\n<\/p>\n
Pope Francis, who rose from modest means in Argentina to become the first Jesuit and Latin American pontiff, who clashed bitterly with traditionalists in his push for a more inclusive Roman Catholic Church, and who spoke out tirelessly for migrants, the marginalized and the health of the planet, died on Monday at the Vatican\u2019s Casa Santa Marta. He was 88.<\/p>\n
The pope\u2019s death was announced by the Vatican in a statement on X<\/a>, a day after Francis appeared in his wheelchair to bless the faithful in St. Peter\u2019s Square on Easter Sunday. The cause of death was a stroke followed by a coma and irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse, the Vatican said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Throughout his 12-year papacy, Francis was a change agent, having inherited a Vatican in disarray in 2013 after the stunning resignation of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, a standard-bearer of Roman Catholic conservatism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Francis steadily steered the church in another direction, restocking its leadership with a diverse array of bishops who shared his pastoral, welcoming approach as he sought to open up the church. Many rank-and-file Catholics approved, believing that the church had become inward-looking and distant from ordinary people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Francis reached out to migrants, the poor and the destitute, to victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy members, and to alienated gay Catholics. He traveled to often-forgotten and far-flung countries and sought to improve relations with an antagonistic Chinese government, Muslim clerics and leaders from across the fragmented Christian world.<\/p>\n After some early stumbles, he took strong steps to address a clerical sex abuse crisis that had become an existential threat to the church. He adopted new rules to hold top religious leaders, including bishops, accountable if they committed sexual abuse or covered it up, though he did not impose the level of transparency or civil reporting obligations that many advocates demanded.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In his final years, slowed by a bad knee, intestinal surgery and respiratory ailments that sapped his breath and voice, Francis used a cane and then a wheelchair, seemingly a diminished figure. But that was a misleading impression. He continued to travel widely, focusing on exploited and war-torn parts of Africa, where he excoriated modern-day colonizers and sought peace in South Sudan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His insistence on shaking up the status quo earned him no shortage of enemies. He demoted conservatives in Vatican offices, restricted the use of the old Latin Mass dear to traditionalists, opened influential meetings of bishops to laypeople, including women, allowed priests to bless same-sex couples and made clear that transgender people could be godparents and that their children could be baptized.<\/p>\n He also refused to endorse calls to deny communion to Catholic politicians supportive of abortion rights, including when he was president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said Francis had called him a \u201cgood Catholic.\u201d<\/p>\n His avuncular charm and easy smile belied his reputation inside the Vatican as a steely \u2014 his opponents said ruthless \u2014 administrator as he brought greater transparency to church finances and overhauled the Vatican\u2019s bureaucracy.<\/p>\n The traditional Italian power bases of the Vatican grew frustrated with his purposefully unpredictable governing style, which relied on a small group of confidants, many of them Jesuits like himself, and his own gut.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Conservative Catholics accused him of diluting church teachings and never stopped rallying against him. Simmering dissent periodically exploded into view in almost medieval fashion, with talk of schisms and heresy.<\/p>\n But Francis also disappointed many liberals, who hoped that he might introduce progressive policies. His openness to frank discussion gave oxygen to debates about long-taboo subjects, including priestly celibacy, communion for divorced and remarried people, and greater roles for women in the church. While he opened doors to talking about such issues, he tended to balk at making major decisions.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are often chained like Peter in the prison of habit,\u201d he said of the church in 2022 in a speech in St. Peter\u2019s Basilica. \u201cScared by change and tied to the chain of our customs.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the most surprising aspect of his papacy was that he became pope at all.<\/p>\n Francis was elected in March 2013 after the resignation of Benedict, the first pontiff to step down in nearly six centuries, amid turmoil and intrigue about secret lobbies and financial chicanery. The cardinal electors sought a reformer with a strong administrative hand, but few anticipated how Francis, then the 76-year-old archbishop of Buenos Aires, would blend reformist zeal and folksy charm in a push to clean house and transform the church.<\/p>\n \u201cBuona sera,\u201d good evening, Francis announced to the faithful in his first remarks as pope from the balcony overlooking St. Peter\u2019s Square, breaking the ice with unaffected style. He joked about being from Argentina, noting that in fulfilling their duty to produce a pope, \u201cit seems that my brother cardinals have gone almost to the ends of the Earth to get him.