Pope Francis, for 12 years head of the Catholic church and proprietor in trust of the Vatican’s library and art collections, has died aged 88 – The Art Newspaper
Pope Francis, spiritual leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, head of state of the Vatican and proprietor in trust of the Vatican’s great collection of art and historic architecture, has died, aged 88.
The Argentina-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the 266th pope in succession over two millennia, the first to be a member of the Jesuit religious order and the first to come from both the Americas and the global south. He was also the first pope to take his name as pontiff from St Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan religious order dedicated to personal poverty, an early indication that he would take a more austere approach to personal comfort and papal pomp than his immediate predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, and a clearer line on social justice.
Benedict had sensationally resigned on 28 February 2013, citing mental and physical exhaustion, opening the way for a conclave of cardinals to elect as pope the 76-year-old Cardinal Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, two weeks later.
As pope, Francis inherited the historic burden of centuries of theological controversy across Christianity and the church’s own culture wars between conservatives and progressives on both doctrinal and social matters; the diplomatic challenge of continuing to improve relations with the leaders of Judaism and Islam started by Benedict and his predecessor John Paul II; the requirement to rethink the administration of the Vatican and its investments in the long hangover from the Vatican banking scandal of the 1980s; and a decades-long controversy in which the Catholic church had covered up or failed to resolve multiple cases involving priests guilty of sexual abuse. He also brought the climate crisis into the Church’s social teaching for the first time and took on questions of cultural restitution from the Vatican’s holdings, and from the Catholic church more broadly. On a papal visit to Canada in July 2022 he apologised for the violent forced assimilation of Indigenous communities.
Pope Francis appeals to Franciscan symbolism of “human solidarity”
By taking the name Francis, the new pope was aligning himself with a saint whose mythical concern for the poor, for human dignity and for communing with nature are represented in the work of early Renaissance masters and their successors. Within a century of the saint’s death in 1226 he was depicted in church paintings across Europe, in his simple friar’s cassock, preaching to the birds or receiving the stigmata associated with Christ’s death on the cross. These defining images included the celebrated cycle of Giotto frescoes in the basilica at Assisi, from the last years of the 13th century, a series of paintings regularly credited with launching the Italian Renaissance a century later.
When Francis issued an encyclical addressing the climate crisis, drawing on his training as a chemist and calling for shared stewardship of the environment, he took its title, in medieval Latin, Laudato Si’ (Praise Be to You, 2015), from St Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures. The encyclical, issued in the lead-up to the signing of the 2015 Paris climate accord, was the first time that the Catholic church had made climate change part of its teaching.
When the National Gallery, in London, held an exhibition devoted to St Francis in 2023—featuring historic paintings by Fra Angelico, Sassetta, Sandro Botticelli, El Greco and Francisco de Zurbarán as well as contemporary works by Antony Gormley and Richard Long—Francis sent a message, welcoming the first show in the UK devoted to the saint he described as “the beloved minstrel of God”. Gabriele Finaldi, the gallery’s director, in his catalogue introduction to the show, describes the saint as attractive “for Christians and non-Christians alike, for utopians and revolutionaries, for animal lovers and for those who work for causes of human solidarity”.
Those “causes of human solidarity” were at the heart of Pope Francis’s most memorable pronouncements on war, peace and human rights. In February 2025 he issued a letter criticising the immigration crackdown, and announcement of mass deportation of immigrants, imposed by the US president, Donald Trump, saying that deporting people who fled their homeland because of exploitation and persecution “damages the dignity of those people and places them in vulnerable and defenseless positions”.
