With pastor’s touch, Pope Francis preached mercy, embraced ‘peripheries’

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis, who died April 21 at the age of 88 gave new energy to millions of Catholics — and caused concern for some — as he transformed the image of the papacy into a pastoral ministry based on personal encounters and strong convictions about mission, poverty, immigration and dialogue.

U.S. Cardinal Kevin J. Farrell, chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, announced that Pope Francis had died at 7:35 a.m.

“His whole life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and his church,” Cardinal Farrell said in a video announcement broadcast from the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, where Pope Francis lived and where he was recovering from pneumonia and respiratory infections. He had been released from Rome’s Gemelli hospital March 23 after more than five weeks of treatment.

Pope Francis “taught us to live the values of the Gospel with fidelity, courage and universal love, especially in favor of the poorest and most marginalized,” Cardinal Farrell said. “With immense gratitude for his example as a true disciple of the Lord Jesus, we commend the soul of Pope Francis to the infinite merciful love of the Triune God.”

The day before his death, the pope had appeared on the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to give his Easter blessing “urbi et orbi” (to the city and the world). His voice was weak and he had trouble raising his arm to make the sign of the cross, but afterward he got into the popemobile and drove through the crowds in St. Peter’s Square.

Pope Francis was often practical and even poetic when speaking about family life, the environment and ministry in the church, but those also were the areas where he frequently unleashed the perplexity and even ire of some Catholics, who were convinced he was trying to change church teaching or practice.

The initial popularity of his pontificate began to be offset by caution and criticism from some sectors of the church, particularly because of the openness he showed toward gay Catholics and toward divorced and civilly remarried Catholics. While insisting he was not changing church teaching, he also insisted Catholics and their parishes must welcome all people seeking God with a sincere heart.

His insistence at World Youth Day in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2023 that in the church there is room for “todos, todos, todos” — “everyone, everyone, everyone” — became a frequent affirmation for the rest of his pontificate.

The iconic images of Pope Francis’ papacy were photographs of him embracing the sick, washing the feet of prisoners and eating with the poor.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the image switched to photos of Pope Francis, standing alone in an empty St. Peter’s Square in the rain, verbalizing the fear many people felt, calling upon the Lord’s help to end the pandemic and raising a monstrance with the Blessed Sacrament to bless the city and the world.

The first major health scare of his pontificate came in July 2021 when, after reciting the Sunday Angelus, he went to Rome’s Gemelli hospital for what the Vatican said was pre-scheduled colon surgery. The three-hour operation included a left hemicolectomy, the removal of the descending part of the colon, a surgery that can be recommended to treat diverticulitis, when bulging pouches in the lining of the intestine or colon become inflamed or infected. The pope remained in the hospital 10 days.

Two years later, he was back at Gemelli for what the Vatican said was surgery to correct a hernia. He was taken to the hospital June 7 after his weekly general audience.

Throughout his pontificate, he occasionally canceled events because of bouts of sciatica, a sharp pain that radiates along the path of the sciatic nerve from the lower back and down each leg. But, beginning in late December 2020, he also started having difficulty with his right knee. He later said the problem was a torn ligament and, by early May 2022, he was regularly using a wheelchair. The knee problem also forced him to cancel several events and to postpone a trip to Congo and South Sudan, which he finally made Jan. 31-Feb. 5, 2023.

God’s mercy was a constant theme in his preaching and was so central to his vision of what the church’s ministry must embody that he led an extraordinary Holy Year of Mercy in 2015-16.

Elected March 13, 2013, the Argentine cardinal was the first pope in history to come from the Southern Hemisphere and the first non-European elected in almost 1,300 years. The Jesuit was also the first member of his order to be elected pope and the first member of any religious order elected in nearly two centuries.

He spent much of the first nine years of his pontificate pursuing two ambitious projects: revitalizing the church’s efforts at evangelization — constantly urging outreach rather than a preoccupation with internal church affairs — and reforming the central administration of the Vatican, emphasizing its role of assisting bishops around the world rather than dictating policy to them.

