Pope Francis' body is carried in a coffin to Saint Peter's Basilica, on the day of its translation, at the Vatican, April 23, 2025. PHOTO/REUTERS/Vatican Media
Elected the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis took on the mantle at a time when the Catholic Church was grappling with several issues. This included the child sex abuse scandal, financial impropriety, among others. Back then, in 2013, the global church had experienced a seismic change after Pope Benedict XVI, who had been the pope for eight years, resigned. Consequently, he became the first pontiff in at least six centuries to resign the papacy.
Today, the Catholic Church is still beset by challenges of dealing with LGBTQ+ community, sex abuse by clerics, questions over abortion and contraceptives, whether women can become priests or not, poverty, dwindling numbers in the church, among others. Pope Francis was widely seen as a transformative figure who boldly tried to address the aforementioned challenges. It all started with the Vatican reforms, which made him unpopular with several conservatives.
Pope Francis’ first task was to clear the bureaucracy after centuries of allegations of waste, mismanagement and market crises put the Vatican’s financial health at risk. It is said the pope-imposed regulations to bring order, transparency and modern accounting to the books. He also called for competitive bidding procedures, put caps on gifts, and enforced salary cuts for cardinals. With the onset of the reforms, he went for the centralisation of assets and investments in one office with “a unified, ethical and green investment policy,” which reportedly angered many top Vatican officials.
In this file photo, President Museveni receives Pope Francis at Entebbe Airpor in Uganda in 2015. PHOTO/FILE/HANDOUT
Pope Francis is credited with creating a Secretariat for the Economy to supervise the Holy See’s finances, where he gave key positions to lay Christians with expertise in financial management who ran the day-to-day activities of the Vatican. He also made a sweeping criminal trial into the Vatican’s botched investment in a London real estate deal that resulted in reported losses of tens of millions of euros.
Role of women
For centuries, the issue of women in leadership in the Catholic Church had been controversial, and women were largely relegated to assistant roles. When Pope Francis took over the leadership of the Catholic Church, he moved to reverse this by ordering a greater role for women in governing the church. He did this by appointing a significant number of women and made changes to the church laws to effect the changes. In one of the sweeping changes at the Vatican, Francis named an Italian nun as prefect of the Vatican office for religious orders. He also appointed another Italian nun as head of the Vatican City State administration. These two jobs were previously held only by cardinals.
In addition, he also named a French nun as an undersecretary in the Vatican Synod of Bishops’ office, giving her a vote in the previously all-male process, and through this, he opened up the synod to voting women members.
Pope Francis meets Uganda's Speaker of Parliament Anita Among. PHOTO | FILE
In bringing women to the top leadership of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis named three women to the Vatican office that vets bishop appointments. He also gave half of the seats on the Vatican’s economic council to women, and appointed two study commissions into whether women could be ordained deacons. In the first of a series of his firsts, Pope Francis put Mary Magdalene on par with the male apostles by declaring a feast day for her. He also formally allowed women to serve as lectors and acolytes, services which previously were male dominated.
LGBTQ+ question
It is said among the most contentious issues during Pope Francis’ pontificate was his stance on the LGBTQ+ community. In 2013, when questioned by a journalist about a Vatican Monsignor who was reported to be gay, Pope Francis famously said: “Who am I to judge?” He would later follow up on his stance when he assured gay people that God loves them as they are. He proceeded to note that “being homosexual is not a crime,” and “everyone, everyone, everyone” is welcome in the church. Pope Francis recently approved a landmark policy allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, a move that angered many conservative bishops. The pronouncement received pushback from some Catholic bishops in Africa, Poland and elsewhere who said they will not implement the new Vatican policy, while others downplayed it.
According to different critics, the pushback showed how polarising the issue remains and how Pope Francis' decade-long effort to make the church a more welcoming place for the LGBT+ community was still able to spark resistance among traditionalist and conservative Catholic leaders. The pope, during his time at the Vatican, reversed that stand and said transgender people could be baptised, serve as godparents and witnesses at weddings, and approved same-sex blessings. But while he met several times with members of the LGBTQ+ community, Pope Francis didn’t change church teaching, stating that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.”
In this file photo taken and handout on August 27, 2022 by The Vatican Media shows Pope Francis (R) salute Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (L) as Benedict XVI's aide Georg Gaenswein looks on, as they prepare to meet with new Cardinals following a consistory to create 20 new cardinals in The Vatican. PHOTO/AFP
Earlier on, while still the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis had opposed efforts to legalise same-sex marriage, and he also unsuccessfully proposed that the country should approve civil unions instead. It is not clear how that stance changed when he became a pope. To date, the issue of LGBTQ+ remains a polarising issue, pitting the “progressive Catholics in the West against what the western people call traditionalists and conservatives.
