The election of Pope Francis in 2013 was unanimously welcomed by progressists, but after his passing on April 21st, the assessment of his time as head of the Catholic Church is a mixed one. As the process of his succession begins, there are fears of a new offensive from the most reactionary among the clergy.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires who became Pope Francis, died at the age of 88 from what the Vatican announced was a stroke and ensuing heart failure on the morning of Easter Monday, a highly symbolic day for the estimated 1.4 billion Catholics around the world.
The Argentine pontiff had suffered from various health problems over recent years. Hospitalized on February 14th with bronchitis, he developed pneumonia in both lungs (bilateral pneumonia) which led to him spending 38 days in hospital – his fourth and longest hospital stay since becoming pope in 2013 – before he was discharged on March 23rd.
His last public appearance was on Easter Sunday, when he toured a packed St Peter’s Square in his open-topped popemobile vehicle, but was visibly fatigued. His voice weak, Francis declined to celebrate Easter Mass in the piazza, handing the task to Cardinal Angelo Comastri, although when it ended he appeared at a balcony to give the papal blessing in Latin.
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There now follows a nine-day period of mourning, while the organisation of the conclave will take between 15 and 20 days, when cardinal-electors – close to 80% of whom were chosen by Francis – will elect his successor. During the intervening period, it is the Irish-American cardinal Kevin Farrell, the camerlengo (cardinal chamberlain), who will take charge of the ordinary affairs of the Holy See.
François made known in 2023 that he wished to be buried at the Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica (Basilica of St Mary Major) in the centre of Rome, rather than in a crypt of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City. Seven popes have been buried at Santa Maria Maggiore, but Francis will be the first since Clement IX in 1669.
Last November, the Vatican published a simplified ritual for the burial of popes, as revised by Francis. This includes changing the make-up of the coffin from the traditional three joined from cypress, lead and oak and instead an ordinary wooden coffin lined with another in zinc. Archbishop Diego Ravelli, the Vatican’s master of liturgical ceremonies with whom Francis worked to simplify the rites, said the changes were “to emphasize even more that the Roman Pontiff’s funeral is that of a pastor and disciple of Christ and not of a powerful man of this world”.
A contrasting record
These symbolic decisions illustrate the role Francis has played at the Vatican during his 12 years as pontiff. He represented an apparent break with the old rituals, like Mass in Latin, and the Church’s most traditionalist fringes who fought to the end against the Argentine pope who, in comparison to the pomp and splendour of the Vatican, preferred a sober lifestyle.
To adopt a two-room apartment of 70 square metres in Rome as his home saw him accused of removing the sacred aura of popehood. Shocking the conservatives from the start, in March 2013, the month he was elected pope, Francis travelled to a youth detention centre to wash and kiss the feet of 12 young detainees to commemorate Christ's Last Supper.
But he also adapted to the traditional structures of the Church. As Mediapart reported in 2017, the support he gave in Argentina to the fundamentalist Catholic fraternity, the Society of Saint Pius X, illustrated a particularly flagrant double-standard: “Pope Francis plays an ambiguous game, alternately progressist and conservative. The face of an open and tolerant Church during the day, the architect of the rehabilitation of a Catholic fundamentalist fringe by night.”
That report revealed, in partnership with the investigative Swedish television programme Uppdrag granskning, produced by public broadcaster SVT1, how Francis, when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, personally lobbied in favour of the reintegration of the Saint Pius X fraternity into the Catholic Church.
“With his temporal and spiritual power, this pope has the skill of always batting for both sides: collegiate and authoritarian, the supreme guardian of hieratic dogmas, but a good shepherd attached to the odour of his flock, he wants to be indiscernible because he is in movement,” wrote Mediapart journalist Antoine Perraud about Francis in December 2014.
The principal legacy of Francis
In reality, the principal legacy of the pope is the political role he took on immediately after his election in 2013 – when he even became “personality of the year” for the US magazine Time. Francis represented a more progressist approach than his predecessors, notably towards environmental issues, migrant rights, social justice and inter-religious dialogue.
He took a stand against the mafia, which he excommunicated during a visit to Calabria in 2014, ending years of ambiguity, even complicity, between certain prelates and the killers from organised crime.
In June 2013, addressing an ecclesial convention of the diocese of Rome, Francis declared: “In this day and age unless Christians are revolutionaries they are not Christians.” He was a harsh critic of the excesses of capitalism. But the pope is a religious leader and the head of a state that has for long been managed in greatest secrecy, and despite his promotion of a reconciliation between Cuba and the US, he was never a disguised socialist activist for world revolution.
His best-known text was an encyclical, published in 2015, about the environment and climate change, entitled Laudato si’. It called for “swift and unified global action" to protect the environment and an end to irresponsible economic activity.
In 2023 he published Laudate Deum (Praise God), an apostolic exhortation in which he urged speedier action to counter climate change and attacked those who deny the existence of the crisis, including “within the Catholic Church”. In his text, Francis underlined the damage caused by “unchecked human intervention on nature in the past two centuries”, underlined that “the change in average surface temperatures cannot be explained except as the result of the increase of greenhouse gases”, and called for “a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model” which “would have a significant long-term impact”.
