For weeks, Catholics throughout the globe worried about their Pope’s health and prayed for him, and now Pope Francis has died at the age of 88.

Francis died at 7:35 a.m. in Rome today (April 21), according to a Vatican statement. He had been hospitalised in Rome in mid-February with bronchitis, which advanced to pneumonia in both lungs – the latest in a string of respiratory and other medical issues he had encountered. On Sunday, he met with US Vice President JD Vance.

The first non-European pope among the 266 since Gregory III in the eighth century. The first Argentine to hold the seat of St. Peter. Most noteworthy, he was the first Jesuit to serve as Pope.

This is how Francis will be remembered in the history of the Church, which considers itself everlasting. He has dead. On Easter Monday, only one day after delivering the “Urbi et Orbi” blessing to millions of people in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. Those who believe will declare he has passed on from this life.

The real name of Pope Francis is Jorge Mario Bergoglio who was born on December 17, 1936, the eldest child of José Mario Francisco Bergoglio and Maria Regina Sívori in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires.

His mother was an immigrant born in Argentina, while his father and his father’s parents left the desperately poor north of Italy during one of the last waves of emigration at the end of the 1920s.

As Jorge Mario recounted in his autograph book, published in many languages in January, his father and grandparents almost did not survive the crossing. They were supposed to have been on board the “Principessa Mafalda,” which sank off the Brazilian coast in the spring of 1927, dragging more than 300 emigrants into the depths. Divine providence, he said, had allowed them to take another ship.

It is no wonder that Francis chose the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa as the destination for his first papal visit in July 2013. There he mourned the fate of the boat refugees who had died in the Mediterranean in search of a better future and lamented the “inertia of the hearts” of those who were not moved by the fate of these people.

The Argentina in which Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born was no longer the country in which his family had placed their hopes barely ten years earlier. In terms of per capita income, it was still one of the richest countries in the world. But the Great Depression had left its mark – to the point where the military staged a coup for the first (and not the last) time in the 20th century. Twenty years later, Peronism, which presented itself as an anti-American-tinged middle ground between Catholicism and Communism (“Mate sí, Whisky no”), would have brought the country to the brink of collapse for the first, but not the last, time through state clientelism and rampant corruption. As Pope, Francis stood more closely in no tradition than that of his Peronist youth.

The Bergoglios picked up where they left off in Italy, in humble circumstances. The eldest son learned early on how to support his parents and their five children through work. University was out of the question for the boy from his humble background. Jorge Mario became a chemical laboratory technician – initially.

At the age of 16, he claimed to have felt a calling to become a priest. But years would pass before he answered this call. First, he entered the seminary of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, and in 1958, at the age of almost 22, after a life-threatening lung disease, he joined the Jesuit order. He was ordained a priest eleven years later. Then everything happened very quickly. In 1971, he was entrusted with the office of novice master of the order’s Argentine-Uruguayan province: a delicate task in the turbulent years following the Second Vatican Council. Clergymen were leaving their posts in droves, and the number of prospective priests and members of the order was declining rapidly. For some bishops and theologians, too, too many of the reforms had been implemented long ago, for others, far too few. The rift ran right through the Church in Argentina, too.

For the doctoral thesis in Frankfurt
There was also unrest among the population: Almost everywhere in Latin America , guerrilla movements and an increasingly repressive state were facing off. Argentina descended into an orgy of left-wing and right-wing violence. In 1976, the military staged a coup and established the most brutal dictatorship the country had seen in the 20th century. Bergoglio became skeptical of internal church confrontations, which at the time were primarily fueled by so-called liberation theology. For him, the life of the “believing people” should be both the standard for pastoral care and the inspiration for theology.

When the military junta abdicated in 1983, Bergoglio had nothing to reproach himself for. For six years, he had been provincial of the Argentine Jesuits, and for another three years he had been responsible for the province’s largest educational institution, the Colegio Máximo San Miguel. With the exception of the two Jesuits arrested in March 1973 and released after six months under pressure from many quarters, none of his followers had come to harm. What’s more, Bergoglio had quietly helped dozens of persecuted people leave the country.

In 1986, he was the one who left Argentina. His destination was Frankfurt am Main, where, it was said, he was to earn his doctorate. Less than a year later, Bergoglio returned, without a doctorate. The self-selected accounts of his life reveal nothing about this period. His brothers simply grew increasingly uneasy with him. Some were magically drawn to him as a professor and pastor, while others were violently repelled by his demanding manner. Bergoglio polarized opinion. When the situation became unbearable, his superiors sent him into exile in Córdoba.

After two years, Bergoglio was back in Buenos Aires: Cardinal Antonio Quarracino had wanted the Jesuit as his auxiliary bishop. The archbishop, whom he had come to value for his spirituality, soon had even greater confidence in Bergoglio – especially since he felt more at home in the “villas miserias” of Buenos Aires than in the middle-class or even elite circles of the capital. Against massive resistance from politicians and bishops in Argentina and the Vatican, Quarracino pushed through Bergoglio’s nomination as his successor to Pope John Paul II in 1998. In February 2001, John Paul II admitted him to the College of Cardinals on the same day as Bishop Karl Lehmann of Mainz and his ecumenical bishop, Walter Kasper.

