Head of the Roman Catholic Church until his death on April 21st 2025—Easter Monday—aged 88. He suffered a fatal stroke; his funeral took place on April 26th at St Peter's Basilica in Rome.
Argentine by birth, named after St Francis of Assisi, the first non-European pope for almost 13 centuries, and the first Jesuit to hold the office. His parents' language was Italian. After his election on March 13th 2013, he said he had been plucked from the "end of the Earth." He had served as archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1998, where he was known as the "Slum Bishop" for insisting that he and his priests go out into the streets and to the margins. In Buenos Aires he cooked his own meals and travelled by bus. He was briefly provincial of the Argentine Jesuits, a role in which he could be fearsomely angry and authoritarian, by his own colleagues' account. His vague political instincts were tinged with Peronist populism. He was a fan of football club San Lorenzo.
Francis was elected to shake up the Vatican administration and to make it more responsive to the wider church. He fulfilled the first of those missions in 2022 with the publication of a new Vatican constitution. He also sought to bolster the authority of synods—assemblies of bishops meeting in the Vatican to discuss specific issues—but that goal remained more aspiration than achievement, largely because he was unwilling to yield when the synods reached conclusions he did not share. A synod on the family made negligible progress. He held a synod for his "Querida Amazonia." He had a penchant for appointing as cardinals prelates from peripheral parts of the world, favouring third-worlders and the open-minded.
His attempts to sort out the black hole of Vatican finances were partly successful but left him open to accusations of high-handedness. His efforts to address child abuse by clergy were often clumsy, and his apologies made little impression on the press or on the victims. He brokered a new relationship between the United States and Cuba.
He refused the papal cape and red slippers, wearing instead a plain white cassock and his ordinary black shoes. He kept the iron-plated pectoral cross he had worn since 1998 as archbishop. He lived not in the 12-room papal apartment but in a two-room suite in the Vatican guests' hostel, taking meals in the dining room with everyone else—an arrangement that lasted until he died. He discarded the bulletproof Popemobile so he could hug, embrace and get himself into selfies with his flock. He would sneak out to hospitals, prisons and hospices; on Holy Thursday he would kneel before people in trouble, wash their feet, towel them dry and kiss them. He described ostentatious displays of sanctity as "osteoporosis of the soul." He fed hundreds of homeless with pizza at the Vatican and adopted several families of Syrian refugees.
More than perhaps any of his predecessors, Francis stressed that Catholic social teaching condemned not just Marxism but also unchecked economic liberalism. His immense 2015 encyclical "Laudato Si'" fiercely attacked consumerism and the profit motive; he gave a copy to Donald Trump when the president visited, and later challenged Trump's views on immigration. His ideas on climate change were at odds with the Trump administration's. "We must commit ourselves to...the protection of nature," he said in 2024.
He denounced the Trump administration's plans for the mass deportation of America's illegal immigrants as a "calamity". He was no great admirer of the United States or of unbridled capitalism.
Where Francis and Trump did see eye to eye was on abortion and, to a more nuanced degree, on the need for an end to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
Of homosexuals, he said: "Who am I to judge?" His exhortation on married love, "Amoris Laetitia", seemed to leave open the possibility that the divorced and remarried could receive communion—provoking some cardinals to present dubia (serious doctrinal doubts). He disregarded them. Some teachings—on abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage—remained non-negotiable in his mind.
After a Palestinian Christian mother and daughter were shot seeking refuge in the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City in December 2023 (Israel denied responsibility), Francis began phoning Gaza's Christians every day, sometimes more often on the worst days. His conduit was Father Gabriel Romanelli, a 55-year-old Argentine priest who had been living in Gaza since 2005. Christians numbered around 1,100 among Gaza's 2.3m people; the war killed 36 of them (3%), according to Father Romanelli's tally. Francis was still calling when failing health forced him to suspend normal activities. Each night Gazans would huddle around the priest's phone, then take the pope's message out into the community.
The conclave to elect his successor was expected to open between May 6th and 10th 2025. Of the 135 cardinals entitled to vote, all but 27 were chosen by Francis. He appointed Cardinal Robert McElroy, an outspoken champion of immigrants, as archbishop of Washington, DC. Trump had named Brian Burch, a hardline critic of Francis, as America's envoy to the Holy See on December 20th 2024.
Not all of Francis's choices for the college of cardinals were progressives; in Africa liberal Catholic bishops and archbishops were scarce. Africa's Catholic population accounts for about a fifth of the global total, yet Africans would cast only one-eighth of the conclave votes.
On both occasions when Francis's papal authority was openly challenged, it was by African cardinals: once over liturgy and once over the 2023 decision permitting priests to bless same-sex couples, in which the African outcry was so vehement that Francis in effect granted an opt-out—a rare practice for the Catholic Church.
His successor, Leo XIV, was an American—Robert Prevost, head of the Augustinian order. The two men had clashed; when Francis was elected pope, Prevost told fellow Augustinians that he would never be made a bishop. Francis must have come to appreciate his qualities, however, because he later made him a bishop, gave him a key Vatican role, and elevated him to cardinal. John Paul II had been the first non-Italian pope for 455 years; Francis was the first from outside Europe in almost 13 centuries.
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