Francis’s public statement, issued at a time when few global leaders were openly questioning the disruptive actions of the US president in dismantling the country’s overseas aid and diversity programmes, its public health, educational, cultural and climate change measures, highlighted the moral and political burden carried by a 21st-century pope. In Francis’s case he filled the particular role of an authoritative progressive voice in international politics able to speak up effectively against the rise of strongman political leaders determined on pursuing narrow national self-interest. He used his spiritual pulpit—physically embodied by Gianlorenzo Bernini’s exuberantly Baroque 70-foot-tall baldacchino over the high altar of St Peter’s Basilica—to counter the “bully pulpit” of great power leaders, and in particular a US president determined on being an agent of chaos.
Two and half years after the death of Queen Elizabeth II and two years after the death of emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, Francis’s death is a reminder of the near impossible role that a modern head of state is required to play—to be a figurehead, a guardian of historic mystique, and an impeccable, tactful envoy—and the many additional calls made on someone taking their place on the throne of St Peter, who becomes a spiritual leader required to pronounce, and preach, on controversial subjects of morals and justice in an always-on media environment.
Papal visits and Vatican tourism
Francis built on the example of his predecessors—the great, runway-kissing showman Pope John Paul II, and the deeply learned arch-conservative Benedict XVI—in following a relentless programme of international visits, featuring gigantic outdoor masses and symbolic visits to sites holy to other revealed religions. With his imposing figure—he had worked as a nightclub bouncer in Buenos Aires to fund his education—broad smile and can-do body language, Francis stood out when officiating mass, whether in the spectacular nave of St Peter’s or in the vast piazza in front of the basilica, or on the temporary altars of the massively attended open-air masses on his global travels. His overseas itinerary, which started with a visit to Brazil in 2013, was halted in 2020 and remained diminished in 2021, because of the Covid-19 global pandemic. In recent years the programme was as full as ever. Francis’s second visit to Turkey had been planned for later in 2025 to mark the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea—called by Emperor Constantine in 325 to bring together all strands of the early Christian church.
Francis’s papal tours had a diplomatic as much as a pastoral purpose. During a 2021 visit to Athens, he visited Ieronymos II, the Orthodox Christian archbishop of Athens and head of the Greek Orthodox Church, and made a night-time visit to the Parthenon. “History makes its weight felt, and here, today, I feel the need to ask anew for the forgiveness of God and of our brothers and sisters for the mistakes committed by many Catholics,” the pope said at the Temple of Athena, one of the great sites of antiquity, according to the Catholic News Agency. The following year, in November 2022, Francis ordered the Vatican Museums to return three Parthenon marble fragments held in their collections since the 19th century to Greece. Vatican officials referred to the works’ repatriation as a “donation” to Ieronymos—and said it signalled “a concrete sign of his sincere desire to follow in the ecumenical path of truth”.
The three sculptural fragments—part of the head of the horse pulling Athena’s chariot in the frieze on the west side of the Parthenon, and elements of the heads of a boy and a bearded man—had been held by the Gregoriano Profano Museum, home to the Holy See’s collections of antiquities.
Record numbers are expected to visit Rome for the 2025 Holy Year Jubilee celebrations—with some estimates of double the 35 million who visited the Eternal City in 2024. Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, told The Art Newspaper that the museums would open for an additional two hours each day throughout 2025. “We will be welcoming many visitors, and we hope to give them a much better journey,” she said. “We want people to be able to spend quality time, with quiet and calm, and we want them to make links with the deeper meanings [of the works on show]. The focus of the Jubilee Year will be ‘Pilgrims of Hope’ and, in these difficult times, hope is so important to all of us.”
Pope Francis as custodian of the Holy See’s built and liturgical heritage
As pope, Francis was head of one of the historic revealed religions, followed by one-eighth of the world’s population, and had ultimate charge not just of the Vatican Museums and Library, with their holdings covering two millennia of Christianity, but also the remainder of the built patrimony of the tiny Vatican City state at the heart of Rome.
