VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis has died April 21 at the age of 88.
The pope died at 7:35 a.m. Rome time, U.S. Cardinal Kevin J. Farrell, chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, announced. Pope Francis 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.
“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.