His momentum and popularity outside the church seemed to falter in 2018 because of new revelations about the extent of clerical sexual abuse in the church and of bishops’ efforts to cover up the scandal, as well as instances in which, initially, Pope Francis seemed more prone to believe bishops than victims.

Pope Francis’ focus on the pastoral aspect of his ministry, and the ministry of all priests, led him to shed elements of protocol and even safety concerns that would have distanced him from crowds at his public appearances; he kissed thousands of babies, drank the popular Argentine mate herbal tea whenever anyone in the crowd offered it, and tenderly embraced people with disabling or disfiguring ailments.

In the first years of his pontificate, he invited small groups of Catholics — beginning with the Vatican gardeners and garbage collectors — to join him for his early morning Mass in the chapel of his residence, and his short homilies quickly became a primary vehicle for his teaching. With an average congregation of fewer than 50 people, the intimate setting gave the pope the space to minister simply and directly, as most of the world’s priests do.

The morning Masses were livestreamed during the strictest of the COVID-19 lockdowns in the spring of 2020; but in May that year, the Vatican stopped providing any coverage of his daily liturgies.

Eight months after taking office, Pope Francis published his apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii Gaudium” (“The Joy of the Gospel”), a detailed vision of the program for his papacy and his vision for the church — particularly the church’s outreach and its response to challenges posed by secular culture.

Faith, he constantly preached, had to be evident in the way one treated the poor and weakest members of society. He railed against human trafficking and rallied forces inside and outside the church to cooperate in halting the trade in people. Not counting a brief visit to Castel Gandolfo to meet retired Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis’ first trip outside of Rome was to visit migrants — many brought across the Mediterranean by smugglers — in Lampedusa, a southern Italian island just 70 miles from Tunisia.

Although initially he said he did not like to travel and insisted he would not be a globetrotter like St. John Paul II was, he made 47 foreign trips, bringing his close-to-the-people papacy to the centers of global power, but especially to the “peripheries” of the world’s influence and power.

Making his first-ever trip to the United States, Pope Francis visited in September 2015 and became the first pope to address a joint meeting of Congress. Referring to himself as a “son of immigrants” — and pointing out that many of the legislators were, too — he pleaded for greater openness to accepting immigrants. Throughout the trip, planned around the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, he defended marriage and the family, insisted on the sacredness of all human life and urged the people of the United States to work together to help one another and offer hope to the world.

Pope Francis’ simple lifestyle, which included his decision not to live in the Apostolic Palace and his choice of riding around Rome in a small Fiat or Ford Focus instead of a Mercedes sedan, sent a message of austerity to Vatican officials and clergy throughout the church. He reinforced the message with frequent admonitions about the Gospel demands and evangelical witness of poverty and simplicity.

The pope also stressed the importance of collegiality, or consultation with his brother bishops, and established an international Council of Cardinals to advise him on reform of the Vatican bureaucracy and governance of the universal church. The council had as many as nine members, never more than three of whom were Vatican officials.

CLERICAL SEX ABUSE

At the suggestion of the Council of Cardinals, Pope Francis instituted the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, which was led by Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston and included experts in child protection, psychology and survivors of clerical sexual abuse. But like his predecessors, Pope Francis had a checkered record of dealing with the abuse scandal and with allegations of cover-up leveled against bishops.

In early 2018, Pope Francis traveled to Chile and seemed surprised by the cold reception he received. During the trip, he strongly defended now-retired Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno, who had been accused of covering up for a notorious abuser, the late-Father Fernando Karadima. The pope told reporters that the people making accusations were liars.

It was only after he returned to Rome that he sent top investigators to Chile to study the clerical sex abuse scandal there, invited survivors to the Vatican for private meetings and called all the country’s bishops to Rome for a meeting, which ended with most of the bishops offering their resignations.