Things soon returned to a frenzy in Argentina. Following the collapse of the economy, which President Menem had steered onto a neoliberal course, Néstor Kirchner became president in May 2003. The left-wing Peronist ignored the archbishop’s criticism of the growing social injustices. Bergoglio did not challenge this, especially since the mutual antipathy quickly spread to Kirchner’s wife and successor as president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. After Bergoglio’s election as pope, however, there could never be enough pictures of the man in white. Soon, other left-wing populists also courted the man from Argentina – and he courted them. As pope, he tirelessly directed his anathema against capitalism, especially the financial markets, with phrases like “this economy is killing.” As a Peronist on the papal throne, he always found milder words – if any – for the scandalous weakness of the rule of law and democratic institutions, not only in Latin America, the endemic corruption, and the underdevelopment of the education system. When Pope Francis visited Cuba in September 2015 before a trip to the United States and the UN, he allowed himself to be harnessed to the Castro propaganda machine. He and his entourage claimed to have heard nothing of the massive repression against hundreds of dissidents and human rights activists.

The Archbishop of Buenos Aires was rarely seen in the Vatican during the final years of John Paul II’s pontificate and the eight years of Benedict XVI’s reign. He was said to be a domestic person, a “casalingo,” to the point that he had already found a room in a retirement home for priests in his home district of Flores for the time after his retirement in 2011. His distance from Rome, however, did not prevent him from speaking out quite bluntly about church affairs. He had little sympathy for Benedict’s attempts to reach out to the Society of St. Pius X, for example, and none for the rehabilitation of Holocaust denier Bishop Williamson. Instead, he demonstratively cultivated his friendship with Rabbi Abraham Skorka and established contacts with Muslim representatives. Like many of his friendships, these too would outlast Bergoglio’s move to Rome for several years. When Pope Francis visited Jordan, Palestine and Israel in the spring of 2015, they traveled together.

In general, as Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio did many things he had already done in Argentina. But Rome was not Buenos Aires. On Maundy Thursday 2013, for example, he washed the feet of young prisoners in a Roman prison, regardless of their religion. A scandal! Shortly before, on the Sunday after his election as Pope, he had publicly praised the latest book by former Curia Cardinal Walter Kasper. Its title, as simple as it was programmatic, was “Mercy.” Three years later, Francis proclaimed an entire “Year of Mercy.”

And the Curia? By choosing his residence in the Santa Marta guesthouse, the new Pope signaled that he did not intend to surrender himself to the grasp of the old powers. Then the phrase “a poor church for the poor” (also contained in Kasper’s “Mercy”) began to make the rounds. When subversive-sounding quotes from the Pope’s impromptu morning sermons were circulated (the church as a “field hospital”), even the most obtuse of the pope suspected that there was something wrong with the Pope who called himself Francis.

But how to rebuild the Church? Francis didn’t have a blueprint. In reforming the Vatican’s finances and strengthening child protection, Francis was able to build on the pioneering work of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. However, almost a year and a half passed between the announcement of the establishment of a commission dedicated to the issue of child protection worldwide. The current status of this commission was clarified by its long-time spiritus rector, the German Jesuit Hans Zollner, at the end of March 2023. He resigned his mandate. This, too, did not prevent the Pope from declaring himself the Church’s supreme child protector in his last book.

The reform of the Roman Curia progressed no less slowly. The symbolic council of cardinals from all continents, which was supposed to help him govern the Church, proved overwhelmed. The reform of the Vatican Curia, which Francis enacted after nine years on Pentecost 2022, has little in common with the principles of good governance. The Curia, which Francis diagnosed with “spiritual Alzheimer’s” shortly before Christmas, remains a court, and the Pope is not bound by any laws. At least, for the past few months, a nun has headed one of the agencies known as the “dicastery.” Otherwise, the Curia is like the Church as a whole. It has, to quote Mephistopheles, a big stomach.

Right at the beginning of his pontificate, the Roman Synod of Bishops, which emerged from the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, experienced a significant upgrade. Francis scheduled two plenary assemblies of the Synod of Bishops for the fall of 2014 and 2015 to address the “hot topic” of marriage and the family. These were, for the first time, prepared through consultations with the people of the Church and took place in an atmosphere of frankness unthinkable under his predecessors.

The appropriation of the results of the deliberations and votes in a so-called post-synodal exhortation, this time titled “Amoris laetitia,” followed the usual pattern. The majority of bishops in Germany, for example, felt encouraged to reconsider the exclusion of divorced and remarried people from the sacraments. In the United States, however, the majority of bishops felt reinforced in their perception that Francis was straying down dangerous paths and leading the Church into schism.