As well as St Peter’s, the greatest of all Renaissance edifices and a building of unique religious and architectural importance, that patrimony includes the Sistine Chapel and its celebrated ensemble of late 15th- and early 16th-century frescoes; the Niccoline Chapel adorned with frescoes by Fra Angelico; and the Raphael apartments, or “Stanze”, in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican. The Vatican also owns and runs three papal basilicas in Rome that are outside the Vatican City but owned and run by the Holy See—Santa Maria Maggiore (where Francis has chosen to be buried), San Giovanni in Laterano (the official mother church for the Catholic faith) and San Paolo Fuori le Mura.
The pope, like his predecessors, took final decisions on all substantial projects relating to the papal collections and patrimony. When an important work of art was restored at Santa Maria Maggiore in 2017, the project was personally authorised by Francis, the Vatican Museums’ director, Barbara Jatta, told The Art Newspaper. Francis’s papacy saw the restoration of the tombs of the two pontiffs most closely associated with the building of St Peter’s Basilica: Pope Paul III (the patron of Michelangelo) and Pope Urban VIII (the patron of Caravaggio and of Gian Lorenzo Bernini). On 11 April 2025, less than a month after Francis had been discharged from hospital after almost dying during a severe case of pneumonia, he made a surprise visit to St Peter’s, at a time when he was meant to be completing 10 weeks of complete rest. Informally dressed, seated in his wheelchair, as the Associated Press reported, he had come to thank two conservators, Lorena Araujo Piñeiro and Michela Malfanti, for their work in completing the conservation of Bernini’s magisterial tomb for Urban VIII.
As pope, Francis was master of the Catholic church’s liturgy and thus a profound influence on the use of Catholic churches around the world, the largest such ensemble of religious buildings. In 2022 Francis reversed his predecessor’s most symbolic liturgical change: Benedict had in 2007 relaxed long-standing restrictions on the Tridentine Latin Mass beloved of Conservative Catholics.
In March 2020, with the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, Catholic worshippers were asked to stay away from the celebration of mass to limit the spread of the virus, bringing in the widespread adoption of online services. This was one of the greatest communication challenges of Francis’s time as pope. On 27 March 2020, a tiny, solitary, spotlit figure in front of the great façade of St Peter’s Basilica and facing the vast rainswept emptiness of St Peter’s Square, Francis prayed for an end to the pandemic, declaring, “Our planet is gravely ill. Without hesitation, we have carried on, believing that we will remain healthy forever in a world that is sick.”
The corpus of Catholic churches includes many buildings old and new of the first importance including, besides the great medieval and baroque cathedrals of Western Europe, 20th-century architectural masterpieces that reflect changes to the Catholic liturgy ordained by successive popes and the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 and are home to important examples of contemporary art. The most thought-provoking Catholic church buildings of Francis’s lifetime include Edwin Lutyens’s crypt for his unfinished Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool, Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp in eastern France, Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona, Guillaume Gillet’s Notre Dame de Royan in western France and José Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles.
Pope Francis’s accommodation with contemporary art
Francis inherited Benedict XVI’s accommodation with contemporary art, which led to the Vatican having its first pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013, the year of Francis’s election as Pope—with a pavilion inspired by the biblical narratives in the Book of Genesis featuring the work of the Milan-based multimedia collective Studio Azzurro, the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka and the Australian-born painter Lawrence Carroll—and later its first at the Architectural Biennale in 2018.
“The Vatican Museums must strive to be a place of beauty and welcome. They must embrace new forms of art,” Francis said in the 2015 book La Mia Idea di Arte (my idea of art), based on the Pope’s conversations with the journalist Tiziana Lupi. “They must throw open their doors to people from around the world and serve as an instrument for dialogue between different cultures and religions, an instrument for peace. They must be alive! Not dusty repositories of the past reserved for the select few… but a vital [institution] which looks after the objects in its care to tell their stories to people today, starting from the most disadvantaged of its visitors.”
In 2021 Francis had shown himself to be true to that vision by opening a contemporary art gallery in the Vatican library. In doing so he picked up on a tradition started a half-century before by Pope Paul VI, who had created the first Vatican galleries of contemporary art, acquiring work by artists including Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio Morandi, Giacomo Manzù, Henry Moore, David Jones, Arthur Pollen and Graham Sutherland.
