- Francis was elected pope in 2013, surprising many with his reformist zeal and humble style.
- He shifted the church’s focus to global issues like climate change and poverty, while addressing internal crises.
- Francis emphasised decentralisation, empowering local bishops, and opened debates on previously taboo topics within the church.
A new style
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of his papacy was that he became pope at all.
Francis was elected in March 2013 after the resignation of Benedict, the first pontiff to step down in nearly six centuries, amid turmoil and intrigue about secret lobbies and financial chicanery. The cardinal electors sought a reformer with a strong administrative hand, but few anticipated how Francis, then the 76-year-old archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, would blend reformist zeal and folksy charm in a push to clean house and transform the church.
“Buona sera,” good evening, Francis announced to the faithful in his first remarks as pope from the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square, breaking the ice with unaffected style. He joked about being from Argentina, noting that in fulfilling their duty to produce a pope, “it seems that my brother cardinals have gone almost to the ends of the Earth to get him.”
Francis not only came from another part of the world: Influenced by his Latin American populist roots, he also saw the world differently than his predecessors did. He became the first pontiff to take his papal name from St. Francis of Assisi, the austere friar who dedicated his life to piety and the poor and who, according to tradition, received instruction from God to rebuild his church.
Francis signalled his humble style from the outset. He paid his own bill at the Vatican hotel where he stayed during the conclave that elected him, rode about town in a modest Ford Focus, lived in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the ornate papal apartments and, in a Holy Week ritual performed at a youth prison, washed the feet of a young Muslim woman. Later, in his ailing years, he referred to his own frailty in demanding dignity for the aged.
His humility could be disarming. When asked about a priest who was said to be gay, he responded, “Who am I to judge?”
The comment made global headlines and signaled a dramatic change underway inside the Vatican.
Francis took over the church at a moment of crisis. In the industrialized world, it suffered from falling attendance, faith-draining clerical sexual abuse scandals, demands for a greater role for women and a dire shortage of priests. And in Latin America, Asia and Africa, where the faith was continuing to grow, the Catholic church faced increasing competition from Protestant evangelical and Pentecostal churches.
He soon tried to move the church away from divisive issues like abortion and homosexuality, and shifted its emphasis to global problems like climate change, poverty and migration. His first papal trip out of Rome was to Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island that had become the point of arrival for thousands of African migrants crossing the Mediterranean.
His vision, expressed in major documents like the encyclical “Laudato Si,” or “Praise Be to You,” linked Catholic theology to protecting the environment and championing those on the margins, while denouncing the excesses of global capitalism in exploiting the poor.
He traveled frequently to the Arab world, where Christians faced persecution, to pursue detente with Islam, and repeatedly visited what he called the “peripheries,” the places and people often overlooked.
In 2019, Francis got on his hands and knees before the warring leaders of South Sudan’s government and its opposition, kissing their shoes and imploring them to make peace. In 2023, in declining health, he traveled to the capital city, Juba, to upbraid them on their lack of progress.
“No more bloodshed, no more conflicts, no more violence and mutual recriminations about who is responsible for it,” Francis said in the gardens of South Sudan’s presidential palace. “Leave the time of war behind and let a time of peace dawn!”
He repeatedly denounced violence and, after an initial reluctance to take sides in the war in Ukraine, spoke out in support of Ukraine. But Ukrainian officials worried that what he called the Vatican’s secret “mission” to mediate an end to the war, without explicitly rejecting Russia’s occupation, could unwittingly aid their enemy.
Francis could be scathing toward the prelates in the Vatican. He once compared the hierarchy to a “ponderous, bureaucratic customs house.” He accused some church officials of deluding themselves as being “indispensable” and afflicted by the “terrorism of gossip.”
His Christmas speeches to Vatican leaders became reliably blunt lectures about a church weighed down by clericalism — the notion that the “peacock priest” and “airport bishop,” who drop in when convenient, see themselves as superior to their flock and had become out of touch. Clericalism, he contended, lay at the heart of many of the church’s ills, including the child sexual abuse crisis.
Some powerful conservatives tried to use those scandals as a cudgel to destroy Francis, accusing him of covering up for Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, an American who was removed in disgrace for the sexual abuse of a minor.
That accusation against Francis proved unfounded, but he nevertheless had a long and painful learning curve on the sex abuse scandals. His initial calls for action yielded little, and when the crisis exploded again on his watch, he instinctively supported his fellow bishops and publicly doubted some victims, endangering his legacy as a defender of the downtrodden.