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Francis not only came from another part of the world: influenced by his Latin American populist roots, he also saw the world differently than his predecessors did. He became the first pontiff to take his papal name from St. Francis of Assisi, the austere friar who dedicated his life to piety and the poor and who, according to tradition, received instruction from God to rebuild his church.<\/p>\n Francis signaled his humble style from the outset. He paid his own bill at the Vatican hotel where he stayed during the conclave that elected him, rode about town in a modest Ford Focus, lived in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the ornate papal apartments and, in a Holy Week ritual performed at a youth prison, washed the feet of a young Muslim woman. Later, in his ailing years, he referred to his own frailty in demanding dignity for the aged.<\/p>\n His humility could be disarming. When asked about a priest who was said to be gay, he responded, \u201cWho am I to judge?\u201d<\/p>\n The comment made global headlines and signaled a dramatic change underway inside the Vatican.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Francis took over the church at a moment of crisis. In the industrialized world, it <\/strong>suffered from falling attendance, faith-draining clerical sexual abuse scandals, demands for a greater role for women and a dire shortage of priests. And in Latin America, Asia and Africa, where the faith was continuing to grow, the Catholic church faced increasing competition from Protestant evangelical and Pentecostal churches.<\/p>\n He soon tried to move the church away from divisive issues like abortion and homosexuality, and shifted its emphasis to global problems like climate change, poverty and migration. His first papal trip out of Rome was to Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island that had become the point of arrival for thousands of African migrants crossing the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n His vision, expressed in major documents like the encyclical \u201c<\/em>Laudato Si,\u201d or \u201cPraise Be to You,\u201d linked Catholic theology to protecting the environment and championing those on the margins, while denouncing the excesses of global capitalism in exploiting the poor.<\/p>\n He traveled frequently to the Arab world, where Christians faced persecution, to pursue d\u00e9tente with Islam, and repeatedly visited what he called the \u201cperipheries,\u201d the places and people often overlooked.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2019, Francis got on his hands and knees before the warring leaders of South Sudan\u2019s government and its opposition, kissing their shoes and imploring them to make peace. In 2023, in declining health, he traveled to the capital city, Juba, to upbraid them on their lack of progress.<\/p>\n \u201cNo more bloodshed, no more conflicts, no more violence and mutual recriminations about who is responsible for it,\u201d Francis said in the gardens of South Sudan\u2019s presidential palace. \u201cLeave the time of war behind and let a time of peace dawn!\u201d<\/p>\n He repeatedly denounced violence and, after an initial reluctance to take sides in the war in Ukraine, spoke out in support of Ukraine. But Ukrainian officials worried that what he called the Vatican\u2019s secret \u201cmission\u201d to mediate an end to the war, without explicitly rejecting Russia\u2019s occupation, <\/strong>could unwittingly aid their enemy.<\/p>\n Francis could be scathing toward the prelates in the Vatican. He once compared the hierarchy to a \u201cponderous, bureaucratic customs house.\u201d He accused some church officials of deluding themselves as being \u201cindispensable\u201d and afflicted by the \u201cterrorism of gossip.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His Christmas speeches to Vatican leaders became reliably blunt lectures about a church weighed down by clericalism \u2014 the notion that the \u201cpeacock priest\u201d and \u201cairport bishop,\u201d who drop in when convenient, see themselves as superior to their flock and had become out of touch. Clericalism, he contended, lay at the heart of many of the church\u2019s ills, including the child sexual abuse crisis.<\/p>\n Some powerful conservatives tried to use those scandals as a cudgel to destroy Francis, accusing him of covering up for Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, an American who was removed in disgrace for the sexual abuse of a minor.<\/p>\n That accusation against Francis proved unfounded, but he nevertheless had a long and painful learning curve on the sex abuse scandals. His initial calls for action yielded little, and when the crisis exploded again on his watch, he instinctively supported his fellow bishops and publicly doubted some victims, endangering his legacy as a defender of the downtrodden.<\/p>\n He ultimately regained his footing on the issue by recognizing his own blindness and by talking with abuse survivors. <\/strong>He never held bishops to account as much as some of his supporters had hoped. But he enacted meaningful reforms, sought to make the protection of children a priority for bishops around the world and, remarkably, ordered an exhaustive investigation that placed blame for Cardinal McCarrick\u2019s ascent at the feet of Saint John Paul II.