Divorce, contraception
For generations, the church had been opposed to the idea of divorce where the marriage had been blessed by the priest. However, Pope Francis reversed this when he opened avenues to divorced and civilly married Catholics to receive Communion. His approach of compassion and humanity to divorced and remarried Catholics, who had long been barred from receiving communion, also proved divisive. In the 2016 document, Amoris Laetitia, he encouraged a more compassionate and case-by-case approach to such individuals. Pope Francis, on September 5, 2016, sent a letter to bishops in Argentina in which he praised a document they had written that said priests could, in some cases, offer the “help of sacraments” to Catholics living in “irregular family situations.”
This is part of a broader effort to support and integrate divorced and remarried Catholics into the life of the church. “There are no other interpretations,” the pope responded. His endorsement was seen as a remarkable move, which, however, prompted a backlash from traditionalists who accused him of diluting doctrine.
They said this is contrary to the church teaching that says, without a church-issued annulment declaring the initial marriage invalid, these Catholics are committing adultery and thus cannot receive the sacrament. On the issue of contraception, while Pope Francis defended the church’s opposition to artificial contraception, he also said Catholics need not breed “like rabbits” and should instead practice “responsible parenthood” through approved methods.
The Catholic Church endorses the Natural Family Planning method, which involves monitoring a woman’s cycle to avoid intercourse when she is ovulating. While he was opposed to artificial contraception, Pope Francis in 2016 suggested that women threatened with the Zika virus could use artificial contraception because children born to parents with Zika virus were causing malformations in thousands of children at the time.
Celibacy, sexual abuse
Pope Francis upheld celibacy for Latin Rite priests even after bishops from the Amazon asked him to make an exception to allow married priests to address a shortage of clerics. He had earlier on said the celibacy requirement could change, since it was not a matter of doctrine. However, he said the debate was too politicised and that he didn’t want to be the pope to take the step. The Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests on Monday called the papacy of Francis a "preventable catastrophe for the children and vulnerable people who were abused during his tenure."
Pope Francis waves to the crowd from the papamobile during his inauguration mass at St Peter's square on March 19, 2013 at the Vatican. World leaders flew in for Pope Francis's inauguration mass in St Peter's Square - where Latin America's first pontiff received the formal symbols of papal power. AFP PHOTO / FILIPPO MONTEFORTE.
The group that said it drafted a letter to deliver to Pope Francis last month urged him "to use his remaining time to implement a true zero-tolerance law that includes independent oversight of bishops". CBS News quoted the group as saying: "We feel it is important to reach out to you now, even as you continue your physical recovery, which we hope will soon bring you back to us." "We anticipate that some may criticise us for raising this issue while you are still healing.
However, when is it ever the right time to discuss the alarming reality of rape and sexual violence against children, which occurs every minute of every hour of every day in this troubled world?" the letter added. On Monday, the group called for the next pope to have no history of covering up sexual abuse, and the group demanded that he "institute a zero-tolerance law for sexual abuse that immediately removes abusive clergy and leaders who have covered up abuse from ministry and mandates independent oversight of bishops." The sex abuse scandal dented Pope Francis’ papacy when he discredited Chilean sexual abuse victims by siding with a bishop whom they accused of complicity in the abuse. He, after realising the issue, invited the victims to the Vatican and apologised in person.
He then brought the entire Chilean bishops’ conference to Rome, Italy where he pressed them to resign Pope Francis in a history move defrocked former US Cardinal Theodore McCarrick after a Vatican investigation found out that he abused minors as well as adults and the pope later on passed church laws abolishing the use of pontifical secrecy and establishing procedures to investigate bishops who abuse or cover up for predator priests.
Abortion
Pope Francis stood firm and upheld church teaching that opposes abortion and echoed his predecessors in saying that human life is sacred and must be defended. During his pontificate, he described abortion as evidence of today’s “throwaway culture” and likened abortion to “hiring a hit man to resolve a problem.” However, his critics said he remained lukewarm by not emphasising the church’s position to the extent his predecessors did. He said women who had abortions must be accompanied spiritually by the church, and he also allowed ordinary priests, not just bishops, to absolve Catholic women who had intentionally terminated a pregnancy, which angered his critics and the conservatives. When he was called by the US bishops to deny Holy Communion to President Joe Biden because of his abortion-rights stance, he rejected the demand and said bishops should be pastors, not politicians.
Mr Francis Sullivan, the chair of Concerned Catholics Canberra Goulburn and the former chief executive officer (CEO) of the Catholic Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, while writing for the Guardian, said Francis regularly railed against clericalism because of its sense of entitlement and misuse of power. According to him, Pope Francis saw it as one of the reasons why the church became obsessed with protecting its image instead of believing and caring for the victims of clerical sex abuse.
“He also realised the clerical instinct to protect their own and conceal their crimes was underpinned by their exclusive hold on the workings of the church. He became determined to recalibrate the relationship between clerics and ordinary Catholics for there to be more mutuality and collaboration in church governance and decision-making. This did not win him friends within the church bureaucracy,” Sullivan said.
