Francis, trailblazing ‘Pope of the Peripheries’

According to custom, a freshly-elected pope imparts the Apostolic Blessing on the faithful from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica.

But, after addressing the thousands of people gathered in St. Peter’s Square the evening of March 13, 2013, the man just introduced as Pope Francis asked them to bless him.

It was only the first of many signs that this pontificate would have a unique feel. Just after 12 years, that pontificate has now come to an end.

It a stroke of providence, the traditional blessing usually offered upon election was the last thing Pope Francis gave his flock. On Easter Sunday, April 20, with a strained voice, he wished the thousands in St. Peter's a good Easter, and then gave the apostolic "urbi et orbi" blessing. He then took a tour through the crowd in the popemobile, for the first time since his February 14 hospitalization. While the Pope was clearly not "back to normal" after his 38 days in hospital and two close calls, his death on Easter Monday morning was not expected.

So the pope who began with a surprise concluded with a surprise.

Indeed, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio continued to surprise the world in the first hours and days of his pontificate. The new Vicar of Christ took a minibus with some of the cardinals who had just elected him back to the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican apartment complex where the cardinals were staying during the conclave and which would become his official residence. The next day, he returned to the Paul VI International House, a residence for foreign clergy visiting Rome, to get his luggage. He insisted on paying the bill for his room where he had stayed before entering the conclave. 

Francis, who died April 21 at the age of 88, would go on to use the power of image and example to teach. 

He was both a pope of surprises and a pope of many firsts: the first member of the Society of Jesus – the Jesuits – to be elected to the Chair of St. Peter; the first to take the name Francis; the first to be called to the See of Rome from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere.

As well, Pope Francis was the first in many centuries to be elected before the death of his predecessor. His election came two weeks after Pope Benedict XVI resigned the office. Pope Emeritus Benedict would go on to live almost another 10 years, residing in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery at the Vatican.

Not a few countries experienced their first papal visit when Francis went to:

He was the first pope in history to celebrate a papal Mass on the Arabian peninsula.

In August 2023, at nearly 87, he became the oldest sitting pope in history to travel abroad when he flew to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia – another country that had never been visited by a pope. 

In June 2024, he became the first pope to attend a Group of Seven meeting, when Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni invited him to take part in the gathering of leaders from the US, UK, and other countries. The Pope delivered a speech about the dangers of artificial intelligence at the meeting.

The “virtual” world, too, was well-traveled by Francis. He continued his immediate predecessor's embrace of the World Wide Web as a forum for evangelization, becoming the first pope to create an Instagram account. He was also the first to pen an op-ed article for The New York Times.

A phrase he used early in his time as pope may actually come to be known as words by which his pontificate will be remembered, at least by some. Speaking to young people gathered in Rio de Janeiro in 2013 for World Youth Day, on his first foreign apostolic journey, he urged them to – as he expressed it in his native Spanish – ”hagan lio,” which roughly translates as “make a mess,” or better, “stir things up.”

To the chagrin of some and the delight of many, he did just that over the next 12 years. In so many ways, such as often abandoning a written text in favor of off-the-cuff remarks, or ignoring certain protocols, Francis shook up the Catholic Church. 

But he also directed attention, in various ways, to aspects of the Gospel that need repeating in our technological age. Major themes of the Francis papacy included a fresh emphasis on mercy; the dignity of migrants, refugees, and others considered “undesirable” (such at the unborn and the elderly), protection of the natural environment, and Church reform. 

In 2015, he proclaimed a Jubilee Year of Mercy and commissioned so-called Missionaries of Mercy – priests from various parts of the world, recommended by their bishops, who are to be “living signs of the Father’s readiness to welcome those in search of his pardon.”

He continued using the Synod of Bishops, an institution that Pope St. Paul VI had created, but expanded its membership to include lay people. He used it to examine the possibility of making the Church more “synodal,” changing the way the institution deliberates and makes decisions.