He ultimately regained his footing on the issue by recognizing his own blindness and by talking with abuse survivors. He never held bishops to account as much as some of his supporters had hoped. But he enacted meaningful reforms, sought to make the protection of children a priority for bishops around the world and, remarkably, ordered an exhaustive investigation that placed blame for McCarrick’s ascent at the feet of Saint John Paul II.
On other issues, Francis could make it difficult to understand where he stood. He rejected same-sex marriage yet called on priests to be welcoming to people in nontraditional relationships, such as gay men and lesbians, single parents and unmarried couples who live together.
He supported civil unions for gay couples but approved a Vatican decision to bar priests from blessing them — a decision he later said he regretted, and then reversed.
He called the criminalization of homosexuality “unjust,” but also backed the Vatican’s opposition to a proposed Italian law extending protections to LGBTQ+ people. And when Germany’s bishops overwhelmingly voted to bless gay couples in 2023, the Vatican cracked down with the pope’s approval.
Some of Francis’ defenders argued that his ambiguities and incrementalisms reflected a strategy to build a consensus for a larger, longer-lasting project — that of creating a more collegial church that shifted power away from Rome to local bishops and priests in the trenches.
After Benedict’s death ended the anomalous situation of two living popes, some of Francis’ supporters expected him to exercise a freer hand. They hoped for bold changes from a meeting of the world’s bishops in 2023 and 2024, where topics such as ordaining women as deacons and priestly celibacy and marriage were on the table. But the potentially explosive meeting ended with a whimper. The bishops called for women to be given more leadership roles but left the other major questions for another day.
Indeed, Francis’ most enduring legacy may be the transformation of the clerical ranks and the reshaping of the College of Cardinals, once dominated by conservatives appointed by Benedict and John Paul II.
In a hierarchy where personnel is policy, Francis’ supporters hope the clergy he promoted — and the successor they will choose — will cross the lines he dared walk up to.
An immigrant family
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born Dec. 17, 1936, in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires to Mario Bergoglio and Regina (Sivori) Bergoglio, both immigrants from Italy.
The family’s passage to Argentina would become part of Bergoglio lore: Booked in steerage on the ocean liner Principessa Mafalda, the future pope’s paternal grandparents missed their departure because of delays in selling their coffee shop in Turin, Italy. But frustration soon turned to relief: The ship sank at sea. A few months later, they arrived safely in Buenos Aires aboard another liner, the Giulio Cesare.
Jorge, who was the eldest of five siblings, is survived by a sister, María Elena Bergoglio.
Growing up, Jorge was deeply influenced by his grandmother Rosa Bergoglio, who in Italy had joined Catholic Action, the 1920s movement that defended the church against the encroachment of Benito Mussolini’s fascist state. The rise of fascism had helped push the family to leave.
In Flores, Rosa taught her grandson Italian inflected with the family’s native Piedmont dialect and a love of literature. His father, Mario, eager to assimilate, insisted on speaking Spanish.
Catholicism was a sustaining and nurturing force in the Bergoglio household. When his mother was bedridden after the difficult birth of one of his sisters, Jorge, then 12, was placed in a school run by Salesian priests. The Salesians helped imbue him with a sense of duty toward the poor, as well as a realization of his own responsibility for improving the state of the world.
“I learned, almost unconsciously, to seek the meaning of things,” he recalled.
Bookish, intelligent and deeply religious, Jorge also played basketball and loved to dance the tango. Barely six weeks short of his 17th birthday, he was rushing to meet his friends in Flores when he paused in front of the Basilica of St. Joseph.
“I felt I had to go in — those things you feel inside and you don’t know what they are,” he recounted. In the sanctuary, he said, he “felt like someone grabbed me from inside” and took him into the confessional. “Right there I knew I had to be a priest,” he said.
He often referred to a story about divine mercy describing the moment Jesus, by “showing mercy and by choosing,” miserando atque eligendo, captivated Matthew the tax collector. He said he felt the Lord was waiting for him too, and chose the Latin phrase for his motto.
“That’s me,” he later told the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest and friend who published an extensive interview with the pope. “How I felt.”
But Jorge hid his ambition from his family. In high school he had demonstrated a scientific aptitude, and his mother hoped he would become a doctor. He worked in a chemistry lab and earned pocket money as a doorman at tango bars.
