The death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, at his residence in the Casa Santa Marta, in Vatican City, marks more than the end of a papacy — it signals the loss of one of the last global moral voices willing to name power by name.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first Latin American, first Jesuit and first non-European pope in over a millennium, died at 7.35 at the age of 88, leaving the Vatican — and the wider world — at a crossroads.
Elected in March 2013 as Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, his 12‑year papacy reoriented the Catholic Church toward the margins — residing in a guesthouse, decrying the “dung of the devil” in unbridled capitalism and elevating climate justice, migrant rights and the dignity of LGBTQ+ people. His humility and insistence on solidarity made him an emblem of conscience precisely when authoritarianism and ethno‑nationalism have surged worldwide.
Over the 12 years, Francis harnessed the pulpit of St Peter’s Basilica to champion causes that too often hindered on the altar of expediency. He condemned unbridled capitalism as the “dung of the devil”, decried the dehumanising logic of Fortress Europe and gave institutional weight to climate justice, economic equality, and the rights of migrants and LGBTQ+ people. His encyclical Laudato Si’ — a letter sent to all bishops of the church — reframed ecological collapse as a moral crisis; his unprecedented call for civil unions signalled a church slowly inching toward tenderness over dogma; his forthright denunciations of colonial violence — most notably in Palestine and Indigenous Canada — revealed a pontiff unafraid to confront history’s bleeding wounds.
A bridge between faiths: Al‑Azhar and human fraternity
Francis’s legacy extended far beyond Catholicism. On 16 October 2018, he received Grand Imam Ahmad al‑Tayyeb of Al‑Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, at Casa Santa Marta, an encounter meant to heal centuries of mistrust between Christianity and Sunni Islam. A few months later, at the Abu Dhabi Interfaith Forum on 4 February 2019, they signed the Document on Human Fraternity — a blueprint for “peaceful coexistence and dialogue” that envisioned religion as a force against violence and division.
In Najaf, Iraq : A call to coexistence
His historic 6 March 6 2021 pilgrimage to Iraq brought him to the humble home of Grand Ayatollah Ali al‑Sistani in Najaf. In that closed‑door meeting, Francis urged Iraq’s Shia leadership to protect the country’s beleaguered Christian minority and to embrace pluralism in the cradle of Abrahamic faiths. It was a living affirmation that true ecumenism demands not mere tolerance but mutual responsibility.
A final insult at the Holy Sepulchre
In his final days, Francis’s symbolic reach extended even to occupied Jerusalem — where, on 18 April 2025, Israeli police erected checkpoints around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, barring thousands of Palestinian Christians from the Holy Fire ceremony and, most egregiously, denying entry to Archbishop Adolfo Tito Yllana, the apostolic delegate and Vatican ambassador to Palestine. This militarised blockade stands as a last, bitter insult — a desecration not just of sacred stone but of the very spirit of Francis’s plea for “fragile peace” in the Holy Land.
Succession amid rising reaction
Now, as the College of Cardinals prepares to enter conclave no sooner than 6 May, the question looms — will Rome install a cautious caretaker or a successor bold enough to continue Francis’s prophetic discomfort? With nationalist strongmen from Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and a possible US President Donald Trump redux capitalising on religious tribalism, the next pontiff’s stance on empire and inequality will carry immense weight.
The rituals that follow his death — sealed apartments, funerary rites, the fumigation of St Peter’s — culminate in a vote that could either entrench a retreat to centrist acquiescence or sustain a challenge to the world’s rising right-wing currents.
His death, however, arrives at a moment of acute peril. Gaza’s children lie beneath the rubble of relentless bombardment; the Sahel and Sudan fracture under proxy wars; nationalist strongmen from Modi to Meloni to Trump traffic in xenophobia and religious tribalism. In a political landscape where spiritual authority has often ceded ground to ethno-nationalist idolatry, Francis stood as one of the few global figures to articulate the interlocking crises of empire, ecology and inequality. Without him, the temptation for the Vatican to retreat into centrist caution grows more real.
Yet Rome’s ancient bureaucracy now faces its greatest test: the conclave. Under Universi Dominici Gregis, cardinals may begin voting no sooner than 6 May — 15 days after the sede vacante — and must choose whether to replenish the papal throne with a quiet moderate or a successor bold enough to keep naming systemic sin. Will the College of Cardinals honour Francis’s legacy of prophetic discomfort, or will they retreat to the safety of the pre‑Francis status quo?
In the vacuum left by his death, it falls to progressive movements and communities of conscience — rooted in anti-colonial struggle — to amplify the questions Francis raised. If the next pope fails to speak truth to empire, then let us raise our voices from below, insisting that faith without justice is a hollow ritual and that silence in the face of atrocity is complicity.
Francis’s white cassock may be folded away but the moral demands he laid upon us remain — to choose solidarity over indifference, to challenge the forces that commodify human lives and to believe that another world — one built on equity, compassion and shared stewardship of this planet — is still possible. In that hope, his legacy endures.
Ali Ridha Khan is a fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape.
