R.I.P. Francis, a pope who broke the mold

Many words will be written and spoken in the next few days about the legacy of Pope Francis, who took the papal office by storm in 2013, launching an open-door pastoral strategy for the Catholic Church, emphasizing Christian witness over doctrinal rules and persistently advocating for society’s most vulnerable.

He authored more than twenty important documents on topics that included climate change, God’s mercy and the “idolatry of money” in the prevailing economic system. He reorganized the Roman Curia and effectively downgraded the role of its doctrinal office, while taking important steps to eliminate corruption inside the Vatican. He promoted social justice, interreligious dialogue and peacemaking on trips to more than 60 countries, from the halls of the United Nations to the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea.

Along the way, he reshaped the church’s hierarchy, naming more than half of active bishops in the world and about 80 percent of the cardinals who will elect his successor. In making his selections, he routinely looked for ministers from the church’s “peripheries” who were close to their people, and steered away from culture warriors.

He changed the modern papacy by acting less as the authoritative supreme pontiff, and more as a simple pastor. He called people to spiritual conversion, saying the church must “meet people where they are” without preconditions. 

Five words that shook the world

Francis leaves behind a mountain of teaching, including formal speeches, impromptu interviews and tweets. But for much of the world, the Argentine pope will probably be best remembered for five short words he uttered four months after his election: “Who am I to judge?”

He was talking to reporters on a plane trip back to Rome from Brazil, and was asked about an investigation into the personal life of a Vatican official. The pope’s answer was long, but at one point he said simply, “A gay person who is seeking God, who is of good will – well, who am I to judge him?”

This was a sound bite heard around the world, and it signaled a fresh approach to the issue of gay identity. It also sent a shudder among more conservative officials back in Rome, and no doubt unsettled many of the priests and bishops who came of age under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. For more than thirty years, the Vatican had been fine-tuning its doctrinal arguments on this issue, and “judging” was seen as a necessary part of its teaching.

Only a few years earlier, Pope Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, had declared that the homosexual inclination itself was “objectively disordered,” and in fact Benedict made sure that language was included in the church’s revised catechism. (Benedict also said men with a homosexual orientation should not be admitted to the priesthood, a position that Francis quietly rolled back early in 2025.)

“Who am I to judge?” Clearly, Pope Francis was moving in a different direction.

Over the next 12 years, this tension between pastoral mercy and doctrinal clarity simmered in the background, both at the Vatican and among other bishops and cardinals of the pre-Francis era. And no doubt it will continue to simmer during the process to elect a new pope.

Pope Francis took a Latin phrase about “choosing mercy” as part of his official motto, and he would later explain why. “The church exists only as an instrument for communicating to people the merciful design of God,” not as an institution that insists on legalisms about salvation, he said. He reminded priests that the church should be a “field hospital” where the task is to heal people’s wounds.

His own teachings, through daily homilies, speeches and documents, reflected that priority. In particular, he shifted the church’s longstanding focus on personal morality – including sexual behavior – toward questions of social justice. Critics, not surprisingly, said the pope’s approach risked compromising with modern secular values.

Francis continually pushed the traditional boundaries of pastoral leniency, and he met resistance. On one issue, that turned into outspoken opposition in 2024, after the Vatican issued a document allowing priests to bless same-sex couples. While supporters called it a major step in the church’s relations with LGBTQ people, leading bishops in Africa and some in Europe rebelled and forbade such blessings. The pope was forced to clarify that the church was not blessing the unions, but the people involved, and he blamed part of the reaction on cultural differences in Africa. The episode brought to the surface a strong vein of hostility to the pope’s agenda, and will no doubt be recalled as the conclave takes shape.

Moving away from a “self-referential” church

The pope’s vision of the church was always less about Catholic identity and more about its members’ external influence, or as he put it, the “culture of encounter” with people in all walks of life. Lay Catholics, he said, need to first love the Gospel and proclaim it by example. He said priests should get out of the sacristy, share the problems of their faithful, and reject an attitude of clerical entitlement. He warned bishops against careerism.

The pope tried to set an example, and he gave much of his attention to the least privileged. He shared frequent meals with the homeless, visited immigrant communities, and spent many hours with the sick and the imprisoned.