In November 1955, just after graduating from high school, he finally told his parents of his plans for the priesthood. His mother was unhappy and accused him of misleading her. “I didn’t lie to you, Mom,” his sister, Maria Elena, recalled Jorge responding. “I’m going to study the medicine of the soul.”
Time in the wilderness
After 13 years of training, Jorge Bergoglio was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1969. The Jesuits had arrived in South America in 1580, along with colonists from Spain and Portugal who subjugated the continent with the complicity of Rome.
The Jesuits, though, resisted some of the worst colonial abuses, creating self-ruled protectorates for Indigenous peoples. The future pope embraced this legacy: the closeness to the poor, the respect for Indigenous peoples, the suspicion of European expansion and the resistance to it, and a wariness toward secular ideologies.
Latin America and Catholicism were in turmoil when Bergoglio, at 36, took charge of the Argentine Jesuits. Argentina was in the throes of a “dirty war,” with a brutal military government killing and torturing thousands of opponents. And the Latin American church was sundered, as many senior prelates remained close to the ruling classes while many Jesuits embraced liberation theology, which called on the church to press for social change on behalf of the poor.
Conservative church leaders denounced that theology as Marxist. One of those critics was Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, an anti-communist crusader from Poland, who in 1978 became Pope John Paul II and appointed conservative bishops who were antagonistic to liberation theology.
Bergoglio shared the view of the local church establishment that liberation theology was too political. He later faced accusations that as leader of the Argentine Jesuits he had done too little to protect two priests who were kidnapped and tortured by the junta, allegations later challenged by biographers and others. He eventually reconciled with one of the priests, but the other remained bitter.
His Jesuit leadership ended in controversy. He had cultivated a passionate and loyal cadre of priests, but he had also made enemies, partly because of what critics called an imperious and autocratic management style. Church authorities sent him into de facto exile in Germany and then to Córdoba, Argentina, a period he later described as “a time of great interior crisis.”
After becoming pope, Francis acknowledged that his administrative style as a Jesuit leader had been imperfect.
“My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he told Spadaro. “But I have never been a right-winger.”
His exile, though, was interrupted in 1992 when a senior figure in the Argentine church unexpectedly named him auxiliary bishop of the Buenos Aires diocese. He became archbishop six years later and focused on outreach to the poor, assembling a group of priests dedicated to ministering in the slums.
During the country’s 2001-02 economic crisis, he organized food kitchens, tripled the number of priests assigned to the slums and built schools and drug rehabilitation centers as state services retrenched. He converted his official residence into a hostel for priests and lived in a modest room in the diocesan building in central Buenos Aires. Before every Easter, he visited prison inmates, AIDS patients or older people, a practice he continued during his papacy.
His suspicion of secular ideologies and theories, including capitalism, deepened. He contended that left-wing ideologies deified the state and economic neoliberalism eviscerated it. In 2006, at the traditional Catholic prayer of thanksgiving on Argentine Independence Day, Bergoglio, by then a cardinal, made a thinly veiled critique of President Néstor Kirchner, who was in attendance.
Bergoglio also had chilly relations with the Vatican. It represented “the heart of everything that he believed the church should not be: luxury, ostentation, hypocrisy, bureaucracy,” his former press officer in Buenos Aires, Federico Wals, told Austen Ivereigh, one of the pope’s biographers. “He hated going.”
After passing the bishop’s retirement age of 75, he reserved a simple room at a Catholic seminary, where he intended to live out his days in prayer and reflection, enjoying his beloved mate tea.
But Pope Benedict XVI changed all that Feb. 11, 2013, when he announced that he would resign. It was the first papal resignation since Gregory XII’s in 1415.
Bergoglio flew to Rome to help elect a new pope. He never returned.
An accidental Pope
In the 2005 conclave that elected Benedict as pope, Bergoglio had finished second and left Rome that year with little reason to believe that he would have another chance at the papacy. There was little evidence that he even wanted the job.
With Benedict’s resignation, the news media was filled with speculation about who would succeed him, including expectations that the cardinals might select the first Latin American pope. Given his age, Bergoglio wasn’t on the shortlist.
But as the voting began, a movement to elect him began to take shape. Many cardinals from outside Rome were furious about dysfunction at the Vatican and the imperiousness of the Roman curia, the bureaucracy of cardinals and other officials that oversees the church. They criticized the church’s response to the clerical sexual abuse crisis as inadequate. And a financial scandal was brewing at the opaque Vatican Bank.