In 2024, Francis attended the Venice Biennale, singling out the late Catholic nun and activist Corita Kent—along with Frida Kahlo and Louise Bourgeois—as female artists whose works have “something important to teach us”. Kent’s graphic works, promoting tolerance and peace, were on show that year in the Vatican pavilion in the women’s prison on Giudecca island, where the pope landed by helicopter for his Venetian visit. Francis also met the president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, and its curator, Adriano Pedrosa, who organised the 2024 exhibition under the title Foreigners Everywhere.
“The world needs artists,” the pope was cited as saying in a tweet posted by the Venice Biennale account on X. “This is demonstrated by the multitude of people of all ages who frequent art venues and events. […] I beg you, dear artists, to imagine cities that do not yet exist on the maps: cities where no human being is considered a stranger. That’s why when we say #ForeignersEverywhere, we are proposing ‘brothers everywhere’.”
Pope Francis took up office just as broadband connectivity and the smartphone were becoming ubiquitous, offering the technological enhancement of art appreciation using mobile search, QR codes and augmented reality. As The Art Newspaper reported in 2013, one Italian company, Haltadefinizione, “allowed sceptics and believers alike to download a free app called Shroud 2.0, which offers high-resolution scans [of the Turin Shroud] as well as a short history lesson on one of the most controversial holy relics. Many still believe it to be the burial cloth of Jesus, despite radiocarbon analysis dating it to the Medieval period. The launch of the app coincided with a rare appearance for the object on live television in late March as part of Pope Francis’s Easter celebrations.”
Pope Francis and the Vatican Museums
The Vatican Museums, under the directorship of Antonio Paolucci and of Jatta, who succeeded him in January 2017, continued to play, during the papacy of Pope Francis, a central role in art history and scholarship.
Francis’s personal magnetism brought larger crowds than ever to the Vatican. In a 2014 interview with The Art Newspaper, Paolucci said that Francis had drawn record numbers. “After the Angelus prayer in the morning and the papal audiences,” Paolucci said, “they want to see the museums. We have 5.1 million visitors a year and I would like to have zero growth now.” During the global pandemic of 2020-21, these visitor numbers were heavily reduced and the Vatican’s finances, dependent on income from tourism and gifts from the visiting faithful, were badly affected
Pope Francis shows Raphael’s tapestries in Sistine Chapel
In February 2020, the sequence of 10 Brussels tapestries of the Acts of the Apostles (1519-21) made to designs by Raphael commissioned in 1515—which first hung beneath Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling in the 1520s and are now housed in the Vatican’s Pinacoteca museum—were exhibited in the chapel once more, for just one week. The presentation of the tapestries, to mark the quincentenary of Raphael’s death, was a rare chance—the first since the Holy Year of the Redemption in 1983—to see the chapel’s decoration as a whole, much as it had been intended in the lifetimes of Michelangelo and Raphael.
A raft of additional conferences and exhibitions to mark the Raphael anniversary were disrupted or put on hold by the global pandemic. Raphael 1520-1483 at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome—a survey told in reverse chronology, mounted in collaboration with Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence—had to close three days after its opening as the world shut down for Covid-19 in March 2020. It reopened three months later on the day it had been meant to conclude, 2 June. One of the curatorial coups of the Scuderie exhibition was to secure the loans of Raphael’s portraits of both his papal patrons: Portrait of Pope Julius II (1511, in the collection of the National Gallery, London, since the UK government’s purchase of the foundation collection in 1824) and Portrait of Pope Leo X with the cardinals Giulio de’ Medici e Luigi de’ Rossi (1518-20, from the Gallerie degli Uffizi).