And so it continued. In 2018, a “Youth Synod” was held, and in 2019, the topic was “Amazonia.” In 2022, as Bergoglio had decreed in March 2020, the synod was to focus on the topic of “synodality.” When it concluded in the fall of 2024, both opponents and supporters of a church in which power no longer rests in the hands of a male clerical caste were no wiser than before. Paving the way for women to enter the ordained ministry was not part of Francis’s reconstruction project. And Francis never left any doubt about this either: The “Synodal Path” of the German Bishops’ Conference and lay members of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) was evil. One Protestant church in Germany was enough, he said.

With each passing year, Francis proved himself to be a pope who sent signals that were sometimes very clear, but also very difficult to decipher, even contradictory. The former include the numerous appointments to the College of Cardinals, but also important bishop appointments. In many important places, most recently in Washington, D.C., personalities were appointed who adhered to one of Francis’s favorite words: frankness. Under the late John Paul II or Benedict XVI, these people would have had no chance. The Argentinean couldn’t care less about traditional prerogatives in the selection of new cardinals. Tonga instead of Turin, Guatemala instead of Berlin – no pope has ever placed such a radical and symbolic bet on the churches of the global “South.”

Above all, Francis made enemies, if not enemies. The fact that the Pope regularly bypassed Curial organs while simultaneously controlling them through trusted individuals, whom he placed in second or third-level positions, did not sharpen the sense of loyalty. Even after the address Francis gave to the members of the Curia before Christmas 2014, in which he diagnosed all sorts of illnesses, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” the rift could no longer be mended.

The message Francis addressed to Europe was at least disconcerting. In November 2014, Francis made his opinion of the EU known during his visit to the European institutions in Strasbourg: an aging, introverted continent that lacked a sense of mission and a willingness to welcome the many refugees from war and crisis zones. Visits in general. If he visited Europe at all, it was only on its fringes. In the almost twelve years of his pontificate, the Pope has never visited Germany; in France, he recently paid his respects to the rebellious Corsicans.

Francis also shattered all conventions with his communication style. As under Benedict, Vatican spokespeople were often the last to hear about new developments. What was new, however, was that his first spokesperson, the Jesuit Federico Lombardi, had to transcribe the impromptu press conferences Francis held on board airplanes. The news value, at least initially, was considerable: Sometimes it was about Catholics who were supposedly breeding like rabbits, sometimes about fathers who were right to just spank their children instead of slapping them in the face, sometimes about homosexuals whom the Pope felt unable to condemn.

Francis showed no consideration in other respects either: In his programmatic first work, “Evangelii Gaudium,” published in November 2013, he advocated for a poor Church for the poor. In his second encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” written in Paris at the end of 2015 with a view to the World Climate Conference, Francis transformed himself into the advocate of a tortured nature against which humanity had sinned so greatly that it threatened to perish with it. Anything that did not fit with his apocalypse was deliberately ignored. The fact that poverty in the world, and thus also maternal and child mortality, had declined to such an extent that it was considered almost utopian when the UN adopted the “Millennium Development Goals” (MDGs) in the early 1990s – progress was not worth mentioning to the Pope.

No matter how crude the economic analyses and therapeutic proposals were, the initial response proved Francis right. For a time, he was considered the conscience of the world, like John Paul II in his brightest days. But with each passing year, doubts about the wisdom of the man at the head of the world’s largest religious community and trust in the integrity of the institution he represented diminished. The lowest point had been reached long before his death. When Francis concluded a elaborately organized child protection conference in the Vatican in March 2019 with a speech in which he saw the devil at work in the case of abuse, not child molesters in priestly robes, it was a slap in the face to all those who had been fighting for years against the moral lethargy in the Church when it came to violence against children, those under their care, and also women, especially nuns.

This picture also reflected the fact that, not least, the Pope himself had quite flexible ideas about the legal culture in the Church. The fact that he took over cases of abuse and made decisions as he saw fit was just as consistent with the picture of an unpredictable administration in the spirit of absolutism as his arbitrary handling of canon law provisions that he himself had issued to better hold bishops accountable for misconduct in dealing with cases of sexual abuse. He did not decide within three months, as required by canon law, on the resignation request of Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, Archbishop of Cologne, due to alleged misconduct in dealing with the issue of abuse, which he forced in February 2022. He did not decide within three months, as required by canon law, but even three years later.

Anyone who thought papal administration couldn’t get much worse at the conclusion of Benedict XVI’s pontificate was proven incorrect by his successor’s pontificate. His supporters and enemies both appear to agree on one thing. Until his death, Bergoglio followed the dictum he had often advised to young people throughout his life: “Make a fuss.” In February of this year, Francis was brought to the hospital with double pneumonia, and many people were concerned. However, the Pope was allowed to leave Gemelli Hospital one more time and even read the usual Easter greeting on Sunday.

Pope Francis, the first of that name, died on Easter Monday, aged 88, in the Vatican.