In the foreword to a 2024 book by biographer Austen Ivereigh, Francis wrote that as pope, he wanted to “encourage our belonging ‘first’ to God, and then to creation and to our fellow human beings, especially to those who cry out to us.” 

From the beginning of his pontificate, Francis insisted that the Church needs to become less self-referential and to “get out of the sacristy.” He condemned clericalism and urged bishops, priests, and faithful to go to the margins of society, to seek out people, to see the Church as a field hospital for the healing of souls. He sought to convey the message that no one should feel excluded from the love and mercy of God.

And yet, some felt alienated by some of his actions. He responded to those who sought clarity on some of his statements as “rigorists” and criticized so-called “traditionalists.”

With his motu proprio letter Tradiciones Custodes, Francis canceled the broad permission that Benedict XVI had granted to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass, expressing concern that it was being used to cause divisions in certain local churches.

While publicly welcoming to his office those who minister to Catholics who are marginalized because they live in sinful lifestyles, particularly those with homosexual tendencies, some presented the Pope as snubbing or ignoring cardinals and bishops who were outspoken in defense of traditional Catholic teaching. He did not respond to a formal request from several cardinals – including US Cardinal Raymond L. Burke – for clarification about his views on Communion for divorced and illicitly remarried Catholics.

From his early days as pope, some voices claimed that he was heterodox and trying to subvert traditional Church teaching -- accusations that followed his every move.

Asked what he considered to be the major theme of the Francis pontificate, Philip Lawler, author of Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis is Misleading His Flock, said bluntly, “Confusion.”

“I think that he’s done an enormous amount of damage by his mode of teaching, which is, well, it's confusing,” Lawler told Aleteia on the eve of the first Synod of Bishops gathering considering the theme of synodality in 2023. “And for that matter by his mode of governance, as well, because it has not been collaborative. The folks at the Vatican don't feel that they're consulted. People around the world don't feel they’re consulted.  So I think there's a great deal of confusion, and the next pope is going to have his hands full.”

Lawler was not alone. Bishop William Medley of Owensboro, Kentucky, reported in 2024 that his priests and lay faithful expressed frustration about a lack of clarity from Pope Francis, specifically in regards to Fiducia Supplicans, the 2023 declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith that allowed for the blessing of same-sex couples. Bishop Medley said that people in his diocese regard Francis as “ambiguous” in his teaching, and want him to “be direct and tell us what you actually mean.”

But David Gibson, director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture in New York, and others, rejected suggestions that Francis was heterodox.

Francis’s emphasis on going to the margins was reflected by his choices of individuals for key posts. New cardinals were created from places most people in the West had never heard of, such as Les Cayes, Haiti; Díli, East Timor, or Vientiane, Laos.

Many of the traditional cardinalatial sees, such as Baltimore or Los Angeles in the US, were passed over in favor of outposts such as San Diego, California, and Newark, New Jersey. The College of Cardinals began to look more like the actual Catholic world, particularly reflecting the areas of greater growth in the Church. So too did the Council of Cardinals, a nine-member advisory committee that Francis established and convened on a regular basis. At one point it included the Archbishops of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo; Bombay, India; and San Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, among others.

The Roman Curia, too, began to look more diverse – and not only geographically and racially. In a 2022 constitution, “Praedicate Evangelium,” Francis affirmed that “the power of governance” in the Curia “does not come from the sacrament of Orders” but from the “canonical mission” given by the pope. The constitution did not say that heads of Vatican offices would have to be cardinals or bishops, but it appeared that any baptized person would qualify for a leadership role. 

In 2021, Francis appointed the first woman to a senior Vatican position: Sister Nathalie Bequart, as undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops. Sister Alessandra Smerilli became Secretary of the Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development.

Even more significant, Italian nun Simona Brambilla, former superior general of the Missionary Sisters of the Consolata, in January 2025 became the first woman prefect of a dicastery of the Roman Curia – the dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. 

Francis also tapped Franciscan Sister of the Eucharist Rafaella Petrini in November 2021 as the secretary general of Vatican City State – the No. 2 position. Later, he appointed her a member of the Dicastery for Bishops and a member of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See – the Vatican’s central bank.