For the Raphael blockbuster at the National Gallery in London, delayed from 2020 until 2022, the Vatican museums lent one of the Raphael Sistine Chapel tapestries, of Saint Paul Preaching at Athens, made at Pieter van Aelst’s workshop in Brussels. (During Benedict XVI’s papacy, four other tapestries from the series, had been lent to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, to mark Benedict’s papal visit to the UK. They were hung there with the seven surviving original full-size cartoons by Raphael and his studio, which had been moved from Brussels to London in 1623 so that Charles I might have a set of tapestries of his own made at Mortlake. The cartoons had remained in the Royal Collection ever since and were given on permanent loan to the V&A by Queen Victoria in 1865.) For the 2020 Scuderie exhibition, with permission from the V&A and the Royal Collection Trust, the Factum Foundation had 3D-printed a facsimile of one cartoon, The Sacrifice at Lystra, from super high-resolution images taken on site at the V&A in 2019. Another full-scale scan of one of the cartoons was hung at right angles to the Saint Paul Preaching at Athens tapestry at the National Gallery in 2022.
Pope Francis completes restoration of Raphael’s Stanze frescoes
Two years into Francis’s papacy, the Vatican Museums started work on the final stages of the restoration of Raphael’s Stanze frescoes in the Apostolic Palace, one of the crowning masterpieces of Renaissance art. In February 2015 conservation began of the Hall of Constantine, 1517-24, the last and largest of the four rooms in the former apartments of Pope Julius II that Raphael had spent 12 years decorating. The conservation work on the hall continued a process begun in 1982 with the Room of the Fire in the Borgo, 1514-17. Work on the Room of the Segnatura (home to Raphael’s tour de force The School of Athens), 1508-11, followed in the 1990s, while the Room of Heliodorus, 1512-14, was restored between 2002 and 2013.
Raphael had died three years into work on the Hall of Constantine, leaving Giulio Romano and other of his followers to complete the decoration from Raphael’s cartoons. After conservation work had been completed on three of the hall’s four walls in 2020, the Vatican Museums announced that they had established that two figures painted in oils—the allegories of Iustitia and of Comitas—likely represent the last work created by Raphael before his death. As the Vatican Museums reopened in June 2020—after the first stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, with visitor numbers kept to one-tenth of normal to allow for distancing measures—work started on the fourth and final wall of the hall, which depicts the Donation of Constantine, the apocryphal moment when the emperor Constantine the Great granted supreme temporal and spiritual power to the Catholic Church. The restoration work was funded by the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums, which has chapters all over the world.
The Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal
The scandal around the longstanding failure of the Catholic Church to act properly against clergy guilty of abuse was one that had haunted the pontificates of both Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II. Particularly serious cases had come to light in the 2000s in Ireland, Mexico and the diocese of Boston, Massachusetts. The last was the subject of the award-winning film Spotlight (2015) about the Boston Globe newspaper’s investigation into diocesan cover-ups and private settlements with abuse victims that led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law. Cases in the Catholic church had found parallels in other serious cases across the globe where those in authority had failed for decades to act against those who exploited a power imbalance to abuse the young and weak—business chiefs, athletics, swimming and gymnastic coaches, directors of care homes, schools, colleges, hostels, hospitals, juvenile detention programmes and religious bodies. The most high-profile recent case involving a global denomination has been the resignation of Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the global Anglican communion, in November 2024, after a report found that he had failed in 2013 to report to police John Smyth, a barrister and abusive leader of evangelical Christian holiday camps in the UK who continued to offend for years afterwards. In his first interview following that resignation, Welby said that he had been overwhelmed by the number of abuse cases brought to his attention that had not been adequately in the past. “There is an absence of forgiveness; we don’t treat our leaders as human,” Welby told the BBC in March 2025. “We expect them to be perfect. If you want perfect leaders, you won’t have any leaders.”
