Pope Francis: Pontiff who shook up the Catholic Church with reforms
Pope Francis presides over a mass for the Solemnity of the Conversion of St Paul - Celebration of Second Vespers, on January 25, 2023 at the Basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls in Rome. PHOTO / AFP
What you need to know:
- Francis summoned almost 200 Church leaders to a summit in February 2019 on child sex abuse by the clergy, issued a landmark decree making bishops directly accountable for sexual abuse or covering it up, and abolished “pontifical secrecy” for abuse cases.
Pope Francis changed the face of the modern papacy more than any predecessor by shunning much of its pomp and privilege, but his attempts to make the Catholic Church more inclusive and less judgmental made him an enemy to conservatives nostalgic for a traditional past. Francis inherited a deeply divided Church after the resignation in 2013 of his predecessor, Benedict XVI.
The conservative-progressive gap became a chasm after Francis, from Argentina, was elected the first non-European pope in 1,300 years. The polarisation was fiercest in the United States, where conservative Catholicism often blended with well-financed right-wing politics and media outlets.
For nearly a decade until Benedict’s death in 2022, there were two men wearing white in the Vatican, causing much confusion among the faithful and leading to calls for written norms on the role of retired popes.
The intensity of conservative animosity to the pope was laid bare in January 2023 when it emerged that the late Australian Cardinal George Pell, a towering figure in the conservative movement and a Benedict ally, was the author of an anonymous memo in 2022 that condemned Francis’ papacy as a “catastrophe”.
The memo amounted to a conservative manifesto of the qualities conservatives will want in the next pope. Francis appointed nearly 80% of the cardinal electors who will choose the next pope, increasing, but not guaranteeing, the possibility that his successor will continue his progressive policies.
Some Vatican experts have predicted a more moderate, less divisive successor. Under his watch, an overhauled Vatican constitution allowed any baptised lay Catholic, including women, to head most departments in the Catholic Church’s central administration. He put more women in senior Vatican roles than any previous pope but not as many as progressives wanted.
In this file photograph taken on September 28, 2014, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (L) is welcomed by Pope Francis as he arrives to attend a papal mass for elderly people on St Peter's Square at The Vatican. PHOTO/AFP
Ascendancy
Francis was 76 when he was elected to the post and his health was generally good for most of his papacy. He recovered well from intestinal surgery in 2021 but a year later a nagging knee problem forced him to slow down. He was never keen on exercise and the restriction of a wheelchair and a cane led to a visible increase in his weight.
His inability to help bring an end to the war in Ukraine was a great disappointment. From the day of Russia’s invasion in February 2022, he made appeals for peace at nearly every public appearance, at least twice a week. The conflict brought relations between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church to a new low in 2022 when Francis said its Patriarch Kirill, who supported the conflict, should not act like “Putin’s Altar Boy”.
He made frequent appeals for the release of hostages taken by Hamas militants but increased criticism of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza ahead of the January 2025 ceasefire agreement in the Israel-Hamas war that erupted in October 2023.
Conservatives were unhappy with the pope from the start because of his informal style, his aversion to pomp and his decision to allow women and Muslims to take part in a Holy Thursday ritual that previously had been restricted to Catholic men.
They balked at his calls for the Church to be more welcoming to LGBT people, his approval of conditional blessings for same-sex couples in December 2023 and his repeated clampdowns on the use of the traditional Latin Mass. He said conservatives had made themselves self-referential and wanted to encase Catholicism in a “suit of armour”.
Their spiritual gurus were Pell and U.S. Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, who once famously compared the Church under Francis to “a ship without a rudder”. In 2016 and in 2023, Burke and a handful of other cardinals lodged public challenges known as “Dubia” (doubts), accusing Francis of sowing confusion on moral themes, once threatening to issue a public “correction” themselves. “I don’t feel like judging them,” the pope told Reuters in 2018. “I pray to the Lord that He settles their hearts and even mine.”
But a year after Benedict’s death, Francis lost his patience with conservative ringleaders, stripping Burke, who was rarely in Rome, of his Vatican privileges, including a subsidized apartment and a salary.
Burke’s punishment came days after Francis dismissed Bishop Joseph E. Strickland of Tyler, Texas, another of his fiercest critics among US. Catholic conservatives, after Strickland refused to step down following a Vatican investigation.
But liberals were deeply disappointed in 2020 when Francis dismissed a proposal to allow some married men to be ordained in remote areas, such as in the Amazon, opens new tab.
Francis’ papacy was also marked by his struggle to restore credibility to a Church rattled to its core by clergy sexual abuse scandals, even though the overwhelming part of the crimes took place before his election.
Francis summoned almost 200 Church leaders to a summit in February 2019 on child sex abuse by the clergy, issued a landmark decree making bishops directly accountable for sexual abuse or covering it up, and abolished “pontifical secrecy” for abuse cases. The Covid-19 crisis forced him to cancel all trips in 2020 and to hold virtual general audiences, depriving him of the contact with people that he thrived on.
Cleaning up the Curia On March 27, 2020, when the whole world was in various forms of lockdowns and death tolls spiralled, he held a dramatic, solitary prayer service in St. Peter’s Square, urging everyone to see the crisis as a test of solidarity and a reminder of basic values.