In the estimation of Vaticanologist John Allen, “Petrini is positioned to play a key role in what might arguably be called the three essential elements of the Francis reform: The administration of the Vatican, the appointment of bishops, and the management of the Vatican’s financial resources.”

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, commented on Francis’ choices. 

Likewise, inclusion of lay men and women in the deliberations of the Synod of Bishops for the first time in 2023 was done because of those lay persons’ baptism, not their particular vocation.

“For the first time, at Pope Francis’ invitation, men and women have been invited, in virtue of their baptism, to sit at the same table to take part, not only in the discussions, but also in the voting process of this Assembly of the Synod of Bishops,” said the Letter of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops to the People of God, issued October 25, 2023, after the conclusion of the assembly.

As is always the case, a new pope represents a stylistic change from his immediate predecessors. After John Paul II's command of the stage, we got Benedict XVI's shy delivery. But both Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI gave carefully-scripted discourses, while Francis was much more “off the cuff.”

In the early days, the Holy See Press Office scrambled to transcribe for publication the new pope’s extemporaneous homilies at his daily Masses in the chapel of Santa Marta, where the Pope chose to live rather than in the Apostolic Palace beside St. Peter’s Basilica. 

The new Pope also met with members of the press much more frequently than previous popes, granting one-on-one interviews to reporters. He gave press conferences on every flight on apostolic voyages, and often a single comment from one of these encounters would make news (not unlike what happened to Benedict XVI as well.)

In this regard, the example that stands out in most people’s memory is when a reporter asked the Pope, returning from World Youth Day in Rio De Janeiro in 2013, how he intended to confront the “gay lobby” in the Vatican. Though the Pope indicated his disapproval for a gay lobby if one did exist, he shifted the focus to a question of personal holiness. 

“If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?” he told the reporter. “The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this in a beautiful way, saying ... no one should marginalize these people for this, they must be integrated into society. The problem is not having this tendency, no, we must be brothers and sisters to one another.”

But only five words stuck with the secular global audience: “Who am I to judge?” The words were celebrated by those who sought greater acceptance by the Church for homosexuals, and rued by those who warned that it would lead to a change in the traditional teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts. 

The Pope’s seeming disregard for caution with reporters, though, led to more kerfuffles. During one of several interviews with Eugenio Scalfari, an atheist philosopher in his 90s, Francis was quoted as denying the existence of hell. But Scalfari neither recorded his interviews nor took notes, writing his articles based purely on his memory of the conversation. The Vatican issued a clarification. 

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on December 17, 1936, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the eldest of five children born to Mario Bergoglio, a native of the Piedmont region of Italy, and Regina Sivori, an Argentine of Piedmontese descent. Today, only a sister, María Elena Bergoglio, survives him, as well as several nieces and nephews.

As an adolescent, Jorge attended a Salesian school and got to know Fr. Stepan Czmil, a missionary from Ukraine. Young Jorge frequently woke early in order to assist Fr. Czmil at the Byzantine Divine Liturgy. Czmil later became a bishop in the clandestine Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

In a meeting with members of the Permanent Synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 2019, Francis said, “I hold you in my heart and I pray for you, dear Ukrainian brothers. And I confide to you that at times I do so with prayers that I remember and that I learned from Bishop Stepan Czmil, then a Salesian priest; he taught me them when I was 12 years old, in 1949, and I learned from him to serve the Divine Liturgy three times a week.” 

Jorge graduated from a technical secondary school and worked as a chemical technician (as well as a bouncer and a janitor). But he soon chose to enter the diocesan seminary of Villa Devoto. In 1957, at the age of 21, he became very ill with pneumonia, and part of his right lung had to be removed. But the following March, he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus, professing his first vows in 1960. 

He completed his studies of the humanities in Chile and returned to Argentina in 1963 to graduate with a degree in philosophy from the Colegio de San José in San Miguel. He taught literature and psychology at Immaculate Conception College in Santa Fé and at the Colegio del Salvatore in Buenos Aires. 