Even as the Chile drama continued to unfold, the Vatican announced that credible allegations of the sexual abuse of a minor had been made against Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, retired archbishop of Washington. Pope Francis accepted his resignation from the College of Cardinals in July 2018, suspended him from ministry and ordered him to a life of prayer and penance pending a canonical trial. The Vatican’s report on how McCarrick managed to rise to the position of cardinal and archbishop of Washington despite decades of rumors of sexual misconduct finally was released in November 2020.

The Vatican announced six months later that a tribunal of the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith found McCarrick guilty of “solicitation in the sacrament of confession and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power,” and the pope dismissed him from the priesthood.

Pope Francis called the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences, heads of the Eastern Catholic churches and representatives of religious orders to a summit in February 2019 to listen to the voices of abuse survivors, to pray and to understand the obligatory steps every bishop and superior must take when an abuse allegation is made.

Less than three months later, he published “Vos estis lux mundi” (“You are the light of the world”), a document setting out universal procedures for reporting suspected abuse, carrying out initial investigations and protecting victims and whistleblowers. It included procedures for holding bishops and religious superiors accountable and mandated that bishops report to the Vatican all cases of suspected abuse, including possession of child pornography.

In June 2021, he promulgated a revision of the section of the Code of Canon Law dealing with crimes and punishments; the revision made many of the procedures in “Vos estis” a permanent part of church law, made mandatory many of the previously suggested measures for handling allegations and expanded the application of canons dealing with abuse to religious and laypeople who have a role, office or function in the church — not just clergy. He slightly revised “Vos estis” in early 2023 and made its procedures definitive.

BISHOPS, SYNODS AND SAINTS

While acknowledging the suffering many Catholics endured under the communist government in mainland China, the Vatican announced in September 2018 that Pope Francis had approved a provisional agreement with the Chinese government on the nomination of bishops. The agreement, while hailed by some as a step toward unifying the Catholic community in China and normalizing Catholic life there, was seen by critics, including a retired cardinal from Hong Kong, as a betrayal of Catholics who risked their lives to avoid cooperating with the communist government.

The Vatican and China renewed the agreement for another two years in October 2020, 2022 and 2024.

The world Synod of Bishops was given greater prominence under Pope Francis, who continued the reforms begun by Pope Benedict to ensure it was a real forum for discussion and not just a place to make speeches.

Pope Francis called two gatherings of the Synod of Bishops to focus on the pastoral care of the family. The first, an extraordinary synod, was in October 2014, and a larger gathering met at the Vatican a year later. Although most media attention was focused on proposals to make it easier for some divorced and civilly remarried couples to return to the sacraments, Pope Francis insisted the agenda was much larger.

“The Lord is asking us to care for the family, which has been, from the beginning, an integral part of his loving plan for humanity,” he told participants at the opening Mass for the 2014 gathering.

In March 2016, Pope Francis published his post-synodal apostolic exhortation, “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), which insisted that because each family that has experienced brokenness has a different story, those differences must be considered when determining if such couples eventually can access the sacraments.

The synod met again in October 2018 to focus on young people, the faith and vocational discernment. Just five months later, Pope Francis released “Christus Vivit” (“Christ Lives”), a combination letter to young people about their place in the church and a plea to older members of the church not to stifle the enthusiasm of the young, but to offer gentle guidance when needed.

His next synod was the special gathering in October 2019 focused on the Amazon and on ways to provide pastoral care to a widely scattered flock while protecting the region’s Indigenous people and safeguarding the environment.

The pope’s reflection on the synod, “Querida Amazonia” (“Beloved Amazonia”) was released less than four months later and contained few concrete ideas for action. Instead, Pope Francis called Catholics to work together to realize the “dreams” of an Amazon region where the rights of the poor and Indigenous are respected, local cultures are preserved, nature is protected, and the Catholic Church is present and active with “Amazonian features.”

In October 2021, Pope Francis launched a two-year process of listening on the local, diocesan and national levels in preparation for a synod focused on working “For a synodal church: communion, participation and mission.”

