Francis

The first ‘Pope Francis’

In February 2013 Pope Benedict XVI resigned, citing old age and health concerns. A conclave was convened in early March, spurring hopes that Benedict’s replacement could be elected and installed before the impending Easter holiday. Bergoglio was elected on the fifth ballot and chose the name Francis, in honor of St. Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226), who lived a life of humble service to the poor, and also recalling St. Francis Xavier (1506–52), a founding member of the Jesuits. Although he was the first Pope Francis and was widely referred to as “Francis I,” he declined to use the Roman numeral I to indicate that he was the first to use his papal name. (Traditionally, the numeral I is not added to a pope’s name until after a second pope of the same name has been elected. John Paul I [1978] was the first pope to use the numeral during his reign.)

Francis took charge of a church at a crossroads. In the early 21st century Roman Catholics constituted more than one-sixth of the world’s population, many of them in Latin America and Africa. Yet scandals, particularly the clergy sexual abuse scandals that first arose in the 1980s and ’90s, undermined the church’s stature, particularly in the United States and Europe. In his earliest public addresses and in his first public mass, Francis called for spiritual renewal within the church and greater attention to the plight of the poor, and he sternly condemned the forces that diverted the church from its ministry and set it at risk of becoming a “pitiful NGO.” He also reached out to his political opponents, including Fernández, whom he invited to his first official papal address. Yet he incensed some traditionalists by appearing on that occasion in a simple tunic rather than in the more traditional papal garments.

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He also took the unprecedented step later in 2013 of appointing a council of eight cardinals to advise him on church policy. His remark in that year that Christ had “redeemed all of us,” even non-Catholics, were broadly interpreted by the media as a message of outreach and goodwill toward atheists and agnostics, though a Vatican spokesman later claimed that Francis had been misinterpreted.

Pronouncements on sexual ethics and clergy sexual abuse

In June 2013 Francis issued the first encyclical of his papacy, Lumen fidei (“The Light of Faith”). It completed a trilogy of papal encyclicals begun by Benedict XVI on the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, following Deus caritas est (“God Is Love”; 2005) and Spe salvi (“Saved by Hope”; 2007).

However, Francis soon became noted for making statements that conveyed an openness to different perspectives on Catholic doctrine, particularly regarding social issues and sexual ethics. Such statements were subsequently either toned down by the Vatican or seemingly contradicted by Francis himself. For example, Francis surprised both liberals and traditionalists when in a September 2013 interview with an Italian Jesuit magazine he criticized the church for having been “obsessed” with issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and birth control. That remark encouraged speculation both within and outside the church that a major shift in Catholic teaching and practice on such matters as same-sex marriage and contraception would follow. Yet, in the following year, Francis spoke out against same-sex marriage and defended the “traditional” family. Moreover, he affirmed the church’s categorical opposition to abortion. Although Francis spoke sympathetically of women’s rights and acknowledged women’s historical role in the church, he did not endorse the ordination of women as priests.

The lingering effects of the church’s sexual abuse scandal has constituted another challenge facing Francis’s papacy. During a visit by Dutch bishops in December 2013, Francis prayed for victims of sexual abuse and urged the bishops to reach out to them and their families. In January 2014 the United Nations (UN) Commission on the Rights of the Child recommended that the Vatican adopt procedures for the mandatory reporting of suspected child abusers to law-enforcement authorities but was rebuffed later that year on jurisdictional grounds. Critics observed that the Vatican was slow to punish and defrock priests who were known pedophiles.

The church as a “field hospital” and Evangelii gaudium

A central dimension of Francis’s papacy has been championing the poor and oppressed, and, from the start, he has promoted a broad ministry that aims to include not only non-Catholic Christians but even non-Christians. He drew traditionalists’ ire soon after taking office when he washed the feet of two young women, including a Muslim, in a juvenile detention center during the traditional Maundy Thursday reenactment of Jesus’ washing of the feet of the Twelve Apostles. (Church tradition held that women could not participate in the ceremony because the Apostles were men. Francis issued a decree in 2016 that revised the Holy Week observances in the Roman Missal to allow for the inclusion women and girls in the ritual.)

In an interview published in the Jesuit magazine America in September 2013, Francis gave an intriguing description of his vision for the Catholic Church:

I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle.