In an August 2024 letter to seminarians, he recalled that he taught the last two years of high school and “had to ensure that my pupils studied El Cid.” 

From 1967 to 1970, Bergoglio studied theology and obtained a degree from the Colegio de San José.

He was ordained a priest on December 13, 1969, by Ramón José Castellano, Archbishop Emeritus of Córdoba. He continued his training at the University of Alcalá de Henares, Spain, and on April 22, 1973, made his final profession as a Jesuit. Back in Argentina, he was novice master at Villa Barilari, San Miguel; professor at the Faculty of Theology of San Miguel; consultor to the Jesuit province and Rector of the Colegio Máximo of the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology.

On July 31, 1973, he was appointed Provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina, an office he held for six years. He then resumed his university work and from 1980 to 1986 served again as rector of the Colegio de San José, as well as parish priest, again in San Miguel. In March 1986, he went to Germany to finish his doctoral thesis. His superiors then sent him to the Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires and to the Jesuit church in the city of Córdoba as spiritual director and confessor.

Cardinal Antonio Quarracino, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, wanted Bergoglio as a close collaborator, and on May 20, 1992, Pope John Paul II appointed the 55-year-old Jesuit as Auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires. On May 27, he received episcopal ordination from Cardinal Quarracino in the cathedral. He chose as his episcopal motto “miserando atque eligendo.” The words come from a homily by the Venerable Bede on the Feast of St. Matthew, which reads: “Vidit ergo Jesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi, ‘Sequere me.’” 

On June 3, 1997, Bishop Bergoglio became Coadjutor Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Upon the death of Cardinal Quarracino, he succeeded him on February 28, 1998, as Archbishop, Primate of Argentina and Ordinary for Eastern-rite faithful in Argentina who have no Ordinary of their own.

Three years later, at the Consistory of February 21, 2001, Pope St. John Paul II created him cardinal. He asked the faithful not to come to Rome to celebrate his entry into the College of Cardinals, but rather to donate to the poor what they would have spent on the journey. 

As an archbishop, he lived an austere life, using public transportation and cooking his own meals. Time Magazine, recognizing Francis as the 2013 Person of the Year, recounted how Cardinal Bergoglio would regularly visit the most desolate parts of his archdiocese.

In October 2001, Cardinal Bergoglio was appointed General Relator to the 10th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Episcopal Ministry. This task was entrusted to him at the last minute to replace Cardinal Edward M. Egan, Archbishop of New York, who was obliged to stay in his homeland because of the terrorist attacks on September 11. At the Synod he placed particular emphasis on “the prophetic mission of the bishop,” his role as a “prophet of justice,” his duty to “preach ceaselessly” the social doctrine of the Church and also “to express an authentic judgment in matters of faith and morals.”

In 2005, he was elected president of the Argentine Bishops’ Conference, a post he held for six years. 

Meanwhile, in April 2005, he took part in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI. There have been rumors that Bergoglio was almost elected as pope. 

In a book-length interview published in April 2024, El Sucesor, Francis confided that Ratzinger “was my candidate.” Francis explained that at one point, he had 40 of the 115 votes, which could have been enough to block the candidacy of Cardinal Ratzinger.

“The maneuver consisted in putting my name forward, blocking Ratzinger’s election, and then negotiating a third candidate,” he said. 

“They were using me,” he said.

But he felt that the theologian from Germany “was the only one who could be pope at that time,” he said. “After the revolution of John Paul II, who had been a dynamic pontiff, very active, with initiative, who traveled, what was needed was a pope who could maintain a healthy balance, a transitional pope.”

“If they had elected someone like me, who makes a lot of mess, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything,” he said.

And he had enough to do in Buenos Aires, an archdiocese with more than 3 million inhabitants. As archbishop, Bergoglio conceived of a missionary project based on communion and evangelization. He had four main goals: open and brotherly communities, an informed laity playing a leading role, evangelization efforts addressed to every inhabitant of the city, and assistance to the poor and the sick. 

