VATICAN CITY—Pope Francis, who sought to refocus the Catholic Church on promoting social and economic justice rather than traditional moral teachings but presided over growing divisions in the church and struggled with the lingering scandal of clerical sex abuse, has died. He was 88.
The pope’s death, announced by the Vatican, came after he spent weeks in the hospital earlier this year to treat a serious bout of pneumonia. His health remained fragile after he returned to his residence in the Vatican.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a pope of firsts. He was the first pope from the Americas, the first from the Jesuit order, and the first to take the name Francis. He was the first in almost six centuries to become pope after his predecessor resigned. Francis also gave the papacy a less formal and more approachable image by spurning regal attire, riding in compact cars and making headlines with blunt comments at news conferences.
He was openly political, urging grassroots activists around the world to bridge the gap between rich and poor while calling on wealthier countries to better protect the environment. As Western politicians moved to close their borders to refugees, Francis advocated for them and
other migrants. In February, he criticized President Trump’s plan for mass deportations.
He maintained a neutral stance on the war in Ukraine, deploring the suffering of Ukrainians but avoiding direct condemnation of Russia and suggesting that the West had provoked the conflict.
Francis’ policy of playing down traditional church teachings on marriage and homosexuality—his most famous single remark was a rhetorical question about gay priests: “Who am I to judge?”—cheered liberals while distressing conservative Catholics, including many bishops in the U.S. But he stopped short of relaxing rules on celibacy for Roman Catholic priests, disappointing progressive bishops in Latin America and elsewhere who argued that it would remedy shortages of clergy.
Francis endorsed zero tolerance for priests who sexually abuse children, but victims and their supporters said he didn’t do enough to tackle the problem. In the biggest scandal of his pontificate, a former Vatican diplomat publicly accused him of turning a blind eye to sexual misconduct by a U.S. cardinal and called on him to resign.
Francis’ decisions over whom to appoint as cardinals—the men who will elect his successor—were notably strategic. He passed over prominent conservative bishops installed by his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI in dioceses such as Los Angeles and Venice, and appointed others from places such as Tonga and Laos, far from the church’s major population centers. By the time of his death, the pope had named about two-thirds of the cardinal electors. A two-thirds majority of electors is required to select the next pope.
Whether the next pope pursues or diverges from Francis’ agenda, the tensions and polarization that grew under his stewardship are likely to persist across the church.
He was born on Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires the first of five children of an Italian immigrant father and an Argentine woman of Italian origin. He studied at a vocational high school with a focus on chemistry and worked occasionally as a doorman in local bars, where he was known as a proficient tango dancer.
Just shy of his 17th birthday, he felt an urge to enter a church and confess his sins. When he later decided to become a priest, his mother objected, telling him she hoped he would pursue a medical career. He told her that he would be studying the “medicine of the soul.”
After joining the Jesuits, an order that emphasized social justice, the future pope volunteered for missionary work in Japan but was turned down, he later said, because he had lost part of his right lung to pneumonia at the age of 20. He was ordained a priest in 1969 and four years later was named the provincial, or leader, of Argentina’s Jesuits at the extraordinarily young age of 36.
Bergoglio was still serving in that role when a military dictatorship took over Argentina in 1976. His record in that period would weigh on him for years to come. Some accused him of having collaborated with the junta’s “dirty war” against its political opponents, including two Jesuits who were kidnapped and tortured for several months.
Nobel peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a former political prisoner of the dictatorship, later exonerated Francis of complicity with the regime and credited him with quiet diplomacy on behalf of its victims.
The pope himself acknowledged criticisms of his record, pointing to his tendency to make quick decisions. After making enemies within the Jesuit order, for which he blamed his authoritarian manner, he was transferred to the city of Córdoba, more than 400 miles from the capital Buenos Aires, where he spent two years. He later described this as a time of “great interior crisis.”
His exile ended in 1992 when his friend Cardinal Antonio Quarracino convinced Pope John Paul II to appoint him as one of Buenos Aires’s auxiliary bishops. When the cardinal died in early 1998, Bergoglio succeeded him as leader of the city’s Catholics, and he became a cardinal in 2001.
During 2019, Francis responded to criticism with a number of high-profile initiatives against sexual abuse. They included a global summit of bishops on the topic, rules to make it easier to discipline bishops who abuse or cover up abuse, and a relaxation of secrecy rules for church documents relating to abuse, making it easier for church officials to cooperate with police and prosecutors. However, advocates for abuse victims criticized the process for investigating and disciplining bishops as lacking in transparency.
But Francis’ biggest legacy for the church could be his focus on social and economic issues, especially in the global south. Whether that continues will depend on how the coming papal conclave votes. If so, it would be a fitting legacy for a pope who described himself as coming from the “ends of the earth.”
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