Bergoglio had a reputation as a tough, effective administrator, as well as someone who firmly believed in devolving power from the Vatican bureaucracies to bishops around the world.
A speech he made to cardinals before the conclave officially began made a mark, especially its emphasis on the church’s duty to come out of its comfortable shell in order to reach people at the physical and spiritual peripheries.
After Bergoglio began accumulating votes, the weight of the papacy seemed to settle on him, witnesses recalled. It took two days, and on the fifth round of balloting, he crossed the 77-vote threshold for a two-thirds majority. Asked if he would accept the papacy, he responded, “Although I am a sinner, I accept.”
Cardinal Cláudio Hummes of Brazil hugged him and said, “Don’t forget the poor!” He did not.
After his time in Argentina, “his papacy is a clear continuity, above all, in his focus on the poor,” the Rev. Augusto Zampini Davies, who once worked in the Buenos Aires slum of Bajo Boulogne, told The New York Times in 2015. “The church — those that appointed him — wanted a change. And they wanted a change from the periphery. But perhaps what some did not predict is that when somebody starts to see the world from the viewpoint of the poorest, he undergoes a profound transformation.”
In a conversation with Italian reporters in 2015, Francis concisely articulated that view: “Without a solution to the problems of the poor, we cannot resolve the problems of the world.”
A global force
Francis quickly established himself as a figure with global influence.
He helped broker a reconciliation between the United States and Cuba, and Vatican diplomats had a hand in the peace deal that ended the decades-old civil war in Colombia. At the height of Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015, he framed it as a moral issue and spoke up tirelessly for those risking their lives to reach Europe.
As anti-migrant sentiment and populist politicians rose in Europe and the United States, Francis seemed out of step with the moment.
During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Francis suggested that Donald Trump was “not Christian” because of his preference for building walls rather than bridges. Trump responded: “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian.” The battle lines were drawn.
Francis repeatedly sought to stand up to nationalism, and became a reliable opponent of ethnic, racial and sovereign appeals.
He visited Hungary in 2021 and appeared to chastise Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who often wrapped his hard line against migrants in an appeal to Christian values. But he returned to Hungary in 2023, a visit that a delighted Orban argued was a show of support for his values.
Francis kept speaking out, but fewer and fewer people seemed to listen.
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the former head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, said the pope had a duty to be a global conscience “even if it’s a losing effort.” The pope still reached a large audience, he said, even if “the world is going in another direction.”
Francis stayed on message, incessantly reaching out to the faithful on the peripheries over more than 40 foreign trips. He also sought closer relations with other religions, especially in places where Catholic minorities risked persecution, while repeatedly courting Muslim leaders.
In 2017, he spoke at a conference in Cairo hosted by Al Azhar, perhaps the most influential center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, and established a strong interfaith relationship with its grand imam.
He took a risky trip to Iraq in 2021, undaunted by the pandemic and security concerns, and sought to forge bonds between Muslims and that country’s dwindling Christian community.
He spoke up for the religious rights of non-Christian minorities, too, including the Rohingya in Bangladesh and Myanmar and the Yazidis in Iraq.
Building on the example of John Paul II, Francis honed the mea culpa into a diplomatic tool. In Dublin, he acknowledged “the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the church charged with responsibility for their protection and education.”
He apologized for the silence of church leaders in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and to the Roma people for a history of discrimination and mistreatment. In Canada, he begged forgiveness from Indigenous communities for the abuse and mistreatment of their children in Catholic schools.
On a flight from the United Arab Emirates in 2019, he acknowledged for the first time that priests and bishops had abused nuns.
In his global diplomacy, Francis sometimes did business with autocrats.
In China, he sealed a provisional deal with the government in 2018 to end a decades-old power struggle over the right to appoint bishops there. He won the first formal recognition of the pope’s authority over Catholics in China, but in exchange he had to recognise the legitimacy of seven government-appointed bishops who had previously been excommunicated.
The agreement gave the church access to an immense population where the growth of Protestantism was far outpacing Catholicism. But critics, including bishops who had suffered at the communist government’s hand, lambasted the deal as a shameful retreat and a dangerous precedent.
Some of his autocratic hosts exploited his visits for their own agendas and image. Francis and his advisers said it was worth such risks to deliver hope, seek breakthroughs and make amends.
Reforms inside the church
The true measure of Francis’ legacy is found perhaps less on the global stage than in the changes he made within his own church.