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On other issues, Francis could make it difficult to understand where he stood. He rejected same-sex marriage yet called on priests to be welcoming to people in nontraditional relationships, such as gay men and lesbians, single parents and unmarried couples who live together.<\/p>\n He supported civil unions for gay couples but approved a Vatican decision to bar priests from blessing them \u2014 a decision he later said he regretted, and then reversed.<\/p>\n He called the criminalization of homosexuality \u201cunjust,\u201d but also backed the Vatican\u2019s opposition to a proposed Italian law extending protections to L.G.B.T.Q. people. And when Germany\u2019s bishops overwhelmingly voted to bless gay couples in 2023, the Vatican cracked down with the pope\u2019s approval.<\/p>\n Some of Francis\u2019 defenders argued that his ambiguities and incrementalisms reflected a strategy to build a consensus for a larger, longer-lasting project \u2014 that of creating a more collegial church that shifted power away from Rome to local bishops and priests in the trenches.<\/p>\n After Benedict\u2019s death ended the anomalous situation of two living popes, some of Francis\u2019 supporters expected him to exercise a freer hand. They hoped for bold changes from a meeting of the world\u2019s bishops in 2023 and 2024, where topics such as ordaining women as deacons and priestly celibacy and marriage were on the table. But the potentially explosive meeting ended with a whimper. The bishops called for women to be given more leadership roles but left the other major questions for another day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Indeed, Francis\u2019 most enduring legacy may be the transformation of the clerical ranks and the reshaping of the College of Cardinals, once dominated by conservatives appointed by Benedict and John Paul II.<\/p>\n In a hierarchy where personnel is policy, Francis\u2019 supporters hope the clergy he promoted \u2014 and the successor they will choose \u2014 will cross the lines he dared walk up to.<\/p>\n Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on Dec. 17, 1936, in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires to Mario Bergoglio and Regina (Sivori) Bergoglio, both of Italian descent.<\/p>\n The family\u2019s passage to Argentina would become part of Bergoglio lore: Booked in steerage on the ocean liner Principessa Mafalda<\/a>, <\/em>the future pope\u2019s paternal grandparents missed their departure because of delays in selling their coffee shop in Turin, Italy. But frustration soon turned to relief: The ship sank at sea. A few months later, they arrived safely in Buenos Aires aboard another liner, the Giulio Cesare.<\/p>\n Jorge, who was the eldest of five siblings, is survived by a sister, Mar\u00eda Elena Bergoglio.<\/p>\n Growing up, Jorge was deeply influenced by his grandmother Rosa Bergoglio, who in Italy had joined Catholic Action, the 1920s movement that defended the church against the encroachment of Mussolini\u2019s Fascist state. The rise of Fascism had helped push the family to leave.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In Flores, Rosa taught her grandson Italian inflected with the family\u2019s native Piedmont dialect and a love of literature. His father, Mario, eager to assimilate, insisted on speaking Spanish.<\/p>\n Catholicism was a sustaining and nurturing force in the Bergoglio household. When his mother was bedridden after the difficult birth of one of his sisters, Jorge, then 12, was placed in a school run by Salesian priests. The Salesians helped imbue him with a sense of duty toward the poor, as well as a realization of his own responsibility for improving the state of the world.<\/p>\n \u201cI learned, almost unconsciously, to seek the meaning of things,\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Bookish, intelligent and deeply religious, Jorge also played basketball and loved to dance the tango. Barely six weeks short of his 17th birthday, he was rushing to meet his friends in Flores when he paused in front of the Basilica of St. Joseph.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt I had to go in \u2014 those things you feel inside and you don\u2019t know what they are,\u201d he recounted. In the sanctuary, he said, he \u201cfelt like someone grabbed me from inside\u201d and took him into the confessional. \u201cRight there I knew I had to be a priest,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He often referred to a story about divine mercy describing the moment Jesus, by \u201cshowing mercy and by choosing,\u201d miserando atque eligendo, captivated Matthew the tax collector<\/a>. He said he felt the Lord was waiting for him too, and chose the Latin phrase for his motto.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s me,\u201d he later told the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest and friend who published an extensive interview with the pope. \u201cHow I felt.\u201d<\/p>\n But Jorge hid his ambition from his family. In high school he had demonstrated a scientific aptitude, and his mother hoped he would become a doctor. He worked in a chemistry lab and earned pocket money as a doorman at tango bars.