He challenged certain contemporary trends, sometimes in tough language but more often in a tone of encouragement. For example, in describing the consumerist “throwaway culture” as one of the greatest threats to human dignity, he explained how it can erode the bond of solidarity with society’s weakest members – including the unborn. He spoke less directly and less frequently about the topic of abortion than his predecessors, which sometimes prompted complaints from bishops.

He once suggested that gender theory was akin to nuclear war against the family and part of an ideological colonization in the world. Yet he met with transgender persons several times, listening closely to their personal stories and defending their human dignity.

A revolution with mixed results

On the whole, I think Francis’ record as pope will be viewed as revolutionary in spirit, but with mixed results in the day-to-day life of the church and the world.

He strengthened church teaching on the moral aspects of ecology, and was clearly a voice for the poor in his sharp critiques of what he called the “tyranny” of capitalism. “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” was a line that resonated with many inside and outside the church.

Visiting Africa in 2023, he condemned what he called “economic colonialism” and said global powers must stop plundering the continent’s vast resources. At the Vatican and abroad, he repeatedly urged people to fight the underlying causes of poverty, inequality and unemployment, as well as new forms of discrimination and human trafficking. He made clear that “spiritual poverty” was a big part of the world’s problems. When it came to what he called “structures of sin” in society, this pope could indeed be judgmental.

Whether his words made a difference in global economic practices is debatable. Critics contrasted his rather absolute statements (“This economy kills”) with the more nuanced critique of capitalism made by Pope John Paul II, and world powers tended to ignore Francis’ most biting denunciations.

Francis became the first pope to condemn not only the use of nuclear weapons, but also “the threat of their use, as well as their very possession.” The statement marked a shift in the Catholic Church’s stand on the morality of such weapons, moving away from a provisional acceptance of nuclear deterrence as a transitional step toward disarmament.

Just as important as his pronouncements about war and peace was his outreach to victims of conflict and displacement. For example, almost every evening during the most recent war in Gaza, the pope phoned the priest and parishioners at a Gaza City church to ask about their well-being – something that Middle Eastern Christians will not forget.

From the start, Francis set out to build bridges to communities and populations outside the Catholic orbit. Advancing his predecessors’ dialogue efforts, he made important initiatives to other Christian churches, to Islamic and Jewish leaders, and to indigenous peoples around the world. He set a collaborative tone, especially on social issues like ecology and migration, where he saw the possibility for joint action. His many visits and other encounters with representatives of other faiths created bonds of friendship; unsurprisingly, at the official dialogue level there were no major breakthroughs.

The pope’s record on internal church problems was likewise marked by achievements that were significant by Vatican standards, but often fell short of public expectations.

Francis took several steps to systematically address the scandal of sex abuse in the church, establishing a papal commission on the issue, instituting global reporting requirements and meeting many times with abuse victims. He said in 2022 that there should be “zero tolerance” on sex abuse, and that a priest who abuses “cannot remain a priest.” He defrocked bishops accused of abuse. But critics said his measures were not enough, and pointed to evidence that abusive priests have, in fact, remained in ministry in many parts of the globe. Moreover, the pope personally defended some bishops accused of abuse or cover-ups, although in the best-known case of a Chilean bishop, Francis later regretted his comments and said he had made a “grave error.”

In his later years, the pope spent much time and effort on what he called “synodality,” a process of listening, dialogue and prayer aimed at broadening participation by all Catholics in church life and decision-making. He tried to use sessions of the Synod of Bishops as a vehicle for change, but the results were disappointing to many. For one thing, the meetings tended to underscore divided opinions along the pastoral mercy/doctrinal clarity fault line. Consequently, despite high expectations, there were few concrete changes. Even the proposed ordination of married men throughout the entire church, something that has been raised at virtually every synod over the last 30 years, got no traction under Pope Francis. One modest exception followed the synod on the family in 2014, when Francis relaxed the criteria allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.