While maintaining the synod’s identity as a meeting primarily of bishops from around the world, the pope expanded the participation by naming several dozen laypeople — women and men — as voting members of the synod, which met in both October 2023 and October 2024. The full participation of non-bishops was not the only innovation: the first gathering was preceded by an ecumenical prayer vigil and a three-day retreat. The assembly was moved to the Paul VI Audience where members sat at round tables and practiced “conversations in the Spirit,” giving each person a chance to speak without interruption and time for prayer before discussing what was heard.

Between the two synod assemblies, Pope Francis took off the table, at least temporarily, some of the more complex, sensitive issues raised in the listening sessions and at the first synod assembly in 2023. Instead, he set up 10 study groups to look at issues such as ministry by women, seminary education, relations between bishops and religious communities and the role of nuncios; the groups were asked to work on proposals to give the pope by June 2025.

He told synod members those questions required more time, but he promised that “this is not the classical way of postponing decisions indefinitely.”

Pope Francis made exceptional use of “equivalent canonizations” — the practice of simply declaring a holy person a saint based on widespread devotion to him or her, but without the normal requirement of verifying a miracle attributable to the candidate’s intercession. In the first 13 months of his pontificate, Pope Francis used the formula to create five new saints, including one of his favorite Jesuits, St. Peter Faber, a 16th-century priest who was one of the founding members of the Society of Jesus.

He also waived the requirement of a miracle needed for the canonization of Pope John XXIII, who opened the Second Vatican Council, and proclaimed him a saint along with Pope John Paul II. He named several modern-day saints, including Sts. Oscar Romero and Teresa of Kolkata. And he announced would canonize Blessed Carlo Acutis, a teenaged tech whiz, April 27 during the special Jubilee for Adolescents.

When the pope died, the Vatican had not immediately announced what would happen with the canonization or the jubilee events.

Pope Francis insisted being holy is not boring or impossible, and that it grows through small, daily gestures and acts of loving kindness. Holiness was the topic of his third apostolic exhortation, “Gaudete et Exsultate” (“Rejoice and Be Glad”), published in March 2018.

EARLY YEARS

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital city, Dec. 17, 1936. His father was an immigrant from northwestern Italy and his mother an Argentine of Italian origin. He was especially close to his paternal grandmother, whom he later credited with inspiring his “journey of faith.”

As a teenager, the future pope swept floors in a factory, ran tests in a chemical laboratory and worked as a bouncer in a bar. When he was 21, he suffered a severe infection, and doctors removed the upper half of his right lung.

He earned a chemical technician’s diploma from his high school and entered the Jesuit novitiate in March 1958. After studying liberal arts in Santiago, Chile, he returned to Argentina and earned his licentiate in philosophy from the Colegio San Jose in San Miguel. Between 1964 and 1965, he was a teacher of literature and psychology at Inmaculada high school in the province of Santa Fe, and, in 1966, he taught the same courses at the prestigious Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires.

SOCIETY OF JESUS

In 1967, he returned to his theological studies and was ordained a priest Dec. 13, 1969. He later recounted that he wanted to serve as a missionary in Japan, but that his superiors refused because of his medical history.

After his perpetual profession as a Jesuit in 1973, he became master of novices at the Seminary of Villa Barilari in San Miguel. Later that same year, he was appointed superior of the Jesuit province of Argentina, a role in which by his own account he proved a divisive figure.

“I was only 36 years old. That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself,” he recalled four decades later, in an interview as pope. “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative.”

Controversy later arose over his stance during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship, which cracked down brutally on political opponents. Estimates of the number of people killed and forcibly disappeared during those years range from about 13,000 to more than 30,000.

Citing a case in which two young priests were detained by the military regime, critics said then-Father Bergoglio, as Jesuit provincial, did not do enough to support church workers against the military dictatorship. Others countered that he had negotiated behind the scenes for the two priests’ release.