<\/p>\n In November 1955, just after graduating from high school, he finally told his parents of his plans for the priesthood. His mother was unhappy and accused him of misleading her. \u201cI didn\u2019t lie to you, Mom,\u201d his sister, Maria Elena, recalled Jorge responding. \u201cI\u2019m going to study the medicine of the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n After 13 years of training, Jorge Bergoglio was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1969. The Jesuits had arrived in South America in 1580, along with colonists from Spain and Portugal who subjugated the continent with the complicity of Rome.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Jesuits, though, resisted some of the worst colonial abuses, creating self-ruled protectorates for Indigenous peoples. The future pope embraced this legacy: the closeness to the poor, the respect for Indigenous peoples, the suspicion of European expansion and the resistance to it, and a wariness toward secular ideologies.<\/p>\n Latin America and Catholicism were in turmoil when Father Bergoglio, at 36, took charge of the Argentine Jesuits. Argentina was in the throes of a \u201cdirty war,\u201d with a brutal military government killing and torturing thousands of opponents. And the Latin American church was sundered, as many senior prelates remained close to the ruling classes while many Jesuits embraced liberation theology, which called on the church to press for social change on behalf of the poor.<\/p>\n Conservative church leaders denounced that theology as Marxist. One of those critics was Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, an anti-Communist crusader from Poland, who in 1978 became Pope John Paul II and appointed conservative bishops who were antagonistic to liberation theology.<\/p>\n Father Bergoglio shared the view of the local church establishment that liberation theology was too political. He later faced accusations that as leader of the Argentine Jesuits he had done too little to protect two priests who were kidnapped and tortured by the junta, allegations later challenged by biographers and others. He eventually reconciled with one of the priests, but the other remained bitter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His Jesuit leadership ended in controversy. He had cultivated a passionate and loyal cadre of priests, but he had also made enemies, partly because of what critics called an imperious and autocratic management style. The church authorities sent him into de facto exile in Germany and then to C\u00f3rdoba, Argentina, a period he later described as \u201ca time of great interior crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n After becoming pope, Francis acknowledged that his administrative style as a Jesuit leader had been imperfect.<\/p>\n \u201cMy authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,\u201d he told Father Spadaro. \u201cBut I have never been a right-winger.\u201d<\/p>\n His exile, though, was interrupted in 1992 when a senior figure in the Argentine church unexpectedly named him auxiliary bishop of the Buenos Aires diocese. He became archbishop six years later and focused on outreach to the poor, assembling a group of priests dedicated to ministering in the slums.<\/p>\n During the country\u2019s 2001-02 economic crisis, he organized food kitchens, tripled the number of priests assigned to the slums and built schools and drug rehabilitation centers as state services retrenched. He converted his official residence into a hostel for priests and lived in a modest room in the diocesan building in central Buenos Aires. Before every Easter, he visited prison inmates, AIDS patients or older people, a practice he continued during his papacy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His suspicion of secular ideologies and theories, including capitalism, deepened. He contended that left-wing ideologies deified the state and economic neoliberalism eviscerated it. In 2006, at the traditional Catholic prayer of thanksgiving on Argentine Independence Day, Archbishop Bergoglio, by then a cardinal, made a thinly veiled critique of President N\u00e9stor Kirchner, who was in attendance.<\/p>\n Cardinal Bergoglio also had chilly relations with the Vatican. It represented \u201cthe heart of everything that he believed the church should not be: luxury, ostentation, hypocrisy, bureaucracy,\u201d his former press officer in Buenos Aires, Federico Wals, told Austen Ivereigh, one of the pope\u2019s biographers. \u201cHe hated going.\u201d<\/p>\n After passing the bishop\u2019s retirement age of 75, he reserved a simple room at a Catholic seminary, where he intended to live out his days in prayer and reflection, enjoying his beloved mate tea.<\/p>\n But Pope Benedict XVI changed all that on Feb. 11, 2013, when he announced that he would resign. It was the first papal resignation since Gregory XII\u2019s in 1415.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Cardinal Bergoglio flew to Rome to help elect a new pope. He never returned. <\/p>\n In the 2005 conclave that elected Benedict as pope, Cardinal Bergoglio had finished second and left Rome that year with little reason to believe that he would have another chance at the papacy. There was little evidence that he even wanted the job.<\/p>\n With Benedict\u2019s resignation, the news media was filled with speculation about who would succeed him, including expectations that the cardinals might select the first Latin American pope. Given his age, Cardinal Bergoglio wasn\u2019t on the shortlist.