John Paul II and Benedict XVI believed in the concentration of authority in Rome. Francis emphasized a collegial, decentralized approach. The large meetings of bishops, called synods, which had historically been opportunities for lectures from the Roman curia, became policy meetings among empowered bishops.
For his supporters, decentralization brought the prospect of change that they had thirsted for over decades. For those who favored Vatican control, it was a nightmare.
When it came to the so-called Liturgy Wars, which affected the way adherents prayed, and which especially in the English-speaking world long divided liberals and conservatives, Francis empowered local bishops to translate liturgical language as they saw fit.
He used his appointment powers to make his vision lasting. He replaced conservatives with allies at the Vatican’s Congregation of Bishops, which selects local church leaders. In choosing bishops, he was said to pick pastors over managers, street priests over power brokers. He preferred bishops closer to the people than those near the business-friendly Catholic group Opus Dei.
In the College of Cardinals, where a two-thirds majority of those under 80 will elect his successor, he appointed more than half its voters. He made the college less white (appointing the first African American cardinal), less Italian and less representative of the Roman curia.
Relying less on Europe, which he called “aged,” or America’s traditional feeder cities, like Philadelphia, he chose cardinals from nations with increasingly popular Pentecostal and evangelical movements in Latin America, Asia and Africa, the most fertile ground for Catholic growth and for priests, who are disappearing from Catholicism’s historic centers in Europe.
“You are important,” he told young Catholics in Mozambique in 2019. “Not only are you the future of Mozambique, or of the church and of humanity. You are their present.”
While he pushed for a decentralized church, Francis also created a sounding board of nine trusted cardinals with extraordinary influence, including the authority to rewrite the Vatican’s constitution.
In a dramatic departure from the three decades of church leadership before him, he sought to revive the more open spirit of the Second Vatican Council. He canonized Pope John XXIII, who called the council, on the same day that he canonized Pope John Paul II. He later canonized Pope Paul VI, who oversaw the council’s reforms.
“You can be with the church and therefore follow the council, or you can not follow the council or interpret it in your own way, as you want, and you are not with the church,” the pontiff said in 2021, in a meeting with a group of Italian catechists.
Francis showed a deft political hand at isolating opponents. Instead of making a martyr out of Cardinal Robert Sarah, the arch-conservative leader of the liturgy department who championed the old Latin Mass, Francis simply ignored him, diluting his influence through empowered deputies, then quietly accepting his resignation when he reached retirement age.
Less than a year later, and only days after leaving the hospital after undergoing colon surgery in 2021, Francis introduced sweeping restrictions on the Latin Mass, arguing that its proponents had exploited it to undermine the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and to create divisions in the church.
In key positions, he brought the ax down hard. In July 2017, he essentially fired the church’s top doctrinal watchdog, the conservative Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, by refusing to extend his term at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Francis folded the Pontifical Academy for Life, a headquarters for anti-abortion advocates, into a new umbrella department for Laity, Family and Life, which also opposed the death penalty. In 2018, capital punishment officially became contrary to church teaching.
Also that year, he put caring for migrants and the poor on an equal footing with opposition to abortion in the apostolic exhortation “Gaudete et Exsultate,” or “Rejoice and Be Glad.” Welcoming the stranger at the door is fundamental to the faith, he said, “not a notion invented by some pope, or a momentary fad.”
One critical area where Francis’ collegial vision seemed poised to deliver concrete change was the deepening shortage of priests in remote and overwhelmed corners of the Roman Catholic Church. He appeared ready to hear the pleas of some of his bishops to ordain married men.
The tradition of priestly celibacy had held sway in the church for nearly 1,000 years, although exceptions exist for Eastern Rite priests and married Protestant ministers who convert to Catholicism. Historically, priests in the church’s first century were free to marry.
He considered whether married men of impeccable credentials could be ordained as priests to serve remote areas. “We need to think about whether ‘viri probati’ could be a possibility,” Francis told the German newspaper Die Zeit in 2017, using the Latin phrase for such “tested” men.
In 2019, he held a major Vatican summit of bishops from the Amazon region, who recommended that Francis allow the ordination of married men as priests. The proposal was limited to remote areas of South America, but if adopted it would have set a precedent for easing the restriction on married priests throughout the world.
Conservative opponents called it a threat to the tradition of the priesthood, and another troubling sign that Francis was willing to dilute the faith to pursue a more inclusive but less pure church. Even Benedict, who in retirement had largely resisted attempts to be drawn into an internecine ideological war, joined them, emerging in January 2020 with a contribution to a book in which he defended priestly celibacy.