In November 2013 Francis issued Evangelii gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), an apostolic exhortation in which he denounced economic inequality and called upon the church to embrace its global diversity. In August 2014 Francis publicly denounced the alleged persecutions of Christians and religious minorities such as the Yazīdīs by the transnational Sunni insurgent group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Laudato si’

In May 2015 Francis issued Laudato si’ (“Praise Be to You”), the second encyclical of his papacy. Laudato si’ proclaimed that environmental degradation was “a moral issue” spurred by greed and unchecked capitalism, which caused human beings to lose sight of the relationships that bound them together and to neglect Earth, their “common home.” Promoting the concept of “integral ecology,” Francis connected sinful actions against the natural world with the economic exploitation of impoverished human beings and the denigration of human rights. The document was also noteworthy for its endorsement of the rights of Indigenous peoples.

Laudato si’ was issued a few months before the Paris Climate Agreement of December 2015, during a time of contentious debate about climate change. Its timing helped stir considerable public interest in the document, which was unusual for a papal encyclical. Initially, it polarized many Catholics, especially in the United States, but it also spurred change within many dioceses and parishes, involving “care for creation” groups, creation-themed liturgies, a call to repentance for wasteful consumption, and ecological awareness action plans.

Papal visits, Amoris laetitia, and catechism changes

Four months after issuing Laudato si’, Francis made his first visit to the United States, where he became the first pope to address the U.S. Congress. He once again courted controversy, this time by holding the first canonization mass in the U.S. in honor of Junípero Serra, an 18th-century Spanish missionary whose role in the colonization of the Americas has been criticized by Indigenous-rights groups. In New York City, Francis addressed the UN General Assembly and urged the world’s leaders to promote peace. He concluded his tour in Philadelphia, with an address before the World Meeting of Families and an open-air Spanish-language mass. In February 2016 he and Kirill I, patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, held the first-ever meeting between the leaders of the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches.

In March 2016 Francis issued his second exhortation, Amoris laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), a wide-ranging pronouncement on family issues. In it he urged priests and bishops to take a more welcoming, and less judgmental, attitude toward homosexuals, single parents, and the divorced who remarried but who had not obtained an annulment, indicating in the latter case that such Catholics might be permitted to receive Holy Communion through the guidance of a priest. He did not, however, lift their formal exclusion from the sacrament, and he reaffirmed the church’s rejection of same-sex marriage and of contraception.

In August 2018 Francis revised the catechism of the Catholic church to fully reject the death penalty. Formerly, capital punishment was permitted when it was seen as the only means of defending human lives against an unjust aggressor. The revision states that the death penalty is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Long a vocal critic of the death penalty, Francis said that the church would work to abolish capital punishment worldwide.

In February 2019 Francis became the first pope ever to visit the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam, in a trip meant to promote religious fraternity and peace. In his three-day visit to Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, he attended the Global Conference on Human Fraternity and met with Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque and one of the highest authorities in Sunni Islam. He also celebrated a papal mass attended by an estimated 180,000 people, many of whom were Christian immigrants, in what was the largest display of Christian worship in the country’s history.

Synod of Bishops on the Pan-Amazon region

In October 2019 Francis convened a special three-week assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Pan-Amazon region. The objectives of the synod were to identify new paths of evangelization, especially for Indigenous peoples living in the Amazon region, and to highlight the important role of the Amazon Rainforest in the health of the planet. At the conclusion of the synod, the bishops voted to recommend that Francis allow the ordination of married men as priests in the region because of severe shortages of ministers in remote areas. Another recommendation was to allow the ordination of women as deacons, also to help resolve priest shortages.

In response to the synod, Francis issued the apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia (“Beloved Amazon”) in February 2020. In the document, he declined—by omission—to grant the bishops’ requests for reform on the ordination of women and married men, and his silence on these requests was met with disappointment and criticism by some Catholics.

COVID-19 pandemic and Fratelli tutti

The COVID-19 pandemic presented challenges to Francis’s ministry in 2020, especially because Italy suffered a particularly high death rate in the first months of the pandemic, while lockdowns resulted in the closing of churches and others places of worship for in-person services. Francis live streamed the Angelus prayer—which he typically delivered every Sunday to worshippers gathered in the square of St. Peter’s Basilica—from inside the Vatican Palace. In March 2020, however, he left the Vatican and made a pilgrimage on foot through the streets of Rome to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore to pray before an icon of the Virgin Mary (the Salus Populi Romani, believed to have been made by St. Luke the Evangelist) for an end to the pandemic. This was followed by a visit to the Church of San Marcello al Corso to pray before a crucifix considered to be miraculous because it had been carried in a procession through Rome in 1522 to ward off a devastating plague.