<\/p>\n But as the voting began, a movement to elect him began to take shape. Many cardinals from outside Rome were furious about dysfunction at the Vatican and the imperiousness of the Roman curia, the bureaucracy of cardinals and other officials that oversees the church. They criticized the church\u2019s response to the clerical sexual abuse crisis as inadequate. And a financial scandal was brewing at the opaque Vatican Bank.<\/p>\n Cardinal Bergoglio had a reputation as a tough, effective administrator, as well as someone who firmly believed in devolving power from the Vatican bureaucracies to bishops around the world.<\/p>\n A speech he made to cardinals before the conclave officially began made a mark, especially its emphasis on the church\u2019s duty to come out of its comfortable shell in order to reach people at the physical and spiritual peripheries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After Cardinal Bergoglio began accumulating votes, the weight of the papacy seemed to settle on him, witnesses recalled. It took two days, and on the fifth round of balloting, he crossed the 77-vote threshold for a two-thirds majority. Asked if he would accept the papacy, he responded, \u201cAlthough I am a sinner, I accept.\u201d<\/p>\n Cardinal Cl\u00e1udio Hummes of Brazil hugged him and said, \u201cDon\u2019t forget the poor!\u201d He did not.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After his time in Argentina, \u201chis papacy is a clear continuity, above all, in his focus on the poor,\u201d the Rev. Augusto Zampini Davies, who once worked in the Buenos Aires slum of Bajo Boulogne, told The New York Times in 2015. \u201cThe church \u2014 those that appointed him \u2014 wanted a change. And they wanted a change from the periphery. But perhaps what some did not predict is that when somebody starts to see the world from the viewpoint of the poorest, he undergoes a profound transformation.\u201d<\/p>\n In a conversation<\/a> with Italian reporters in 2015, Francis concisely articulated that view: \u201cWithout a solution to the problems of the poor, we cannot resolve the problems of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Francis quickly established himself as a figure with global influence.<\/p>\n He helped broker a reconciliation between the United States and Cuba, and Vatican diplomats had a hand in the peace deal that ended the decades-old civil war in Colombia. At the height of Europe\u2019s migrant crisis in 2015, he framed it as a moral issue and spoke up tirelessly for those risking their lives to reach Europe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As anti-migrant sentiment and populist politicians rose in Europe and the United States, Francis seemed out of step with the moment.<\/p>\n During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Francis suggested that Donald J. Trump was \u201cnot Christian\u201d because of his preference for building walls rather than bridges. Mr. Trump responded: \u201cFor a religious leader to question a person\u2019s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian.\u201d The battle lines were drawn.<\/p>\n Francis repeatedly sought to stand up to nationalism, and became a reliable opponent of ethnic, racial and sovereign appeals.<\/p>\n He visited Hungary in 2021 and appeared to chastise Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who often wrapped his hard line against migrants in an appeal to Christian values. But he returned to Hungary in 2023, a visit that a delighted Mr. Orban argued was a show of support for his values.<\/p>\n Francis kept speaking out, but fewer and fewer people seemed to listen.<\/p>\n Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the former head of the Vatican\u2019s Pontifical Council for Culture, said the pope had a duty to be a global conscience \u201ceven if it\u2019s a losing effort.\u201d The pope still reached a large audience, he said, even if \u201cthe world is going in another direction.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Francis stayed on message, incessantly reaching out to the faithful on the peripheries over more than 40 foreign trips. He also sought closer relations with other religions, especially in places where Catholic minorities risked persecution, while repeatedly courting Muslim leaders.<\/p>\n In 2017, he spoke at a conference in Cairo hosted by Al Azhar, perhaps the most influential center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, and established a strong interfaith relationship with its grand imam.<\/p>\n He took a risky trip to Iraq in 2021, undaunted by the pandemic and security concerns, and sought to forge bonds between Muslims and that country\u2019s dwindling Christian community.<\/p>\n He spoke up for the religious rights of non-Christian minorities, too, including the Rohingya in Bangladesh and Myanmar and the Yazidis in Iraq.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Building on the example of John Paul II, Francis honed the mea culpa into a diplomatic tool. In Dublin, he acknowledged \u201cthe grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the church charged with responsibility for their protection and education.\u201d<\/p>\n He apologized for the silence of church leaders in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and to the Roma people for a history of discrimination and mistreatment. In Canada, he begged forgiveness from Indigenous communities for the abuse and mistreatment of their children in Catholic schools.