Francis made repeated public apologies for the evil of clerical abuse, starting with an unequivocal statement in April 2014, saying that he personally asked for forgiveness “for the damage [some priests] have done for having sexually abused children”. That statement came soon after a United Nations panel in Geneva and subsequent report had taken the Catholic church to task for putting the reputation of Church officials above the protection of children, something the church had always denied.
In 2018 Francis issued a letter, People of God, asking for forgiveness, “with shame and repentance”, saying Catholic leaders had been to blame, following the release of a grand jury report in a case where priests in Pennsylvania had abused more than 1,000 children over decades. “We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them,” Francis said. The following year, Francis called a summit of religious leaders in Rome to address the abuse scandal. To highlight its international nature and bring in new measures. But five years later, in 2024, it was clear that the new measures and regulations had had little impact, not least because cases were still being dealt with internally and with no published reports of how complaints had been resolved.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit son of Buenos Aires
Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936 in the Flores neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. He was the eldest of five children, with two younger sisters and two younger brothers, of Mario José Bergoglio, an accountant whose family had fled Italy in 1929 to escape Mussolini’s Fascist regime, and his wife Regina María Sívori, an Argentina-born member of a family originally from northern Italy. He studied at a school run by the Salesian fathers in Ramos Mejía, Buenos Aires, and then a technical secondary school. He worked as a chemist at Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory before attending the archdiocesan seminary to study for the priesthood. After three years in the seminary, at the age of 21 he became a novice in the Jesuit order (full title the Society of Jesus), a religious order historically dedicated to education and the spreading of the Catholic faith, for writing and historical scholarship, as well as the daily intellectual spiritual rigour of the exercises left by its founder St Ignatius of Loyola.
The Jesuit order was officially recognised by Alessandro Farnese, Pope Paul III, in 1540, at the height of the reformist Council of Trent—at a time when Paul III was employing Michelangelo Buonarroti both on the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel and in bringing coherence to the design of St Peter’s Basilica (1506-1626), including the ultimate design for its famous dome. In the wake of the council, the Jesuits played a leading role in the Catholic Counter Reformation and the ecstatic emotional Church art that derived from it, exemplified by Peter Paul Rubens’s depictions from the 1610s and 1620s of the visionary and miraculous episodes from the lives of both St Ignatius and his co-founder of the Jesuit order, St Francis Xavier.
The Jesuit order had not produced a pope before Francis as its priests traditionally take a vow not to accept high clerical office, and because the papacy had historically gone through periods of mistrusting the order, fearing its independence of thought. In 1981 Pope John Paul II had gone so far as to impose a personal delegate, Fr Paolo Dezza, a conservative theologian, to run the order, at a time when the Jesuits had become increasingly associated with liberation theology, a public stance in favour of the poor and dispossessed when much of Latin America was led by military or highly conservative governments. Dezza, John Paul II had said, would “represent me more closely in the society”. (John Paul II allowed the order to elect a new superior general, Peter Hans Kolvenbach, in 1983.) From the time he became an auxiliary bishop in Buenos Aires, in 1992, Bergoglio was increasingly seen to be living at a distance, admittedly a benign one, from his religious order.
The Dirty War and the “disappeared”
Bergoglio had been superior of the Jesuit province of Argentina for three years when the country was cast into turmoil after a military junta seized power in 1976, the prelude to the notorious seven-year “Dirty War” in which left-wing activists, social campaigners and union leaders were tortured or “disappeared”. At the time of his election as pope, these years came back to haunt Bergoglio, who had previously given evidence in two court cases relating to the Dirty War and to children of “disappeared” mothers who were adopted by military families. He said in court that he had only learnt of the “stolen babies” scandal following the restoration of democracy in 1983.