During this period, the future pope ran a clandestine network that sheltered or shuttled to safety people whose lives were in danger because of the nation’s military-backed dictatorship. According to witnesses, the future pope never let on to anyone what he was doing, and those who helped him find rides or temporary housing for “guests” never realized until years later that they had been part of his secret strategy.

After his term as provincial, he returned to San Miguel as a teacher at the Jesuit school, a job rarely taken by a former provincial superior. In 1986, following a few months of study in Germany, he was sent to serve as spiritual director to Jesuits in the central Argentine city of Cordoba, where he went through what he later called a “time of great interior crisis.”

BISHOP AND CARDINAL

In May 1992, Father Bergoglio was called back to Buenos Aires to serve as one of the archdiocese’s three auxiliary bishops. He kept a low profile in the job, spending most of his time in ministry at the local Catholic university, counseling priests and preaching and hearing confessions.

He was named coadjutor archbishop in 1997 and became archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998; Pope John Paul II named him to the College of Cardinals three years later.

As leader of an archdiocese with more than 2.5 million Catholics, Cardinal Bergoglio strove to be close to the people. He rode the bus, visited the poor, lived in a simple apartment and cooked his own meals. Many of his flock continued to refer to their cardinal-archbishop as “Father Jorge.”

The cardinal reached out to leaders of other religions in his multicultural city, most notably Rabbi Abraham Skorka, with whom he co-hosted a television show and co-authored a book addressing a range of moral, cultural and social topics. Rabbi Skorka and Omar Abboud, a Muslim leader from Buenos Aires, later became the first non-Christian leaders to join a papal entourage when Pope Francis had them accompany him during his May 2014 visit to the Holy Land.

As cardinal, he was one of the presidents of the 2001 Synod of Bishops, which focused on the role of bishops in the church, and was elected to the synod council, bringing him to the attention of fellow bishops around the world.

His international reputation was enhanced by his work at the 2007 assembly of the Latin American bishops’ council, CELAM, and particularly by his role as head of the committee that drafted the gathering’s final document on reforming and reinvigorating the church’s evangelizing efforts on the continent.

A SURPRISE CHOICE

Cardinal Bergoglio was a known and respected figure within the College of Cardinals, so much so that no one disputed a respected Italian journal’s report that he received the second-highest number of votes on all four ballots cast in the 2005 conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI.

In retrospect, that result made him an obvious candidate at the conclave after Pope Benedict’s resignation eight years later, yet few commentators focused on him in the run-up to the event, particularly because of his age.

While Pope Benedict cited his declining energy in his resignation announcement, many people speculated that it also was tied to the scandal that had erupted over revelations of corruption and incompetence at the Vatican. At the cardinals’ meetings prior to the 2013 conclave, the need to reform the Vatican bureaucracy was a common theme of concern.

But Cardinal Bergoglio’s concerns were broader and more fundamental than problems of administration. In a speech to the gathering, he warned against “self-referentiality and a kind of theological narcissism” in the church and argued the next pope “must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the church to go out to the existential peripheries” to spread the Gospel.

His election March 13 came on the second day of the conclave, on its fifth ballot, a surprisingly quick conclusion to an election that apparently had begun with no clear favorite.

A NEW STYLE OF BEING POPE

The surprises continued at a fast rate, among them the new pope’s choice of name, which he later explained was intended to honor St. Francis of Assisi, “the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation.”

Pope Francis’ very first words to the crowd in a rainy St. Peter’s Square were disarmingly informal: “Buona sera” (“good evening”). Many noted that he was wearing only his white papal cassock without the traditional ermine-trimmed, red velvet cape called a mozzetta, which his predecessors had worn on the same occasion. Before bestowing his traditional blessing, he bowed and asked for the blessing of the crowd. In an interview later, he said he had not prepared what he would say or do, but “I felt deeply that a minister needs the blessing of God, but also of his people.”

Under his watch, the papal charities office increased its outreach, particularly to the homeless who live near the Vatican. Sleeping bags were handed out at Christmas, showers were installed in the public bathrooms in St. Peter’s Square and a special, private tour of the Vatican Gardens and Vatican Museums was arranged.