Ultimately, Francis set aside the proposal, disappointing his liberal supporters. Müller welcomed the decision as potentially having a “reconciling effect of reducing internal church factions, ideological fixations and the danger of inner emigration or open resistance.”
Opposition rises
The resistance to Francis was first tacit, then grumbling and ultimately full-throated.
Not long after his election, Vatican ambassadors briefed him on various situations around the world and suggested that he be especially wary when appointing bishops and cardinals in the United States.
“I know that already,” the pope interrupted. “That’s where the opposition is coming from.”
The American church had for decades been consumed with culture-war issues, and the de facto leader of the conservative opposition to Francis inside the Vatican was Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, an American canon lawyer who viewed Francis’ inclusive vision as a dilution of doctrine; he even suggested that the pope was heretical and that his laws were void. Francis removed Burke from the Congregation of Bishops, ending his role in choosing bishops in the United States.
Burke joined a few other cardinals in 2016 in signing a letter of “dubia” — Latin for “doubts” — demanding clarification from Francis about his apparent willingness to open the door for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion, which the signatories argued was against church law.
Francis enraged them by failing to respond.
Many of Francis’ conservative opponents invoked Benedict as the church’s real moral authority. Until his death, Benedict lived in a monastery inside Vatican City, not far from Francis’ own apartment, and mostly kept his promise to stay hidden from the world even while Francis undid parts of his legacy and showed a dislike for the high church style and traditionalism that Benedict preferred. Francis, a wily political operator, had made a habit of dropping in on his retired predecessor in showings of white-cloaked cordiality that were fictionalized in a 2019 movie, “The Two Popes.”
The spats mostly remained internal, but the ascendance of Trump in the United States gave traditionalist forces in the Vatican a rival power to rally around. A constellation of conservative Catholic news sites, blogs and television channels, many financed by sources in the United States and Canada, constantly sought to weaken the pope.
Tensions escalated in 2017 when two close associates of Francis, in a Vatican-vetted journal, accused American Catholic conservatives of making an alliance of “hate” with evangelical Christians to back Trump.
In 2018, Francis criticized the hostile tenor that often reverberated throughout the conservative Catholic blogosphere.
“Christians, too, can be caught up in networks of verbal violence through the internet,” he said, citing vicious examples of defamation in some Catholic outlets where “people look to compensate for their own discontent by lashing out at others.”
In September 2019, on the papal plane en route to Mozambique, Francis acknowledged the sharp opposition he faced from conservative detractors in the United States in an offhand remark. He said, it was “an honor that the Americans attack me.”
On the flight back to Rome a few days later, he was asked whether he worried that the sustained opposition from Catholic conservatives in the United States could drive traditionalists to break with the church. He said the church had been through plenty of such ruptures. “I pray there are no schisms,” he said. “But I’m not scared.”
Sex abuse scandal
The election of Francis seemed to signal a new energy in the church to eradicate the sex abuse scourge, which had severely damaged its reputation and depleted its ranks.
While Benedict had defrocked hundreds of priests, the church had not addressed the question of how or whether it would hold bishops accountable who had been negligent or covered up abuse.
In 2014, Francis established the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, led by Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who was credited with cleaning up the disastrous scandal in Boston that had brought the issue to the world’s attention. The commission, which included victims of abuse, sought to hold bishops accountable for abuse of office. But that effort fell apart.
In 2016, Francis issued an apostolic letter, “Like a Loving Mother,” which sought to use existing church law to dismiss negligent bishops — a proposal that critics found woefully inadequate. Members of the commission quit in frustration at the slow pace of change. The pope also seemed less than sensitive to the appeals of victims.
Then major investigations in Australia, Germany and the United States revealed thousands of victims preyed on by hundreds of priests, as well as the predatory behavior of McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington and a church power broker, against adult seminarians as well as minors.
In January 2018, Francis seemed to pour salt in the wound when he was asked by a Chilean reporter about a bishop he had appointed there in 2015 despite accusations that the bishop had covered up for an abusive priest.
The accusations against the bishop, Juan Barros, were “all a calumny,” Francis told the reporter. On the flight back to Rome, he reiterated that there was no “evidence” against the bishop, who he insisted was the victim of slander. “I am also convinced he is innocent,” Francis added.