In September 2009 he launched a solidarity campaign for Argentina’s bicentenary of independence. Two hundred charitable agencies were to be set up by 2016. And on a continental scale, he expected much from the impact of the message of the Aparecida Conference in 2007.

Cardinal Christophe Pierre, papal nuncio to the United States since 2016, noted the importance of the Aparecida Conference, especially in light of how the Francis Pontificate would turn out. 

Known formally as the Fifth Conference of CELAM (the Episcopal Conference of Latin America and the Caribbean), it took place in Aparecida, Brazil, just before Cardinal Pierre took up his duties as papal nuncio to Mexico. It was, he said, “a kind of synodal process of the South American bishops.”

“This is the only continent that has made such a synodal process,” Pierre told America magazine in 2023. “The bishops developed a kind of dynamic of working together and looking for solutions together, to evangelize better, which is what the synod [on synodality] is all about. Nothing else: Better evangelization. And they accompanied the people in their suffering, in their difficulties, and in their challenges.”

At Aparecida, the bishops decided to write a document to address “the difficulty to transmit the faith from one generation to the next” in a new cultural context. Cardinal Bergoglio was put in charge of the writing commission.

He also had a battle on his hands at home. Argentina was moving to legalize same-sex marriage, and Archbishop Bergoglio championed opposition to the move. Marriage is something else, he insisted, saying that same-sex couples should have some other type of legal protection. His campaign brought him the attention of the universal Church, as eyes were on the growing LGBTQ movement in Latin America.

At the Vatican, Cardinal Bergoglio was a member of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the Congregation for the Clergy, the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, the Pontifical Council for the Family and the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.

Prior to his papacy, he authored three books: Meditaciones para religiosos (1982), Reflexiones sobre la vida apostólica (1992) and Reflexiones de esperanza (1992).

Since his papacy began, his name has been on other books as author: Life. My Story in History, written with Vatican journalist Fabio Marchese Ragona (2024), and Hope: The Autobiography, written with Carlo Musso (2025).

After Benedict’s resignation in February 2013, Bergoglio was one of several cardinals to give an intervention before the conclave began its secret voting. It is thought that this speech is what got the attention of many of the cardinal-electors. He lamented that the Church had become “self-referential” to the point of sickness, immersed in a self-destructive “theological narcissism.” In many places, it was forgetting its mission.

Bergoglio was 76 when he was elected the 266th Bishop of Rome on March 13, 2013. He described how he came to choose his papal name:

It would seem that those thoughts guided his comportment from the beginning. According to the National Catholic Reporter, Francis made a visit to the St. Mary Major Basilica the day after the election. He prayed before an icon of Mary and the Child Jesus, the "Salus Populi Romani" (Protectress of the Roman People), and left a bouquet of flowers.

“Exiting the basilica, he spent some time visiting with children in a nearby schoolyard,” the newspaper said. “He traveled to the basilica in a common Vatican service car, declining again to use the papal limousine…. He was also accompanied by a small security detail and not a police escort.”

Ten days after his election, he traveled to Castel Gandolfo to meet with the pope emeritus, Benedict XVI. According to the Vatican, this was another first – the first time a sitting pope met with a former one. 

It was the middle of Lent, and just a few days later was Holy Thursday. In keeping with his admonition of helping Jesus to “get out” of a “self-referential Church,” he chose to celebrate the commemoration of the Last Supper at the Casal del Marmo Penitentiary Institute for Minors on the outskirts of Rome. There, he washed the feet of 10 boys and two girls and preached about the need for service and humility.

Just a month after his election, on April 13, 2013, Francis appointed a group of cardinals, including Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley of Boston, to advise him on Church government and on a plan to revise the Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia.

The major teaching documents issued during Pope Francis’ pontificate include three encyclicals: Lumen Fidei (On Faith, June 29, 2013); Laudato si' (On Care for Our Common Home, June 18, 2015), and Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship, October 3, 2020).