Like St. John Paul used to do, Pope Francis also insisted on personally administering the sacrament of reconciliation. Making parish visits in Rome, he arrived early to meet with the parish council, parents of recently baptized babies and usually a group involved in charitable work. But before celebrating Mass, he always left time to hear confessions.

Still, it apparently was a complete surprise, even to Pope Francis’ closest aides, when, at a penance service in 2014 in St. Peter’s Basilica, instead of going to the confessional to hear confessions, he turned and knelt at another confessional to receive absolution first.

He also set aside the usual practice of washing the feet of 12 priests during a public celebration of the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper. Instead, he celebrated smaller Masses — closed to the public — and washed the feet of Catholic and non-Catholic youths at a juvenile detention facility in 2013. Ten years later, he returned to the same jail to wash the feet of young men and women.

For four of the next six years, he celebrated the Mass at Italian prisons, including two in Rome, one in Paliano and one in Velletri. In 2014, he washed the feet of people with severe physical handicaps at a rehabilitation center, and in 2016, he celebrated the liturgy and foot-washing ritual at a center for migrants and refugees.

In early January 2016, the then-Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments issued a formal decree at the pope’s request, changing the rubrics of the Roman Missal, which mention only men having their feet washed. Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman at the time, said the pope wanted to highlight “this dimension of the gesture of Christ’s love for all.”

A NEW APPROACH TO EVANGELIZATION

“Go out” was Pope Francis’ constant plea to every Catholic, from curial cardinals to the people in the pews. More than once, he told people that while the Bible presents Jesus as knocking at the door of people’s hearts to get in, today Jesus is knocking at the doors of parish churches trying to get out and among the people.

In the early years of his papacy, his daily homilies at Mass in the chapel of his residence were summarized by Vatican news outlets and became key vehicles for helping Catholics live and share their faith in word and in deeds. But even his more formal homilies at large liturgies were relatively simple and conversational.

A large section of “Evangelii Gaudium” was devoted to suggestions for improving priests’ homilies, which he said were all too often moralistic, disorganized and long-winded.

Pope Francis’ criticisms of clergy did not stop there; he warned priests against a “business mentality, caught up with management, statistics, plans and evaluations” and “ostentatious preoccupation with the liturgy, doctrine and the church’s prestige.”

While he stressed God’s limitless mercy and readiness to forgive, the pope was unsparing in denouncing Christians for “enmity, division, calumny, defamation, vendetta, jealousy and the desire to impose certain ideas at all costs, and even persecutions which appear as veritable witch hunts. Whom are we going to evangelize if this is the way we act?”

Pope Francis also sought to correct what he saw as an overemphasis on certain moral teachings at the expense of the essential Gospel message.

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” the pope told an interviewer. “The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear, and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”

The interview was published about a month after he told reporters, “A gay person who is seeking God, who is of goodwill — well, who am I to judge him?”

Some critics saw the statements as dangerous signs of leniency, but even if he did so less frequently than his immediate predecessors, Pope Francis also taught about those moral issues. For example, meeting Catholic physicians in November 2014, he insisted that in “the light of faith and the light of correct reason, human life is always sacred and always of ‘quality.’ There is no human life that is more sacred than another” and no “human life qualitatively more significant than another.”

He also constantly urged support for the traditional family and, as he did during a talk at the Vatican in November 2014, insisted “children have the right to grow up in a family with a father and mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child’s development and emotional maturity.”

SPEAKING OUT FOR THE POOR AND THE PERSECUTED

“How I would like a church that is poor and that is for the poor,” Pope Francis told reporters three days after his election and, from the start, he made economic justice one of his major themes.

“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills,” he wrote in “Evangelii Gaudium.”

Pope Francis’ blunt language about the deadly impact of the “idolatry of money” and an economic model without moral constraints or obligatory sharing led to some extreme reactions, including accusations that he was a Marxist or a socialist.