The backlash, even within his own church, was swift and fierce. O’Malley, the commission’s leader, distanced himself, calling the pope’s remarks “a source of great pain for survivors.”
Amid public pressure and internal disappointment, Francis reversed himself, acknowledging his error and taking swift action.
He dispatched the Vatican’s leading sex crimes investigator to Chile. He reactivated the moribund abuse commission. And, in an extraordinary letter to the bishops of Chile, he wrote, “I have made grave errors” in the handling of sexual abuse cases. He began accepting the resignations of Chilean bishops, including that of Barros, and befriended the victims he had previously accused of slander.
But his enemies inside the church tried to use the issue against him.
That August, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the disgruntled former papal envoy to the United States, published a remarkable j’accuse letter calling on Francis to resign for protecting McCarrick. He called Francis part of a “conspiracy of silence” to protect a “homosexual current” within the Vatican.
Francis denied it. “About McCarrick I knew nothing,” he said in an interview. “Obviously, nothing, nothing.”
In February 2019, he summoned bishops from around the world to Rome for an unprecedented meeting on protecting minors, a sign that the Vatican would finally treat the sexual abuse problem as a global crisis, and not the failing of a particular country or culture.
He issued the church’s most comprehensive response to the crisis, and it became the seminal document on Vatican culpability.
It obligated church officials worldwide to report cases of sexual abuse — and attempts to cover it up — to their superiors. Vatican officials described the measure as an effort to enshrine accountability for bishops into church law, and to impose a uniform response to accusations of sexual abuse, which had differed widely from country to country. In some dioceses, where leaders denied the existence of abuse, there had been no procedures at all.
However the edict, which was made permanent in 2023, did not require church officials to report abuse accusations to the police and prosecutors, an omission that outraged abuse victims and their advocates. Vatican officials argued that such an obligation could, in some places, result in victims being ostracised or priests being persecuted.
A new openness
Arguably the most dramatic change Francis brought to the church, his supporters say, was perhaps the simplest: a willingness to open questions for debate, planting the seeds for deep, long-lasting change. He talked in 2018 about an “apostolate of the ear: listening before speaking.”
He once told Spadaro, the Jesuit priest and friend: “Opposition opens up paths. I love opposition.”
Some of his predecessors had been less fond of it. Pope Pius X purged Catholic theologians who took a modernist approach to Bible studies. John Paul II treated theological disagreement as profane dissent, and with his doctrinal watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, the Vatican silenced theologians with differing visions of the church. When he became pope, Benedict ordered the removal of the editor of a Jesuit journal, America, because it entertained ideas anathema to conservative orthodoxy.
Francis did not stifle views he disagreed with and believed in a patient process — he called it discernment — in which ideas and proposals could be weighed before going forward.
“Bosses cannot always do what they want,” he told Reuters in 2018. “They have to convince.”
His closest allies said the slow and steady approach worked.
“It’s been an intense 10 years,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, said on the anniversary of Francis’ election. Reforming the Roman bureaucracy that governs the church, which is deeply resistant to change, he said, “took a lot of time and a lot of energy.”
While some of Francis’ most ardent boosters worried that his fondness for debate and discernment resulted in a pontificate that was largely talk, he made undeniable substantive changes, like broadening the definition in church law of people who could be considered victims of clerical sex abuse, and seemingly bureaucratic ones, like devolving power away from Rome and stacking the hierarchy in the United States with liberals. Those efforts have the potential to yield even greater change.
His October 2023 meeting of world bishops, which for the first time included women and lay people as voting members, built momentum for a larger role for women in the church and at least broached some of the most sensitive topics, including the celibacy and marital status of priests, even if it didn’t change those policies. In the following weeks, he issued papal equivalents of executive actions to allow priests to bless gay couples.
For many liberals, that impetus stalled and the progress it promised never materialized. But in many ways, Francis’ willingness to discuss once-taboo issues was itself a breakthrough. And if, at the beginning of his pontificate, supporters predicted a “Francis effect” that would fill the pews with faithful, by the end they claimed a more modest achievement, that he had opened church doors that had for decades been sealed shut.
Written by: Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley
Photographs by: Ian Willms, Daniel Berehulak, James Hill, Doug Mills, Jim Huylebroek, Todd Heisler, Ivor Prickett, Rina Castelnuovo, Damon Winter, Eric Thayer, Chang W. Lee, Sam Hodgson, Erin Schaff.
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