The pope expanded the role of women in the church, but not in ordained ministry; the rather modest idea of female deacons was once again put on the back burner for further study. He did change church law to allow women to have liturgical roles like lector and acolyte. He also appointed two women to high Roman Curia positions, dispensing with the traditional argument that priestly ordination was a requirement for decision-making authority at the Vatican. This was considered a bold move inside the Vatican walls but failed to stir much excitement in the wider church.

An unfiltered pope

For journalists, Pope Francis was a godsend. He often spoke off-the-cuff, granted frequent interviews (without Vatican minders) and managed to circumvent Vatican departments that for centuries have presumed a right to control and edit papal communication. His decision to downsize his living quarters was an important element in all this. By moving out of the ornate papal apartments and into a modest Vatican guest house, far from other Vatican offices, he gained more freedom to talk and meet with people. In essence, he relocated the day-to-day work of the papacy outside the Roman Curia.

Francis communicated in accessible language and with a spontaneity that garnered headlines but sometimes got him in trouble. For example, he once remarked that Catholics should practice responsible parenthood, which didn’t mean they should breed “like rabbits.” He later apologized and said he didn’t mean to devalue large families. More than once, he reminded people that popes are not infallible in everything they do and say, and that “even the pope has defects.”

The pope’s style and content won him popularity among many. Opinion polls among Catholics in the United States and elsewhere usually gave him approval ratings of 70 percent or more. At the same time, however, his remarks and policies caused polarization in more traditional Catholic circles. This was clearly true in the United States, where some bishops outright opposed the pope on key issues and others reacted with indifference, while conservative lay groups also voiced open criticism.

The pope responded with his usual directness, saying in 2023 that there was a “very strong reactionary attitude” among some U.S. Catholics, which reflected a “backward” mindset based more on ideology than faith.

More recently, Francis was critical of the Trump administration’s plans for mass deportations of immigrants living in the country illegally. Relatedly, he engaged in a veiled sparring match with Vice President J.D. Vance on the question of how far Christian charity should extend, saying: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups … (it) builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” His willingness to wade into the political fray may help explain why the pope’s approval ratings were significantly lower among Catholic Republicans than Catholic Democrats.

Cleaning up the Vatican

Pope Francis was elected with a mandate to clean up the Vatican’s dysfunctional and opaque bureaucracy. With the help of outside auditors, he quickly took steps to centralize Vatican accounting and investments, establishing watchdog agencies that had unprecedented authority over every Vatican department. But scandals, small and large, continued to surface. In 2023, a cardinal who was once a top papal aide was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to jail by a Vatican tribunal for his role in a multi-million dollar London property deal.

Although he successfully revamped the offices of the Roman Curia, as the years passed the pope seemed less interested in administrative tasks. He diminished the central role of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, preferring to rely on a few close advisors, and the number of high-level projects by other Vatican offices declined. The pope relied very little on the College of Cardinals, convening them only three times for consultation, a fact that led to accusations of “autocratic” rule from some of the upper levels of the church’s hierarchy.

Diplomatic initiatives were also few and far between. A papal peace envoy helped bring about a recent prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia, but little else; the pope himself caused a backlash in much of the West when he said in 2024 that Ukraine should demonstrate the “courage of the white flag” and commence negotiations with Russia. (History may view the pope’s comment as a wise warning.)

The Vatican opened a new chapter in its relations with China in 2018, signing an agreement that paved the way for the Vatican’s appointment of several bishops in the country. The fragile agreement has been renewed three times, although some critics have said it gives the Chinese government too much say in the selection of bishops. (Similar criticism was leveled at Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI on the same issue.)

There were a few personal and dramatic moments in papal diplomacy. Meeting with Sudan’s warring political leaders at the Vatican in 2019, Francis shocked them – and his own aides – when he knelt and kissed their feet in an entreaty for peace.

In general, though, Pope Francis was more a voice of social conscience than a diplomatic protagonist. The world’s most powerful people, in fact, may have viewed his preaching as largely irrelevant. But I think it can be argued that for many others, especially young people, Francis may have saved the church from irrelevance, at least temporarily. He will be remembered for his fresh approach to spreading the Gospel and his innovative way of conducting the papacy – as a servant of the “church of the poor.” Whether that approach will continue to guide the church’s future is something to be answered by the coming conclave.