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On a flight from the United Arab Emirates in 2019, he acknowledged for the first time that priests and bishops had abused nuns.<\/p>\n In his global diplomacy, Francis sometimes did business with autocrats.<\/p>\n In China, he sealed a provisional deal with the government in 2018 to end a decades-old power struggle over the right to appoint bishops there. He won the first formal recognition of the pope\u2019s authority over Catholics in China, but in exchange he had to recognize the legitimacy of seven government-appointed bishops who had previously been excommunicated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The agreement gave the church access to an immense population where the growth of Protestantism was far outpacing Catholicism. But critics, including bishops who had suffered at the Communist government\u2019s hand, lambasted the deal as a shameful retreat and a dangerous precedent.<\/p>\n Some of his autocratic hosts exploited his visits for their own agendas and image. Francis and his advisers said it was worth such risks to deliver hope, seek breakthroughs and make amends.<\/p>\n The true measure of Francis\u2019 legacy is found perhaps less on the global stage than in the changes he made within his own church.<\/p>\n John Paul II and Benedict XVI believed in the concentration of authority in Rome. Francis emphasized a collegial, decentralized approach. The large meetings of bishops, called synods, which had historically been opportunities for lectures from the Roman curia, became policy meetings among empowered bishops.<\/p>\n For his supporters, decentralization brought the prospect of change that they had thirsted for over decades. For those who favored Vatican control, it was a nightmare.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When it came to the so-called Liturgy Wars, which affected the way adherents prayed, and which especially in the English-speaking world long divided liberals and conservatives, Francis empowered local bishops to translate liturgical language as they saw fit.<\/p>\n He used his appointment powers to make his vision lasting. He replaced conservatives with allies at the Vatican\u2019s Congregation of Bishops, which selects local church leaders. In choosing bishops, he was said to pick pastors over managers, street priests over power brokers. He preferred bishops closer to the people than those near the business-friendly Catholic group Opus Dei.<\/p>\n In the College of Cardinals, where a two-thirds majority of those under 80 will elect his successor, he appointed more than half its voters. He made the college less white (appointing the first African American cardinal), less Italian and less representative of the Roman curia.<\/p>\n Relying less on Europe, which he called \u201caged,\u201d or America\u2019s traditional feeder cities, like Philadelphia, he chose cardinals from nations with increasingly popular Pentecostal and evangelical movements in Latin America, Asia and Africa, the most fertile ground for Catholic growth and for priests, who are disappearing from Catholicism\u2019s historic centers in Europe.<\/p>\n \u201cYou are important,\u201d he told young Catholics in Mozambique in 2019. \u201cNot only are you the future of Mozambique, or of the church and of humanity. You are their present.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While he pushed for a decentralized church, Francis also created a sounding board of nine trusted cardinals with extraordinary influence, including the authority to rewrite the Vatican\u2019s constitution.<\/p>\n In a dramatic departure from the three decades of church leadership before him, he sought to revive the more open spirit of the Second Vatican Council. He canonized Pope John XXIII, who called the council, on the same day that he canonized Pope John Paul II. He later canonized Pope Paul VI, who oversaw the council\u2019s reforms.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can be with the church and therefore follow the council, or you can not follow the council or interpret it in your own way, as you want, and you are not with the church,\u201d the pontiff said in 2021, in a meeting with a group of Italian catechists.<\/p>\n Francis showed a deft political hand at isolating opponents. Instead of making a martyr out of Cardinal Robert Sarah, the arch-conservative leader of the liturgy department who championed the old Latin Mass, Francis simply ignored him, diluting his influence through empowered deputies, then quietly accepting his resignation when he reached retirement age.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Less than a year later, and only days after leaving the hospital after undergoing colon surgery in 2021, Francis introduced sweeping restrictions on the Latin Mass, arguing that its proponents had exploited it to undermine the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and to create divisions in the church.<\/p>\n In key positions, he brought the ax down hard. In July 2017, he essentially fired the church\u2019s top doctrinal watchdog, the conservative Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig M\u00fcller, by refusing to extend his term at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.