A week later Francis performed an extraordinary Urbi et Orbi (“To the City and to the World”) blessing in a dark, deserted St. Peter’s Square, praying again for an end to the pandemic. (The Urbi et Orbi blessing is usually reserved for feasts such as Christmas and Easter; this event was deemed “extraordinary” because it was held outside of the “ordinary,” or standard, schedule for such blessings.)

In October 2020 Francis issued his third encyclical, Fratelli tutti (“Brothers All”), in which he addressed the topics of fraternity and social friendship as well as “the fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic.” Taking the encyclical’s title from the writings of St. Francis of Assisi, “this saint of fraternal love,” Francis condemned the world’s “throwaway culture” and called for an “architecture of peace” that serves the common good.

Health issues, return to global travels, and apology to Indigenous peoples in Canada

In 2021 Francis largely returned to his usual calendar of activities, though he was limited by continuing pandemic-related restrictions as well as personal health issues. A bout of sciatica led to the pope’s cancellation of several appearances in January. However, by March he was feeling well enough to travel to Iraq, marking the first time in history that a pope visited that country. In July he underwent surgery on his colon. The following year Francis’s knee problems resulted in more cancellations or postponements of trips and appearances, and he began requiring the use of a wheelchair. Yet, in July 2022 he made a “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada, where he met with survivors of the country’s religious-run residential schools, which had attempted to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children and became notorious for their widespread physical and sexual abuse. In his historic apology, Francis said to survivors, “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” and he described the schools as “a disastrous error, incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The following year was marked by further health issues for Francis, including abdominal surgery in June. He kept up his travels to the world’s faithful, however, visiting Portugal in August for World Youth Day and celebrating an open-air mass in Lisbon with 1.5 million people. In September he visited Mongolia, a country with a population of 3.5 million people but only 1,500 Catholics; the trip was another historic first in papal visits. Also in 2023, in October, he issued the apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum (“Praise God”), a follow-up to Laudato si’ in which he warned that the world’s responses to the climate crisis “have not been adequate.”

Many Catholics interpreted his actions of 2023 as setting the stage for the church’s future beyond his reign. Having initiated in previous years reforms of the church’s governance and finances, in September 2023 Francis consecrated 21 new cardinals, an unusually high number, which increases the likelihood that the next conclave will elect a pontiff who will continue his reforms.

The Synod on Synodality, Fiducia supplicans, and Dilexit nos

The three-year Synod on Synodality (2021–24) was opened by Francis with a solemn mass in October 2021 and held its first session in October 2023. Convened as a forum through which dioceses throughout the world could participate in listening and dialogue sessions on the future of the church, the synod was expected to spark debate on the topics of women deacons, sexuality, and gender identity. Significantly, the synod allowed the participation of laypeople (including women) as delegates with the right to vote on synod matters.

In December 2023 the Vatican issued the doctrinal declaration Fiducia supplicans (“Supplicating Trust”) announcing that Francis had formally approved the blessing of same-sex couples under the condition that such blessings not be administered during rituals or liturgies. The document also reiterated church doctrine that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. That same month Francis shared in an interview his plans to be buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore after his death rather than at the Vatican, a decision that arose from his devotion to the Virgin Mary. He will be the first pontiff buried in Santa Maria Maggiore since 1669—yet another indication of Francis’s distinctive legacy of reform.

In October 2024 the pope issued a new encyclical, Dilexit nos (“He Loved Us”). Subtitled “Letter on the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ,” the document reflects on the Sacred Heart of Jesus and calls for Catholics to reject consumerism and individualism. The encyclical also cautions against an over-reliance on technologies such as artificial intelligence. Immediately after the encyclical was published, the Synod on Synodality closed; Francis took the unusual step of ratifying its final document and forgoing a postsynodal apostolic exhortation. Although the final document called for women to be included in church leadership roles, the question of whether women can be allowed to serve as deacons was left for a synodal study group to resolve in 2025.