Lumen Fidei was Francis' completion of a draft by Benedict XVI, who almost finished a trilogy of encyclicals on the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. The encyclical traces the history of the faith of the Church (from God’s call to Abraham and the people of Israel to the resurrection), discusses the relationship between reason and faith, the Church's role in the transmission of the faith, and the role faith plays in the building of societies in search of the common good.

Laudato si' was published amid growing concern that climate change and global warming would lead to conditions on earth that are increasingly incompatible with life, and that the world's poor people face the brunt of the problems created by rising sea levels, droughts, etc.. The encyclical is addressed to "every person living on this planet" for an inclusive dialogue about how man is shaping the future of the planet. Pope Francis calls on the Church and the world to acknowledge the urgency of our environmental challenges and to join him in embarking on a new path. 

Though many in the Church have felt that there is generally a divide between Catholics who are concerned for the environment and those who are more concerned about life issues, Matthew J. Ramage, a professor of theology at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, found that Laudato si' could provide common ground. 

"One of his lasting contributions will be his emphasis on care for creation and his landmark encyclical Laudato si', that was in continuity with and strengthened the teaching of John Paul and Benedict," said Ramage, who is also a nature enthusiast with a background in biology. Ramage said that in Laudato si' and elsewhere, Francis "very powerfully affirms the right to life for the unborn," expressing concern for life "all the way down to its embryonic stage."

The third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, invites the Church to live out the call to universal fraternity and social friendship. It offers “a way of life marked by the flavor of the Gospel" and shares a vision for humanity that Francis has emphasized throughout his papacy. 

“It is my desire that, in this our time, by acknowledging the dignity of each human person, we can contribute to the rebirth of a universal aspiration to fraternity," he wrote. "Brotherhood between all men and women.”

But some say that Francis’ “first encyclical” was one not written on paper, but a journey rich in symbolism. 

“I think his most significant journey was his first one – to Lampedusa,” said David Gibson, of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture. 

The Pope visited the small Italian island in the Mediterranean on July 8, 2013. Just 61 miles from Tunisia, it is one of the nearest gateways to Europe for Africans fleeing poverty and conflict. He arrived on a Coast Guard boat, threw a wreath into the sea in memory of the many migrants who have drowned trying to reach Europe, and offered Mass near a "boat cemetery" where the hulks of shipwrecked migrant boats lie in the sun. His altar was a small boat.  

Those two questions echo today, he said. "The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people, makes us live in soap bubbles which, however lovely, are insubstantial; they offer a fleeting and empty illusion which results in indifference to others; indeed, it even leads to the globalization of indifference."

An important early document that was not an encyclical was Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), an apostolic exhortation on the proclamation of the Gospel in today's world. Released November 24, 2013, it contains, the Pope said, "guidelines which can encourage and guide the whole Church in a new phase of evangelization." He asked Catholics to leave their "comfort zone" and go to the “peripheries” of society that are in need of the light of the Gospel.

“Evangelizers thus take on the ‘smell of the sheep’ and the sheep are willing to hear their voice,” he said. 

But another apostolic exhortation, issued following the Synod assembly considering family issues, was far more controversial. Some suggested that it was introducing a concept that was contrary to traditional Catholic teaching on the sacred bond of matrimony. Amoris Laetitia, issued in 2016, contained a footnote that suggested that in some cases, Catholics who remarried after a divorce, when their marriage was still a reality because the spouse was living or the marriage had not been officially declared null after a Church investigation, could receive Holy Communion. Individual situations must be examined with appropriate discernment. That, in the view of traditional Catholics, allowed for desecration of the Eucharist, as it contravened St. Paul’s admonition that no one receive the sacrament in the state of serious sin. 

Four cardinals, including US Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, sent a letter to the pope, asking for clarification of “contrasting interpretations” of the parts of Amoris Laetitia relating to admission of remarried divorcees to the sacraments.

“I thought that Amoris Laetitia was very consequential,” said Phil Lawler, author of Lost Shepherd. “That was a point at which a lot of people, myself included, said we've got a real problem here: it's not just a different manner of teaching, but teaching different things.”