<\/p>\n Francis folded the Pontifical Academy for Life, a headquarters for anti-abortion advocates, into a new umbrella department for Laity, Family and Life, which also opposed the death penalty. In 2018, capital punishment officially became contrary to church teaching.<\/p>\n Also that year, he put caring for migrants and the poor on an equal footing with opposition to abortion in the apostolic exhortation \u201cGaudete et Exsultate,\u201d or \u201cRejoice and Be Glad.\u201d Welcoming the stranger at the door is fundamental to the faith, he said, \u201cnot a notion invented by some pope, or a momentary fad.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One critical area where Francis\u2019 collegial vision seemed poised to deliver concrete change was the deepening shortage of priests in remote and overwhelmed corners of the Roman Catholic Church. He appeared ready to hear the pleas of some of his bishops to ordain married men.<\/p>\n The tradition of priestly celibacy had held sway in the church for nearly 1,000 years, although exceptions exist for Eastern Rite priests and married Protestant ministers who convert to Catholicism. Historically, priests in the church\u2019s first century were free to marry.<\/p>\n He considered whether married men of impeccable credentials could be ordained as priests to serve remote areas. \u201cWe need to think about whether \u2018viri probati\u2019 could be a possibility,\u201d Francis told the German newspaper Die Zeit in 2017, using the Latin phrase for such \u201ctested\u201d men.<\/p>\n In 2019, he held a major Vatican summit of bishops from the Amazon region, who recommended that Francis allow the ordination of married men as priests. The proposal was limited to remote areas of South America, but if adopted it would have set a precedent for easing the restriction on married priests throughout the world.<\/p>\n Conservative opponents called it a threat to the tradition of the priesthood, and another troubling sign that Francis was willing to dilute the faith to pursue a more inclusive but less pure church. Even Benedict, who in retirement had largely resisted attempts to be drawn into an internecine ideological war, joined them, emerging in January 2020 with a contribution to a book in which he defended priestly celibacy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ultimately, Francis set aside the proposal, disappointing his liberal supporters. Cardinal M\u00fcller welcomed the<\/a> decision as potentially having a \u201creconciling effect of reducing internal church factions, ideological fixations and the danger of inner emigration or open resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n The resistance to Francis was first tacit, then grumbling and ultimately full-throated.<\/p>\n Not long after his election, Vatican ambassadors briefed him on various situations around the world and suggested that he be especially wary when appointing bishops and cardinals in the United States.<\/p>\n \u201cI know that already,\u201d the pope interrupted. \u201cThat\u2019s where the opposition is coming from.\u201d<\/p>\n The American church had for decades been consumed with culture-war issues, and the de facto leader of the conservative opposition to Francis inside the Vatican was Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, an American canon lawyer who viewed Francis\u2019 inclusive vision as a dilution of doctrine; he even suggested that the pope was heretical and that his laws were void.\u00a0Francis removed Cardinal Burke from the Congregation of Bishops, ending his role in choosing bishops in the United States.<\/p>\n Cardinal Burke joined a few other cardinals in 2016 in signing a letter of \u201cdubia\u201d<\/a> \u2014 Latin for \u201cdoubts\u201d \u2014 demanding clarification from Francis about his apparent willingness to open the door for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion, which the signatories argued was against church law.<\/p>\n Francis enraged them by failing to respond.<\/p>\n Many of Francis\u2019 conservative opponents invoked Benedict as the church\u2019s real moral authority. Until his death, Benedict lived in a monastery inside Vatican City, not far from Francis\u2019 own apartment, and mostly kept his promise to stay hidden from the world even while Francis undid parts of his legacy and showed a dislike for the high church style and traditionalism that Benedict preferred. Francis, a wily political operator, had made a habit of dropping in on his retired predecessor in showings of white-cloaked cordiality that were fictionalized in a 2019 movie, \u201cThe Two Popes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The spats mostly remained internal, but the ascendance of Mr. Trump in the United States gave traditionalist forces in the Vatican a rival power to rally around. A constellation of conservative Catholic news sites, blogs and television channels, many financed by sources in the United States and Canada, constantly sought to weaken the pope.<\/p>\n Tensions escalated in 2017 when two close associates of Francis, in a Vatican-vetted journal<\/a>, accused American Catholic conservatives of making an alliance of \u201chate\u201d with evangelical Christians to back Mr. Trump.<\/p>\n In 2018, Francis criticized the hostile tenor that often reverberated throughout the conservative Catholic blogosphere.<\/p>\nA New Style<\/h2>\n
Roots in Italy<\/h2>\n
Time in the Wilderness<\/h2>\n
An Accidental Pope<\/h2>\n
A Global Force<\/h2>\n
Reforms Inside the Church<\/h2>\n
Opposition Rises<\/h2>\n