In 2013—with the focus on Bergoglio’s election as pope and following three decades in which the country had been convulsed by revelations on and judicial investigations into the iniquities of the “Dirty War”—his critics said he had been a “collaborationist” and had failed to protect priests whose social work in the slums of Buenos Aires angered the military regime. Bergoglio, who was never investigated for his conduct under the dictatorship, had told his biographers in 2010 that “on the contrary, I tried to help many people at the time.” His defenders in 2013 said that had been critical of the dictatorship, and after the kidnapping of two priests, and had appealed directly to Emilio Massera, head of the Argentine navy, for their release.
In 1980 Bergoglio spent three months in Ireland, studying English while living in a Jesuit community house at Milltown in Dublin before returning to Buenos Aires to be rector of the college where he had completed his training as a priest, the Philosophical and Theological Faculty of San Miguel. After further study in Germany and working as head of a Jesuit community in Córdoba, Argentina, Bergoglio was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires in 1992 and Archbishop in 1998. It was while serving as bishop in his home city that he acquired his reputation for living without episcopal trappings, in a small apartment, and travelling by public transport, a modus vivendi that he brought with him when elected pope.
Pope Francis’s personal papal style
When he moved to the Vatican as supreme pontiff of the Catholic church the new Pope Francis set up home at the Domus Sanctae Marthae, a Vatican guest house, rather than in the Apostolic Palace, and was driven around Rome in a small car rather than using a papal limousine. He was regarded as conservative on matters of Catholic doctrine and a liberal in terms of his personal concern for the poor and disadvantaged. With his open visage and obvious personal warmth he came to be known to his followers as “Papa Francesco”, rather than “The Pope”, reminding pontiff-watchers of the reformist John XXIII, pope from 1958 to 1963. Francis, like “Papa Giovanni” 50 years before him, carried the aura of a priest of the streets, ready to minister the sacraments of the church in the most disadvantaged areas; more readily a “people’s Pope” than a prince of the church.
Pope Francis, the climate champion
It may be that Pope Francis will be best remembered in future years as a champion of the environment. During his Venice Biennale visit in 2024 the pope addressed a crowd of 10,000 in Piazza San Marco emphasising the danger that climate change posed to the city. “Venice is one with the waters on which it stands, and without the care and protection of this natural environment it could even cease to exist.”
His command of science, as much as of social justice, is plain to see in the clearly written text of Laudato Si’. “The human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together; we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation,” he wrote. “In fact, the deterioration of the environment and of society affects the most vulnerable people on the planet… For example, the depletion of fishing reserves especially hurts small fishing communities without the means to replace those resources; water pollution particularly affects the poor who cannot buy bottled water; and rises in the sea level mainly affect impoverished coastal populations who have nowhere else to go.”
Pope Francis was admitted to the Gemelli hospital, in Rome, suffering from a lung infection, on 14 February 2025, and pronounced to be critically ill. Twice he was thought to be close to death. Prayer vigils for his recovery were set up around the world and the cast of the prize-winning film Conclave, about the machinations behind the election of a new pope—for which the Sistine Chapel (where the cardinals of the church traditionally sit in convocation to choose a new pontiff) had been recreated on the backlots of the fabled Cinecittà studios, in Rome—sent their best wishes for his recovery. He returned to his Vatican quarters after 38 days in hospital on 23 March to recuperate at home.
The career of Jose Maria Bergoglio as Pope Francis is a reminder that—after two millennia of schisms, doctrinal divisions, reformations and counter-reformations, and the theological and pastoral controversies that he inherited from his predecessors, as well as the fresh political and environmental challenges that he faced—the role of Saint Peter, the first pope, guardian of the spiritual and social needs and cultural riches of the Catholic church, remains as difficult to assume now as it has ever been in the past 2,000 years.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio; born Flores, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 17 December 1936; member, Society of Jesus (Jesuit Order) 1958-, novice 1958, ordained priest 1969, final vows 1973, superior, Jesuit province of Argentina 1973–79; auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires 1992-98, Archbishop of Buenos Aires 1998-2013, cardinal 2001-13; elected Pope Francis and head of the Vatican State 2013; died Rome 21 April 2025.
