Pope Francis delivers his annual ‘State of the World’ address to members of the Vatican diplomatic corps in January. (Photo: The Vatican)
Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 1936, died on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, aged 88.
The symbolism was impossible to ignore: the head of the Catholic Church died at the heart of its most sacred weekend—Easter, the ancient commemoration of suffering, death, and resurrection.
In a faith built on ritual and meaning, this death echoed with a deeper clarity. His papacy, too, had been a resurrection of sorts—of justice, humility, and the throne of Peter held by a man who began his work as a priest in the shanty towns, the villas miserias, of Buenos Aires.
Francis was not perfect. He led an institution that has committed and concealed horrors across centuries.
The Church under his watch still denied the ordination of women, still faltered in dealing with abuse, still allowed its conservative flank to rail against queerness, migrants, and liberation theology.
But what Francis did do, more than any pope in living memory, was to refuse the version of Catholicism that ingratiates itself with the powerful while abandoning the poor.
To understand his significance, one must understand the institution he inherited. The papacy is not just a spiritual role. It is one of the longest-standing political offices in the world.
For over a millennium, the Catholic Church has held land, crowned emperors, bankrolled crusades, and blessed colonial conquest. It helped codify European empire and white supremacy under the cross. Even in the 20th century, parts of the Church hierarchy sided with fascism.
The Vatican signed a concordat with Nazi Germany in 1933, and senior clerics remained complicit in Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy. Pope Pius XII, Francis’s wartime predecessor was widely criticised for his silence during the Holocaust.
It’s in this context that Francis’s background matters. He was the first pope from outside Europe since Pope Gelasius I, the third African pope, in the late 5th century, and the first Jesuit to hold the office. The Jesuits—intellectual, often radical, and historically expelled from multiple countries for their political commitments—stood apart in a Church dominated for centuries by a conservative European aristocracy.
His Italian parents had fled fascism, and he came of age during Argentina’s Dirty War, a period of state terrorism marked by forced disappearances and torture. His role during that time was complex—he has been accused of both complicity via silence and quiet resistance—but it undeniably shaped his understanding of political power and institutional failure.
As pope, Francis made it clear that Catholicism could no longer serve empire. He spoke not in the language of doctrine but of solidarity.
“The poor,” he said, “are at the centre of the Gospel.” As a young Jesuit in Argentina during the 1970s he was wary of liberation theology in its most radical, Marxist forms. Yet despite this early caution, Bergoglio lived an austere life and his pastoral practice gradually converged with the “preferential option for the poor,” the moral heart of liberation theology.
In 2013, he quietly welcomed Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian founder of liberation theology, to the Vatican—an act that would have been unthinkable under previous pontificates. Most significantly, he canonised Archbishop Óscar Romero in 2018, honouring the Salvadoran martyr who had long been a symbol of liberation theology and whose sainthood had been stalled by conservative resistance.
His support for the poor was in support for the spirit of what liberation theology calls the ‘protagonism’ of the poor. He was close to the movement of the landless in Brazil, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). He invited S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo to the Vatican for a personal audience.
Francis condemned capitalism as the “dung of the devil,” warned that neoliberalism was “an economy that kills”. He insisted that environmental destruction was a spiritual and political crime. His encyclical Laudato Si’ placed climate justice at the centre of Catholic teaching, linking ecological collapse with inequality, imperialism, and greed.
Francis openly supported same-sex civil unions, challenged patriarchal theology, and reformed Church governance to give lay people—especially women—greater roles, even if full equality remained far off. He washed the feet of Muslim refugees and embraced undocumented migrants in Lampedusa while European leaders debated how best to drown them in the Mediterranean.
That said, his position on LGBTQ+ inclusion requires nuance. While Francis’s outreach was historic in tone and emphasis, he did not alter Church doctrine.
His significance lies not in what he changed theologically—but in how he shifted the Church’s posture. In 2013, he famously said “Who am I to judge?” when asked about gay priests, signalling a departure from the harsh rhetoric of the past. In 2020, he publicly endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples, saying they deserved legal protection.
However, he did not endorse same-sex marriage, and the Catechism continued to describe homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered.”
The Vatican’s doctrinal office even rebuked efforts to bless same-sex unions in 2021. Yet under Francis, the conversation moved from moral condemnation to one centred on dignity, protection, and inclusion—a shift of real consequence in a Church that spans progressive orders and parishes on one hand, and violently homophobic states on the other.
Francis stood unequivocally for Palestinians. He repeatedly condemned the occupation, called for a Palestinian state, and referred to Israeli actions in Gaza as violations of international law and human dignity. In 2023, he decried the bombing of hospitals and refugee camps in Rafah and reminded the world that peace without justice is not peace, it’s domination.
His voice on Palestine cut through the complicity of most world leaders—including many Church officials who still carry the colonial DNA of missionisation and settler theology.
As his health deteriorated in early 2025, Francis remained politically sharp. He did not shy away from criticising those in power. Even in his final months, he warned that “leaders who build walls and lie about compassion” were dragging humanity backwards.
It was an obvious rebuke to Donald Trump—whose second presidency has been marked by an escalation of the racism and fascist inflections as his first. Francis had long criticised Trump’s nationalism, climate denial, and treatment of migrants, once suggesting that a man who builds walls “is not Christian.”
In his final days, with pneumonia sapping his breath, the Vatican became a theatre for vultures. Perhaps the most grotesque moment was the intrusion by U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who forced himself into a photo-op with the dying pontiff.
Francis, barely able to sit up, was clearly exhausted and ill. Vance knelt beside him for the cameras. It was a calculated political move—part of the American right’s ongoing effort to claim moral legitimacy while gutting it from the inside. In that moment, the world saw clearly what Francis had always warned against: that power without empathy is desecration.
None of this is to canonise the man. Francis did not overturn centuries of patriarchy. He did not end the institutional protection of abusers. He left too much in the hands of bishops who despise his vision.
The Church remains, in many ways, conservative, hierarchical, and slow to transform. His predecessor, Benedict XVI—formerly Joseph Ratzinger—was in the Hitler Youth as a teenager and later served as the Vatican’s doctrinal enforcer. The shadows of that history remain.
But Francis changed the Church’s posture. He forced it to look outward. He reminded millions that Christianity is not a fortress, but a call—to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and confront the Pharaohs of our time. It is, as anyone who has read the gospel of Luke knows, a call to solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. Francis positioned the Vatican, for a moment, not above the world, but among the dispossessed.
He was not a saint. He was something harder, and more necessary: a contradiction willing to be questioned. A man of power who attained great power but often sided with those who have none.
The question that now confronts the Church is what, and who, comes next. If anything rises from his passing, let it be the politics of the excluded. Not another saviour, but a renewed commitment to justice, carried by those he believed in most—ordinary people.