Meanwhile, the bulk of Amoris went unnoticed in some circles, leaving aside the Pope's careful reflection on St. Paul's Hymn to Charity and the concrete exhortations that it offers to married couples and families.

For example, on the virtue of patience, the Pope writes:

Another document that upset a certain population in the Church was Tradiciones Custodes, which severely restricted the public celebration of the traditional Latin Mass.

“For many of us these actions were disappointing because we were hoping for a continuation of the renewal stressed by Benedict, the wedding of the ancient and modern, the old and the new liturgies, emphasizing the importance and role of both,” said Matthew Ramage, the theology professor at Benedictine. 

Others were upset by Francis insisting that the ministerial priesthood is for men. And while he allowed for a formal study of the possibility that women could become deacons, he did not end up allowing such ordinations to take place.

Finally, the Pope ruffled many feathers with his vivid denunciations of abortion and euthanasia. Comparing abortion to hiring a hit-man, or acting like the ancient Spartans, and going so far as to say that neglecting the elderly in nursing homes is a grave sin, the Pope was adamant in his defense of vulnerable life.

Several times during his pontificate, Francis expressed the idea that humanity is engaged in a Third World War, being fought piecemeal. As his pontificate passed 10 years, in fact, more and more people came to feel that a full-blown world war was a good possibility.

In 2014, as the world marked the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, he issued a plea to stop armed conflicts in the Middle East, Iraq, and Ukraine. Civil war was still raging in Syria. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was fighting to establish a caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq, and in the process persecuting Christians, Yazidis and Muslims who were not radical enough, in their view. Russia, in response to the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, annexed that country’s Crimean peninsula and backed a separatist movement in the Donbas. And the following year, in October 2023, Hamas, the militarized governing party of the Gaza Strip, launched an invasion of Israel, leading to a massive response on the part of the Israelis.

Francis responded to many conflicts by calling on parties to favor non-military solutions, insisting always on dialogue. His efforts were sometimes lauded, often criticized. He invited a delegation of Sudanese leaders to a conference in the Vatican where they could try to work out their differences. He made a dramatic gesture at the end of the meeting by kneeling down and kissing the feet of key leaders on both sides of the conflict.

When Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Francis made an impromptu visit to the Russian Ambassador to the Holy See – breaking protocol. During the conflict, he was criticized several times for appearing to overlook Russia’s aggression and paper over the victimization of Ukraine. In response to an outcry from Ukraine, the Vatican modified plans to have two women – one Russian, one Ukrainian – read a meditation on one of the Stations of the Cross. Instead, they carried the cross during together in silence during that Good Friday Way of the Cross ceremony in the Roman Colosseum.

Francis often pointed to the arms trade as a major factor in the continuation of wars.

“Violence is always fueled by weapons. You cannot speak of peace while you are secretly racing to stockpile new arms. This is a most serious responsibility weighing on the conscience of nations, especially the most powerful,” he said during a meeting with the heads of the Churches and the Christian Communities of the Middle East, held in Bari, Italy, in July 2018.

He sought new solutions to old problems, such as the status of Christians in communist China. He is thought to have played a mediating role in the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States during the administration of President Barack Obama.

“Since the Holy See has few material interests — just a tiny territory and no real economy — it is free to see the truth of temporal situations,” Victor Gaetan, author of God’s Diplomats, told Aleteia in 2021. “When a pope is highly respected, as Pope Francis is, secular diplomats sometimes defer to his moral authority on, essentially, political matters.”

Gaetan said that when Cuba and the United States reached an impasse in negotiating a new way of relating to each other, it was Francis who got the two countries on the same page. 

“Final negotiations were conducted at the Apostolic Palace in 2014,” he said. “Deep distrust prevented the longtime antagonists from getting to yes, so the Vatican stepped in as a higher power with the authority to hold each side accountable.”