Visiting Bolivia in 2015, Francis addressed a public meeting in Santa Cruz, accompanied by then Bolivian president Evo Morales. In a fiery, one-hour speech he denounced what he called the unfettered pursuit of money, describing this as “the dung of the devil”, and a system that “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature”.
“This system is by now intolerable,” he continued. “Farm workers find it intolerable, labourers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable.”
He also had harsh words against the rejection by Europe of those fleeing war or poverty. His first official visit as pope was to the Italian island of Lampedusa, the destination of tens of thousands of migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe. A symbol of the selfishness and xenophobia of Europe, it was there that he first pronounced his subsequently well-known phrase, “the globalisation of indifference”.
He called for "pardon for those who are complacent and closed amid comforts which have deadened their hearts", and "forgiveness for those who by their decisions at the global level have created situations that lead to these tragedies".
In 2023, Francis made a two-day visit to the French port city of Marseille – and “not to France”, he insisted – in a gesture of support for the local branch of the Catholic Church which has a long history of support for migrants. Addressing a Church conference, he denounced “archaic and bellicose nationalisms”.
"There is a cry of pain that resonates most of all,” he said, “and it is turning the Mediterranean, the 'mare nostrum', from the cradle of civilization into the 'mare mortuum', the graveyard of dignity: it is the stifled cry of migrant brothers and sisters."
On February 11th this year, he condemned the massive deportations of migrants ordered by US President Donald Trump, prompting angry reaction. There was a certain irony in the visit paid to the Vatican this last weekend by US vice-president JD Vance, a Catholic convert who represents the hardest currents within the Church, a supporter of reactionary policies and authoritarian regimes. He met with the pope just hours before the latter passed away.
In his last message, read out on Sunday by an aide as Francis looked out from the balcony in St. Peter’s Square, the pope described the humanitarian situation in Gaza as “dramatic and deplorable” while also denouncing a “worrisome” anti-Semitic trend in the world. "I express my closeness to the sufferings ... of all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people," read his message. "I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace.”
Abortion and LGBTQI+ rights
But at another level, Francis promoted right until the end, a profoundly reactionary ideology on gender issues, while also pronouncing homophobic comments, and in 2018 compared abortion to “hiring a hitman to resolve a problem” . In 2020, the pope opposed legislation passed in Argentina’s parliament in favour of legalising abortion.
In 2019, the Vatican published a document of teaching guidance entitled Male and Female He Created Them. Under the pretence of calling for dialogue, it only mentions the terms “queer”, “transgender” and “gender-neutral” in order to call them into question for leading to “a society without sexual differences” and for removing the meaning of the “anthropological basis of the concept of family”. In 12 years as pontiff, Francis never questioned the doctrine of the Church regarding homosexuality, which it views as “intrinsically disordered”.
Last year, he issued an apology for using a derogatory term for homosexuals in Roman dialect, when he told around 250 bishops gathered with him for a closed-door meeting of the Italian bishops conference that he was against admitting openly gay men to Catholic seminaries, where priests are trained. The pope said that there were already too many frociaggine, roughly translatable as “poofs”.
His ambivalence was summed up in an interview Francis gave to The Associated Press in January 2023 on the issue of homosexuality. “It’s not a crime. Yes, but it’s a sin,” he said. “Fine, but first let’s distinguish between a sin and a crime,” adding: “It’s also a sin to lack charity with one another.”
The sexual abuse scandals
It is a similar story with the issue of sexual violence within the church, one of the principal scandals that dogged his term. Francis profoundly disappointed and hurt associations representing victims of the crimes, notably in South America. In 2018, the Church was plunged into crisis after Francis lent support to a Chilian bishop who was close to notorious paedo-criminal and former priest, Fernando Karadima. The pope later apologised.
That same year he caused shock during a visit to Ireland when he said he was unfamiliar with the scandal of the Magdalene Laundries, institutions run mostly by Catholic orders where, between 1922 and 1996, more than 10,000 Irish women were housed and worked in brutal slave-like conditions, some sexually abused. The scandal, revealed in 1993 after the unmarked graves of 155 women were found in the grounds of one of the institutions, was widely documented, had been the subject of an official inquiry into the collusion of the Irish state, for which an offical apology was issued in 2013.
In a summit on tackling paedo-criminality within the Church, held at the Vatican in February 2019, the pope told assembled bishops and cardinals that “faced with the scourge of sexual abuse committed by men of the church against minors, I wanted to reach out to you,” telling them to “listen to the cry of the little ones who are seeking justice”.
“The universality of this scourge, at a time when its extent in our societies is confirmed, does not diminish the monstrosity of it within the Church,” he said. While he lifted pontifical secrecy on the issue, and instructed the clergy and non-clergy to report cases they are aware of to their hierarchy, he disappointed the more far-reaching demands of associations representing the many recorded victims of abuse.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse