By Anthony Faiola · The Washington Post (c) 2025
VATICAN CITY – Three days after white smoke billowed from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel in March 2013, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires greeted the international press inside a cavernous Vatican audience hall. As he rose from a richly upholstered armchair, a pair of well-worn black shoes peeked out from underneath his new papal robes.
The decision by Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, to reject the lavish red slippers of his office was widely interpreted as a small act of rebellion in the tradition-bound Vatican.
The Argentine Jesuit had assumed the mantle of a church dazed by the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI and wounded by revelations of rampant sexual abuse in the priesthood and financial scandal. Now, after the surprise selection of the first non-European pontiff since 741, Francis was demonstrating modestly but unmistakably that he would be a different kind of pope.
Francis, 88, died April 21 of cerebral stroke and cardiocirculatory collapse, the Vatican announced. In February, after a bout with bronchitis, he had been hospitalized in Rome with what Vatican officials called a “complex clinical picture” that included a diagnosis of double pneumonia. Over recent years, he had suffered recurring respiratory infections, undergone colon and abdominal surgery, and experienced increasing mobility problems, requiring the use of a cane and wheelchair.
His death came after Francis, ignoring doctors’ orders to convalesce for two months and avoid large crowds, sought to continue his duties, making public appearances and holding private audiences before and during Easter. On Sunday, a day before his death, he met one-on-one with Vice President JD Vance and later funneled through a throng of 35,000 faithful in St. Peter’s Square in the popemobile.
In Vatican City, regality was always part of the papal mystique. Yet after receiving the nod, Francis personally placed a call to cancel his newspaper subscription back home in Buenos Aires. Previous pontiffs had traveled in the majestic comfort of a black limousine and lived in an opulent 10-room apartment overlooking St. Peter’s Square. Francis hitched rides on a Holy See minibus to his chosen quarters, a boardinghouse plunked behind a gas station. It remained his home.
During his first audience with Vatican journalists, one of them – a vision-impaired man led by a guide dog – fumbled for words as he met the pope, finally asking Francis to pray for his wife and daughter.
“And a special blessing for your dog, too?” the pope said, smiling mischievously before laying hands on fur.
A ripple of laughter among the press only grew at the stunned looks of senior Vatican officials. It was a telltale moment for a pontiff who, through landmark inclusion, revelatory humility and an occasional dash of humor, would bring a humble style and welcoming tone to the job of leading 1.389 billion Catholics.
Francis was most radical not in his theology or reforms, but rather in his methods. He embraced cultural practices from tango to Twitter, using the social media platform now known as X as a regular tool for communicating to the faithful. He became the first pope to give regular – and long – interviews to secular reporters. In them, an image emerged of a man who came to the papacy not as a scholar or bureaucrat but as a front lines cleric used to working in shantytowns.
Nowhere more than in his historic outreach to the LGBTQ+ community did his candid comments hint at momentous change in the approach, if not the official teachings, of the church. As the first Latin American and first Jesuit pope, he brought a novel worldview and perspective to the Holy See, the ancient city-state where he always seemed something of an outsider.
In contrast to Benedict, a German theologian revered by traditionalists, Francis focused his papacy on pastoralism and outreach rather than the reinforcement of doctrine.
“Francis took off the table all the obsessions [the church had] with issues of sexuality – you have no more discussion about relations before marriage, about divorced people, about [whether] homosexuals or transgender [people are] sons and daughters of God,” said Marco Politi, a papal biographer and longtime Vatican watcher. “His was the image of the Good Samaritan, and through him, the image he gave of the church was of a Good Samaritan.”
During Francis’s tenure, Catholicism faced serious, resurgent challenges: the expansion of evangelical Christian churches, especially in the developing world; the abandonment of organized religion;a clerical shortage; and lingering disgust over the cover-up and mismanagement of sexual abuse allegations.
The church still grew under Francis, especially in Africa, expanding globally by nearly 11 percent. But the pace was slightly slower than under Benedict, largely owing to an exodus in Europe of those frustrated with abuse scandals and the pace of reforms. Younger Catholics unwilling to pay “church taxes” in countries such as Germany also drifted away.
The number of baptisms in the church has decreased significantly, from nearly 18 million in 1998 to 13.3 million in 2022, according to Fides, a Vatican news agency.
Behind the scenes, Francis proved a tough administrator. He took aim at corruption within the Vatican’s byzantine bureaucracy, though he could not keep the Holy See in the latter stages of his papacy from hurtling toward financial crisis as global donations dropped and pension deficits jumped. He shook up the College of Cardinals, naming 108 of its 135 voting members and making sure the conclave that would pick his successor was more diverse and less dominated by Europeans.
His writings and statements brought harsh rebukes from some doctrinally conservative Catholics, the most steadfast of whom deeply opposed his move to stamp out the traditional Latin Mass, a liturgy he saw as exclusionary. He was more broadly embraced by liberals, even if they felt his personal ecumenism never translated into the radical reform they sought, especially on the role of women.
Although aspects of his reluctance to stand on ceremony would win him praise on the left and right, both camps would also accuse him of sowing confusion through actions that sometimes seemed contradictory or purposely vague.
Asked about gay priests by a journalist on a flight back to Italy from Brazil in 2013 – early in Francis’s papacy – the pope memorably replied, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” In a nod to modern norms, he used the colloquial “gay” – a term previous popes had avoided. He later went further, calling in January 2023 for the abolition of secular anti-gay laws while bluntly stating that “being homosexual is not a crime.”
To the exasperation of religious conservatives, he later defended the secular legal rights of same-sex couples while maintaining his opposition to same-sex marriage within the church. In 2023, he went further, opening the door to some blessings of gay couples by Catholic priests, and he released guidance declaring that, under certain circumstances, transgender people may be baptized, serve as godparents and witness weddings.
In December of that year, the Vatican office in charge of doctrine – then newly run by a Francis ally and fellow Argentine – outlined landmark guidelines for “ordained ministers” to bless people in same-sex couples, raising the ire of conservatives and praise from liberals. Later clarifications released by the Vatican often left both sides guessing what the pope meant.
Though LGBTQ+ outreach became a hallmark of his papacy, Francis did not fundamentally change church doctrine or its official teachings that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered.”
Regarding the Vatican’s environmental policy,hejoined the fight against human-driven climate change in a 192-page encyclical that warned against “synthetic agrotoxins” and “bioaccumulation” from industrial waste. He declared pollution a sin.
Like John Paul II, the charismatic pontiff Francis canonized as a saint, the Argentine leveraged his grassroots popularity and media spotlight to focus attention on the poor and marginalized in an effort to foster compassion.
His first official trip was to the Italian island of Lampedusa, a burdened way station for refugees seeking sanctuary in Europe from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East. In an unsubtle message to Christians who would turn away Muslim refugees, he sponsored a group of Syrians to live in Rome during the civil war in their country.
In 2016, after then-presidential candidate Donald Trump vowed to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, the pope said, “A person who thinks only about building walls wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”In Trump’s second term, Francis positioned the church as a spiritual bulwark against mass deportations in the United States and appeared to chide Vice President JD Vance – a conservative Catholic – for misinterpreting theological concepts to defend the practice.
“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” Francis wrote in a recent letter to U.S. bishops.
He frustrated Vatican security officials by eschewing the bulletproof lid of the “popemobile.” On his historic trip to the United States in 2015, Francis traveled in a humble Fiat. Preaching that priests should be shepherds who “lived with the smell of the sheep,” he opened car windows and mingled with the masses during papal visits. In a pre-Easter tradition, he knelt to wash the feet of Catholics and non-Catholics, some of them painfully disfigured and diseased.
“It’s all or nothing,” he told a Brazilian TV station. “Either you make the journey as you have to make it, with human communication, or you shouldn’t make it at all.”
At times, he was given to sudden bursts of emotion. On a trip to the Philippines in 2015, he discarded prepared remarks and spontaneously embraced a young girl who had asked him why God allows children to suffer the neglect of parents or the ills of drug abuse and prostitution. “She is the only one who has put a question for which there is no answer, and she wasn’t even able to express it in words but in tears,” he told the crowd.
Vatican officials struggled to contain his unscripted comments, such as when he suggested flexibility on the church’s opposition to contraception during an outbreak of the Zika virus in Latin America that was causing birth defects.
At times, Francis leaned into the role of pope as diplomat, particularly in Latin America, where his influence could be seen in the thaw between Cuba and the United States under President Barack Obama. A secretive deal to reach détente with China saw the Vatican grant Beijing the right to select bishops, with the pope holding only a veto. The Vatican defended the deal as bringing Chinese Roman Catholics out of the shadows, though the move was derided as appeasement by a range of critics from human rights groups to American conservatives.
Coming from a country in the Global South, Francis held a common view of the United States that was never fully trusting of its influence and power. During a 2023 encounter with Jesuit priests in Lisbon, he blasted the “strong reactionary attitude” of traditionalist American Catholics, describing them with an apparently self-created Italian word – “indietristi,” or backward-looking people.
He leveraged the authority of his office to call for religious coexistence and an end to sectarian strife in Iraq, where he met in March 2021 with the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a preeminent religious figure for Iraqi Shiites. From a desert stage on the plain of Ur, said to be the birthplace of Abraham – the Hebrew patriarch also revered by Christians and Muslims – he told a multi-faith crowd, “We need one another.”
He could be stern, particularly with the Vatican City bureaucracy, which he saw as overwrought and wasteful. But he also brought a comforting casualness to his job, rejecting fire and brimstone in favor of outreach. Almost everything he did – including his rapprochement with divorced Catholics and women who had had abortions – could be seen as a manifestation of his central ideal: mercy.
And yet, while Francis’s inclusive style brought cheers from liberal and casual Catholics, notable atheists and secular celebrities (gay pop-rock star Elton John called him a “miracle”), it proved divisive within his church. His ideology was nuanced and far from consistently liberal. He once compared gender theory (the study of gender identity) to nuclear weapons.
Few of his teachings proved more contentious than his opus on the family, “Amoris Laetitia,” or “The Joy of Love.” In the document, derisively dubbed “The Joy of Sex” in at least one conservative blog, Francis told married couples that they should not fear “a healthy sexual desire” and suggested that they start their days with a “morning kiss.”
More important, he appeared to open the door for divorced and remarried Catholics – long considered by the church to be living in a state of adultery – to receive Holy Communion. Such decisions, as with the brief blessings he authorized for people in same-sex unions, were left to the discretion of pastors, part of his effort to build flexibility into a less top-down church.
Francis’s fiercest critics – including Raymond Burke, a conservative U.S. cardinal who would become a chief antagonist within the church – decried such teachings as sowing confusion among the Catholic flock.
“Practically speaking, division has entered into the church, which is contrary to our very nature,” Burke said in 2016 while arguing that the pope’s teachings on divorced Catholics may have deviated from the faith’s “fundamental principles.”
Francis remained unbowed.
“May the church be a place of God’s mercy and hope, where all feel welcomed, loved, forgiven and encouraged to live according to the good life of the Gospel,” he said in 2013, when he also was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. “And to make others feel welcomed, loved, forgiven and encouraged, the church must be with doors wide open so that all may enter.”
Francis’s early tolerance for open dissent would fade along with his health in the latter stages of his papacy.
In late 2023, he caused an outcry among conservatives by removing one critic, Bishop Joseph Strickland, as head of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas. He also stripped traditional privileges – including a Rome apartment – from Burke. Francis relayed his thinking to his biographer Austen Ivereigh.
“A cardinal, in his oath, promises obedience ‘to blessed Peter in the person of the supreme Pontiff,’ ” Ivereigh wrote after discussing the move against Burke with Francis. “The wording is not accidental.”
A spiritual calling
Francis’s father, Mario José Francisco Bergoglio, emigrated from Italy’s Piedmont region with his parents and five siblings in 1928. They ventured west to join family already living in what was then the immigrants’ paradise of Argentina, one of the world’s wealthiest countries by the early 20th century.
The Great Depression, as well as the start of a long succession of military rulers, undermined the country’s promise. The Bergoglios relocated from the countryside to bustling Buenos Aires, the capital. There the pope’s father, a bookkeeper, met his future wife – Regina María Sivori, the daughter of Italian immigrants – at Mass.
The couple, who spoke Italian and Spanish at home, settled in the working-class neighborhood of Flores. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the eldest of five siblings, was born in the capital on Dec. 17, 1936. At the time, Flores was a relative backwater, a cluster of homes crisscrossed by dirt roads and vegetable fields. As a youth, Jorge played soccer and danced up-tempo milongas at parties. (His only immediate survivor is his sister, María Elena Bergoglio.)
His spiritual life was deeply influenced by Rosa Vassallo, his paternal grandmother, who cared for him during the day. In Italy, she had joined a Catholic group opposed to fascism, and in Argentina, she instilled in her young charge a sense of social justice. Even as pope, Francis would keep in his prayer book a letter she wrote him at his ordination.
“If on some painful day, sickness or the loss of a loved one fills you with grief,” it read, “remember that a sigh before the Tabernacle, where the greatest and most august martyr resides, and a gaze at Mary at the foot of the Cross, can make a drop of balm fall on the deepest and most painful wounds.”
An encounter on Sept. 21, 1953, stirred Jorge’s calling to the priesthood. Under the vaulted ceilings and frescoed walls of the Basílica San José de Flores, he went to confession and met a visiting priest, Carlos Duarte Ibarra, who was dying of leukemia. An impressionable 16-year-old, the future pope took comfort in Duarte’s absence of religious sternness and his spirit of forgiveness.
“He died the following year,” Pope Francis recalled in his 2016 book, “The Name of God Is Mercy,” written with Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli. “I still remember how when I got home, after his funeral and burial, I felt as though I had been abandoned. And I cried a lot that night, really a lot, and hid in my room. Why? Because I had lost a person who helped me feel the mercy of God.”
Taking a circuitous path to the priesthood, Jorge Bergoglio worked as a lab chemist (his mother wanted him to be a doctor) and, briefly, as a nightclub doorman. His spirituality deepened after he fell ill with pneumonia at 21, resulting in the eventual removal of most of one lung. In recollections with biographers Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, he said a nun – Sister Dolores, the woman who had prepared him for his First Communion – came to his sickbed.
“You are imitating Christ,” she told him, in what the future pope would interpret as a lecture on how to confront pain stoically.
He was ordained in 1969 after joining the Jesuits, a progressive Catholic order that emphasizes social justice and that, before Francis, had not produced a pope.
His ascent toward higher office began at a time when Argentina, includingthe Catholic Church there, was deeply divided by a right-wing military junta in power from 1976 to 1983.
The church hierarchy in Argentina stood accused of, at best, failing to denounce and, at worst, being complicit in the Dirty War, during which at least 10,000 accused dissidents disappeared. The military was fighting left-wing guerrillas, but its targets expanded to include political opponents, journalists, Jews, intellectuals and authors.
Father Bergoglio did not adhere to the radical liberation theology that led many idealistic young priests of his era to adopt sharply left-wing views. In the book “The Silence” (2005), Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky reported that Father Bergoglio, then a senior Jesuit, had lifted church protection from two leftist priests of his order, effectively allowing them to be jailed for refusing to end their politically tinged ministry in the Buenos Aires slums.
One of them died before Father Bergoglio became pope. The other, Francisco Jalics, later insisted that allegations that Father Bergoglio and the church had abandoned the two priests were based on false information.
A critical trait as Francis became a leader, wrote biographer Ivereigh, was his inscrutability, which earned him the nickname “Mona Lisa” among fellow Jesuits. Dozens of dissident escapees, Ivereigh noted, said Father Bergoglio helped them to hide or to flee Argentina through covert networks. He was credited with alerting others who were being targeted for persecution.
Father Bergoglio, Ivereigh wrote, found himself in a delicate position. He was said to disdain the ideology of the junta as well as the Marxist ideology of the left-wing Montoneros guerrilla movement. But he was exceedingly practical and needed to maintain open lines with both sides to protect the church.
In a 2010 trial on war crimes committed in Argentina during the junta years, the future pope was questioned about Esther Ballestrino, a chemist and communist militant who had campaigned for women’s and laborers’ rights and who had been a supervisor at the lab where young Jorge Bergoglio once worked. He cited her as a major influence on his thinking.
In the late 1970s, she helped form the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – a group of mothers of the “disappeared” whose regular marches with photos of their missing children presented a stark challenge to the junta. When the military began seizing dissidents, Father Bergoglio hid Ballestrino’s books on Marxism at her request.
She was arrested, and Francis later admitted in a deposition that although he held a senior position in the church, he did not seek to secure her release. Ballestrino, like many Argentine dissidents, is presumed to have been killed by being thrown from an airplane into the Atlantic Ocean. “I blame myself for not doing enough,” the future pope said at the trial.
In 1992, Pope John Paul II named Father Bergoglio assistant bishop in Buenos Aires, and five years later, he became archbishop. He served on Vatican commissions and, in 2005, was widely believed to have come in second to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, later Pope Benedict XVI, at the conclave convened to select the successor to John Paul after his death.
As Cardinal Bergoglio, a position he would achieve in 2001, he foreshadowed the revolutionary changes in style that would mark his years as Pope Francis. He lived in a modest dwelling after refusing to move into the large, impressive home of the city’s top clerics. He washed the feet of AIDS patients, drug dealers and prostitutes. He spent long days ministering in the sprawling slums known in Buenos Aires slang as “misery villages.”
While Catholic clerics in Eastern Europe clamored for a closer relationship between church and state, Cardinal Bergoglio sought a more detached approach. He believed that the church in Argentina had become too closely associated with politicians such as President Carlos Menem, who had been broadly denounced for corruption.
In 2001, Argentina suffered a profound economic collapse that unleashed hunger and malnutrition in what had been Latin America’s wealthiest nation. It was, perhaps, one of Cardinal Bergoglio’s finest hours. He launched church-backed relief operations that offered food, medicine, job training and shelter to the needy.
In the years immediately before his election as pope, he displayed a continued wariness toward politics, setting up his notoriously adversarial relationship with President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
A left-wing populist, Kirchner paintedCardinal Bergoglio as complicit in the junta, and he responded with thinly veiled swipes at the Argentine political class’s ingrained corruption and haughty attitude toward the poor.
His objection to Argentina’s landmark bill legalizing same-sex marriage provoked Kirchner, who backed the measure and described his tactics as reminiscent of “medieval times and the Inquisition.”
The cardinals “thought he was going to be more conservative,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Vatican analyst. “But that was partly because he did not speak English, and many bishops outside of Latin America did not know him so well as they thought. In Buenos Aires, he had sat in the homes of poor people and heard their stories, and did not see the marketplace or globalization as helping these people.”
An inclusive philosophy
Pope Francis’s approach to his papal office struck a new chord from the outset. The Rev. Guillermo Karcher, then a Vatican protocol officer, would recall striding through the massive doors of the Sistine Chapel on the day Francis was elected. Upon finding him in a hallway, Karcher knelt to kiss the papal ring.
Francis demurred, casually inviting the incredulous Karcher back to his feet and asking him to stand before him as an equal.
“Then we just stood there; he started asking me how my mom was doing,” Karcher told The Washington Post in 2015. “I think that from the very beginning, we knew this man was going to be different.”
The church that Francis inherited was in a state of disarray.
Benedict XVI had shocked the world by retiring – the first pope to do so since 1415 – after a short tenure rocked by a resurgence of the clerical sex scandals that had emerged under John Paul II. The Vatican had also become tabloid fodder after Benedict’s butler leaked documents alleging that secret homosexual mafias and financial corruption lurked behind the ancient walls of the Holy See.
Francis pressed for more transparency in the Roman curia, the vast and powerful Vatican bureaucracy. He sacked senior officials and created new commissions. But his efforts, often thwarted by internal power struggles, never quite lived up to the high hopes of many for top-to-bottom reform.
During his papacy, the church continued to suffer the fallout of revelations that, for years, the Catholic hierarchy had shuffled from parish to parish priests known to have sexually abused children.
Francis personally intervened to escalate a small number of cases, and he created the first pontifical commission dedicated to the protection of minors. But the church under Francis was sharply criticized for being too lenient with accused clergy, and Francis promoted a Chilean bishop – Juan Barros – who had allegedly covered up for a pedophile priest. (Francis accepted Barros’s resignation in 2018.)
Under Francis’s watch, in January 2019, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican watchdog that presides over investigations of sexual abuse, found former Washington archbishop Theodore McCarrick guilty of sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians. McCarrick was expelled from the priesthood, marking the first time a cardinal or bishop in the United States had been defrocked.
Nodding to modern times
Francis’s position on same-sex couples, guided by what he would later describe as his belief that they should not be “marginalized,” was especially complex. Rubin, an authorized biographer of Francis, told reporters in 2013 that during the same-sex marriage campaign in Argentina, then-Cardinal Bergoglio had suggested a radical idea to his peers: that the Argentine church publicly back same-sex civil unions as an alternative.
His position was quickly shot down by more-conservative bishops. His backing of civil unions reemerged in 2020, when his words as pope in support of legal rights for same-sex couples were highlighted in a documentary that premiered at the Rome Film Festival.
The comments sparked headlines worldwide. But he had actually made them a year earlier, in a television interview with a Mexican journalist said to have been conducted with Vatican cameras and Vatican control of the footage. They came to light after the documentary’s director, Evgeny Afineevsky, was granted access to Vatican archives, and what he found raised the possibility that church officials had been involved in a decision to cut the comments from the original interview.
In a subsequent letter to Vatican embassies around the world, the office of the Holy See’s secretary of state stressed that the pope was referring to secular unions and was not establishing new doctrine. The March 2021 decree ordered priests not to bless same-sex unions and made crystal clear – to the dismay of liberal priests in countries such as Germany – that Francis’s intention was never to change official church teachings.
Nevertheless, Francis’s position backing secular recognition for same-sex couples stood in stark contrast to the Vatican’s official position. A 2003 document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith described any legal recognition of same-sex couples as tantamount to “the approval of deviant behavior.”
Some gay Catholics experienced rapprochement with their families as a result of Francis’s opening. In a 2014 interview, a 35-year-old lesbian in Florence, Anna Maria, told The Post that her devoutly Catholic mother had called her after hearing the pope’s “Who am I to judge?” declaration. The two of them had grown distant since she had told her mother years earlier that she was a lesbian.
“But when she called me, she said, ‘If the pope is not judging you, then who am I to judge you either?’ ”
In his early 2023 call to eliminate laws that criminalize same-sex relationships, Francis still described homosexuality as “a sin.” Days later, he clarified that he did not mean that same-sex relations were any more sinful than heterosexual sex outside marriage.
“I should have said, ‘It is a sin, as is any sexual act outside of marriage,’ ” Francis added in a written reply to a priest ministering to the LGBTQ community in the United States. He continued, “I would tell whoever wants to criminalize homosexuality that they are wrong.”
The lack of church recognition of same-sex marriage, however, still meant that homosexuals had to abstain from sex for life to avoid sin.
The Francis-authorized decision in 2023 to allow short blessings of individuals in same-sex unions sparked a massive backlash within the church, particularly in Africa, where national churches said they would not uphold the ruling.
The decision emboldened the pope’s internal critics, who during Francis’s papacy would speak out against him with an ardor not seen since Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the church’s ban on artificial birth control in 1968. The German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, a frequent Francis critic, went as far as to describe the new guidance on blessings as “blasphemy.”
Francis embraced the notion of a “synodal church” – or a less top-down institution where laypeople and women were given more of a voice. In 2023 and 2024, he set high expectations for two synods that were billed as the most important gatherings of church leaders since the 1960s.
For church liberals, the events failed to deliver on several fronts. Francis did not budge on his opposition to married priests, and although he did not shut down discussions over women deacons, he made clear that during his papacy that would not become a reality.
He promoted women to unprecedented positions of power within the male-dominated Vatican, even as his words on the role of women – he often repeated the church’s portrayal of them as “daughters, sisters, mothers” – sparked accusations of reductive thinking.
“Especially on women, I’ve always thought he was quite the traditionalist,” Lucetta Scaraffia, a church historian and former editor of the Vatican women’s magazine Women Church World, told The Post in 2024, after the leadership of a Catholic university in Belgium rebuked Francis for his statements on women during an encounter with students and staff.
With Benedict’s death in late 2022, the world glimpsed a first in modern times – a sitting pope nodding at the coffin of his predecessor. The aftermath saw church conservatives amp up their criticism of Francis, as well as the unmasking of the author of a poison-pen letter provided to a journalist by a senior church official. The letter, a bitter critique of the Francis era, was written by Cardinal George Pell – a conservative titan whose name was revealed after his death in January 2023.
Though Francis never clearly changed doctrine, he stocked the College of Cardinals with less-traditional thinkers and moved fast to mint new saints. One of Francis’s canonizations involved 813 Italian martyrs of the 15th century. He may hold the record for canonizations, a distinction he was said to have happily embraced.
Francis reportedly favored candidates for canonization who reflected his personal focus on inequality, mercy and the plight of the poor, and he repeatedly waived the “two-miracle rule” to speed their way to sainthood.
The beneficiaries included Peter Faber, a founder of Francis’s Jesuit order and a figure viewed as a personal hero of the pope. Francis, on his own birthday, canonized Faber, after telling the Catholic magazine America why he found him so worthy.
It was, the pope said, because of Faber’s “dialogue with all, even the most remote and even with his opponents, his simple piety, a certain naivete perhaps, his being available straightaway, his careful interior discernment, the fact that he was a man capable of great and strong decisions but also capable of being so gentle and loving.”
Pope Francis died at the age of 88 on April 21, the Vatican announced, ending a historic chapter for the world’s largest Christian faith.(c) 2025 , The Washington Post