In addition, another kind of “world war” took place during his pontificate: the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, which was spreading in many places like wildfire, including northern Italy. One of the enduring images of Pope Francis will surely be of him praying alone in a rainy St. Peter’s Square during what was called a Moment of Prayer and “Urbi et Orbi” Blessing. The pontiff also strongly encouraged people to receive a vaccine against the virus, as he himself did. 

Some of the most significant journeys that Francis made included a May 2014 pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There, he met with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople and the leaders of the Churches in Jerusalem to commemorate and renew the commitment to unity expressed 50 years earlier by Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople.

The Pope visited Cuba and the United States from September 19-27, 2015. While in the US, Francis addressed a joint session of Congress as well as the United Nations. He also canonized St. Junipero Serra during a Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. He concluded his visit to the US with Mass at the Eighth World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia. 

In Canada in 2022, he met with representatives of indigenous tribes who were seeking justice from the Church for past wrongs. Many said they were still dealing with generational trauma from Canada’s former practice of taking indigenous children from their families, placing them in boarding schools run by churches or other institutions, and forcing them to abandon their traditional lifestyles, language and dress and integrating into Canadian society. 

“I have come as a brother, to discover firsthand the good and bad fruit borne by members of the local Catholic family in the course of the years,” the Pope said. "I have come in a spirit of penance, to express the pain that we carry in our hearts as Church for the wrong inflicted on you by not a few Catholics who supported oppressive and unjust policies in your regard.”

Francis emphasized from the beginning that he was the Bishop of Rome – as if to send a message to the heads of autocephalous and autonomous Orthodox Churches, such as the Patriarch of Moscow or Constantinople or Antioch, that he is firstly a bishop.

In a book published in 2024, Francis said that if he were to retire, he would like to be known as the Bishop Emeritus of Rome, not Pope Emeritus. 

"Pope Francis is in a good continuation with all popes since the Second Vatican Council, because all  popes have an open heart for ecumenism," Cardinal Kurt Koch, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity told Aleteia in 2024. "He wants to deepen the friendship and fraternal relations with the other Churches. We distinguish between a dialogue of love and a dialogue of truth. Dialogue of love is deepening the relations with the other Churches. And here we see Pope Francis has many relations with the heads of other Churches, visits them during the Apostolic journeys, and there have been many visits of heads of other Churches here in Rome."

"And then, for Pope Francis what is very important is the practical ecumenism and collaboration between the different Churches," Cardinal Koch continued. "He mentions always that what is important is that we walk together, we pray together, and we collaborate together in the many challenges that we have in society today."

For Francis, the cardinal said, a special issue is the ecumenism of martyrdom.

"Pope Francis said the blood of the martyrs doesn't divide Christians but unites Christians," said the Swiss cardinal. "And to commemorate all the martyrs of this time is a very beautiful contribution for re-finding unity between the Christians."

In 2023, Francis added the 21 Coptic Martyrs, who were murdered by the Islamic State in 2015, to the Roman Martyrology of the Catholic Church.

In 2024, the Pope restored a title for the Bishop of Rome that his predecessor had eliminated, Patriarch of the West, a move that was seen to improve ecumenical relations. 

In an interview with Vida Nueva, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople said that when Benedict XVI withdrew the title, there were fears that too much importance was given to papal jurisdiction to the detriment of ecumenical dialogue. “Although we never believed this was Pope Benedict's intention, [it] certainly made us happy to see Francis restore the title. Since his election and inauguration, the Pope has preferred to use the expression ‘bishop of Rome’ over any other nomenclature.”

As of early 2025, Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew planned to commemorate the 1,700th anniversary of the first ecumenical council – Nicaea – later that year. It was the council where the Nicene Creed was formulated and the one where a calculation for the date of Easter was established. Coincidentally, 2025 was one of those rare years in which Easter fell on the same date in both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and Francis took that as a sign that East and West could come to an agreement on a permanent common date – and a harbinger for full communion to be restored.

If Pope Francis did not live to see that dream fulfilled, it can perhaps be said that he did much to move the needle closer to it becoming a reality.