Francis moved to clean up the Curia, the staid central administration of the Roman Catholic Church that was held responsible for many of the missteps and scandals that marred Pope Benedict’s eight-year pontificate. Despite massive improvements compared to the past papacies, financial scandals still plagued the Vatican during Francis’ pontificate. In 2020, he took drastic action by firing Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who was accused of embezzlement and nepotism and was also enmeshed in a scandal involving the Vatican’s purchase of a luxury building in London.
Becciu has denied any wrongdoing. On July 3, 2021, Becciu was among 10 people sent to trial in the Vatican charged with financial crimes including embezzlement, money laundering, fraud, extortion and abuse of office. In December 2023 Becciu was found guilty on several counts of embezzlement and fraud and sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail.
He and others convicted are free pending appeal. Francis brought the Catholic Church’s dialogue with Islam to new heights in 2019 by becoming the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula, but conservatives attacked him as a “heretic” for signing a joint document on inter-religious fraternity with Muslim leaders.
A trip to Iraq in March 2021, the first ever by a pope, aimed to solidify better relations with Islam while also paying tribute to the Christians whose two millennia-old communities were devastated by wars and Islamic State.
From Buenos Aires
To The Vatican Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on December 17, 1936 into a family of Italian immigrants who had settled in Buenos Aires. After he decided to become a priest, he studied at the diocesan seminary and in 1958 entered the Jesuit religious order. At about that time, when he was 21, he caught pneumonia and had to have the top part of one lung removed because of cysts. After studies in Argentina, Spain and Chile, he was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1969, rapidly rising to head the order in Argentina.
That coincided with the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, during which up to 30,000 suspected leftists were kidnapped and killed. As archbishop of Buenos Aires from 2001-2013, he clashed frequently with the Argentine government, saying it needed to pay more attention to social needs.
Francis endeared himself to millions with his simplicity when he spoke minutes after his election as pope on March 13, 2013. “Brothers and sisters, good evening,” were his first words from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, departing from the traditional salutation “Praised be Jesus Christ!”. The first
Pope Francis with children. Photo/Courtesy/File
Modest life
He took the name Francis in honour of Francis of Assisi, the saint associated with peace, concern for the poor, and respect for the environment. In that first appearance, the new pope shunned the crimson, fur-trimmed “mozzetta”, or cape, and also did not wear a gold cross but kept around his neck the same faded silver-plated one he used as archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Gone too were the plush red “shoes of the fisherman” used by his predecessors. He kept the same simple black shoes he always used and wore $20 plastic watches, giving some away so they could be auctioned off for charity. In his first meeting with journalists three days later, Francis said: “How I would like a Church that is poor and for the poor.” Inside the tiny city-state, where some cardinals lived like princes in frescoed apartments, Francis renounced the spacious papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace and never moved out of the Vatican hotel where he and the other cardinals who entered the conclave of 2013 were billeted in simple rooms.
The Santa Marta residence, a modern building with a common dining room, became the nerve centre of the more than 1.3 billion-member Roman Catholic Church. “It (the decision to stay in Santa Marta) saved my life,” he told Reuters in an interview in 2018, explaining that apartments used by his predecessors were like a “funnel” isolating inhabitants.
The bulletproof papal limousine was dispatched to the Vatican Museums and Francis took to being driven around Rome in a blue Ford Focus with no security features. His first trip outside Rome was to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa to pay tribute to the thousands of migrants who had drowned in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe and a better life.
“In this globalised world we have fallen into the globalisation of indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others. It doesn’t regard us. It doesn’t interest us. It’s not our business,” he said.
A terrible year
The year 2018 was Francis’ “annus horribilis” - chiefly because of the simmering crisis around Church sex abuse. It began with a trip to Chile in January, where at first he strongly defended a bishop who had been accused of covering up sexual abuse, testily telling reporters that there was “not a single piece of evidence against him”.
His comments were widely criticised by victims and their advocates throughout Latin America. Soon after he returned, he sent the Church’s top sexual abuse investigator to Chile. That May, all of Chile’s 34 bishops offered their resignations en masse. The pope accepted seven resignations over the next few months.
He later defrocked the two other bishops and the priest at the centre of the abuse scandal. Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., stepped down as cardinal over sexual misconduct accusations in July and in August the U.S. Catholic Church was rocked by a grand jury report in Pennsylvania that detailed 70 years of abuse.
A church for the poor
Francis enjoyed considerable prestige internationally, both for his calls for social justice as well as for risky political overtures. He made more than 45 international trips including the first by any pope to Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Myanmar, North Macedonia, Bahrain and Mongolia.
In 2014, secret contacts mediated by the Vatican resulted in a rapprochement between the long-hostile United States and Cuba.
In 2018, he led the Vatican to a landmark deal on the appointment of bishops in China, which conservatives criticized as a sell-out by the Church to Beijing’s communist government. Under his watch, the Vatican and the United Nations teamed up to hold international conferences on climate change and in June 2015 he issued an encyclical in which he demanded “action now” to save the planet.
Throughout his pontificate, Francis spoke out for the rights of refugees and criticised countries that shunned migrants. He visited the Greek island of Lesbos and brought a dozen refugees to Italy on his plane, and asked Church institutions to work to stop human trafficking and modern slavery.