He responded that he was just trying to be a Christian. “When money, instead of man, is at the center of the system, when money becomes an idol, men and women are reduced to simple instruments of a social and economic system, which is characterized — or better yet, dominated — by profound inequalities,” he said in an interview.

In the modern world, the earth itself is one of the poor as it faces the threat of pollution and destruction, he wrote in his 2015 encyclical letter, “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home.”

Pope Francis cited “a very strong scientific consensus” recognizing global warming and how human activity seriously contributes to it. He said all who believe in God and all people of goodwill have an obligation to take steps to mitigate climate change, clean the land and the seas, and start treating all of creation — including the unborn and the poor — with respect and concern.

As a follow-up to “Laudato Si’,” and with a view to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai, the pope published “Laudate Deum” (“Praise God”) in October 2023. He insisted on the importance of listening to the scientific community and on the need to build an inclusive culture of caring for the common home through personal action and national and international institutions.

Just as he turned to St. Francis of Assisi’s love for creation in “Laudato Si’,” he turned to the saint’s teaching on “fraternal openness” for his encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti, on Fraternity and Social Friendship,” signed at the tomb of the Assisi saint and released on the saint’s feast day, Oct. 4, 2020.

Believing in God as creator of all people carries with it an obligation “to acknowledge, appreciate and love each person, regardless of physical proximity, regardless of where he or she was born or lives,” he wrote.

Of course, the pope expressed his concern for the poor not only in words but through gestures such as celebrating his birthday with homeless people and insisting that a visit — and often a meal — with people assisted by a Catholic charity be part of most of his trips within Italy and abroad.

For Pope Francis, helping the defenseless also meant paying special attention to prisoners, victims of war and, particularly, Christians and other religious minorities persecuted for their faith.

Meeting in October 2014 with an international criminal law group, Pope Francis said, “All Christians and people of goodwill are called today to work not only for abolition of the death penalty — whether it be legal or illegal and in all its forms — but also to improve prison conditions out of respect for the human dignity of persons deprived of their liberty. And this, I connect with life imprisonment. ... Life imprisonment is a hidden death penalty.”

In August 2018, saying he was building on the development of Catholic Church teaching against capital punishment, Pope Francis ordered a revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to assert “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and to commit the church to working toward its abolition worldwide.

Throughout his papacy, Pope Francis continued the tradition of popes being an untiring voice for peace, urging an end to armed conflict, supporting dialogue and encouraging reconciliation. He called Russia’s war on Ukraine “madness” and called on the world’s bishops to join him in consecrating Ukraine and Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. He was vocal in seeking peace for Ukraine and throughout the Middle East, and he worked with Anglican and Presbyterian leaders for peace in South Sudan, visiting Juba with the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury and the moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in February.

REFORMING THE VATICAN

Elected with a mandate to reform the Roman Curia, Pope Francis told the College of Cardinals in February 2015, “The aim to reach is that of promoting greater harmony” and collaboration among Vatican offices “with the absolute transparency that builds up authentic synodality and collegiality,” or shared responsibility for the good of the whole church. “The reform is not an end in itself, but a way to give a strong Christian witness, to promote more effective evangelization, a more fruitful ecumenical spirit and encourage a more constructive dialogue with all.”

Just two months earlier, the pope grabbed people’s attention when he turned his traditional Christmas talk to curial officials into an exercise for them in the “examination of conscience.” He asked them to think about how they might have fallen prey to a host of spiritual ills, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” “existential schizophrenia,” seeking publicity, the “terrorism of gossip” and even a poor sense of humor.

On March 19, 2022, the ninth anniversary of the inauguration of his papacy, he finally promulgated “Praedicate Evangelium” (“Preach the Gospel”), his complete restructuring of central church offices to emphasize the church’s missionary focus and the Curia’s role as assisting the pope and local bishops.

Pope Francis also launched investigations of the Vatican’s accounting practices and the Vatican bank and expanded the reach of Vatican City laws against money laundering and the financing of terrorism.