genocide" and condemned projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation. He visited the Ermineskin Cree Nation's cemetery at Maskwacis and promised a serious investigation into the history of abuse.

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• 8. Mercy and the World

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  Cardinal Walter Kasper once called mercy the key word of the Francis papacy. In April 2015 the papal bull Misericordiae Vultus proclaimed a Jubilee Year of Mercy, which ran from the 8th of December 2015 to the 20th of November 2016. Holy Doors opened in the major basilicas of Rome, and "Doors of Mercy" opened in cathedrals worldwide. "Missionaries of Mercy" were priests who could forgive even severe sins normally reserved to the Holy See. Francis kept the church's teaching against abortion but spoke of an "obsession" among some Catholics with a few issues. He said they "do not show the heart of the message of Jesus Christ". At the year's end he created the World Day of the Poor.

  Francis published a long list of writings. Evangelii gaudium, issued on the 24th of November 2013, was described by him as the programme of his papacy. Laudato si' in 2015 was his first own encyclical, on care for the planet. Amoris laetitia, on love within the family, came on the 8th of April 2016. At the end of that year four cardinals formally asked him to clarify whether divorced and civilly remarried Catholics may receive communion. Fratelli tutti followed on the 4th of October 2020, on fraternity and social friendship. In October 2023 Laudate Deum urged decisive action on the climate crisis and condemned climate change denial. In 2019 he said ecocide was a sin and should be a "fifth category of crimes against peace". After a climate summit in May 2024, he ordered the Vatican to build an agrivoltaics facility on its land outside Rome.

  In September 2024 Francis renewed calls for a universal basic income and higher taxes on billionaires. He criticized trickle-down economics and consumerism. On the death penalty, he revised the Catechism in 2018 to call it "inadmissible" and said the church works for its abolition worldwide. In Fratelli tutti he wrote that "there can be no stepping back from this position."

  In July 2013 a televised remark became his most famous statement on gay people: "Who am I to judge?" That year the American magazine The Advocate named him Person of the Year. He supported civil unions as legal protection for same-sex couples while repeating that marriage is between a man and a woman. Under him the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith confirmed that transgender people can be baptised. The document Fiducia supplicans allowed blessings of individuals in same-sex relationships. In a January 2023 interview with the Associated Press he called the criminalization of homosexuality "unjust". He urged the church to distinguish between sin and crime.

  In diplomacy, Francis helped restore relations between Cuba and the United States. The Vatican signed its first treaty with Palestine under him. In 2018 he approved a provisional agreement with China on bishops' appointments, which his critic Cardinal Joseph Zen said led toward the "annihilation" of the church there. The Chinese government repeatedly violated it. In 2021 Francis defended the talks, saying an uneasy dialogue was better than none. In 2016 he said of Donald Trump that a person who thinks only about building walls and not bridges "is not Christian". Trump called it disgraceful for a religious leader to question a person's faith.

  On the 13th of March 2020, Francis learned that the Vicar General had closed all churches in the Diocese of Rome during the COVID-19 lockdown. He reacted with displeasure and worked to partly reverse the closures. He had already canceled his general audiences to prevent crowds. On the 27th of March he gave an extraordinary Urbi et Orbi blessing. He called getting vaccinated a moral obligation.

  After a period of declining health, Francis made his last public appearance on Easter Sunday. He died the next day, the 21st of April 2025, Easter Monday. On the 8th of May the conclave elected Leo XIV, the second pope from the Americas, after Francis himself.

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