The Pope who strode onto the global stage calling for “a church of the poor and for the poor” has left us. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, Bishop of Rome and Patriarch of the West, died Easter Monday at age 88.
Nine weeks ago, Francis was admitted to the hospital with double pneumonia. In recent weeks, he had been continuing his recovery at the Vatican.
Francis was the first Pope born and raised outside of Europe since the Syrian Pope Gregory III reigned from 731 to 741. He was the first Pope from south of the equator and the first Pope from the Americas. He was the first Jesuit Pope.
He was also the first Pope to speak to Canadians about the deepest wound in their history, using the word “genocide” to describe not just residential schools but the entire history of colonization and dispossession of Indigenous peoples.
“[I] asked for forgiveness, pardon for this activity that is genocidal,” Pope Francis told journalists on a plane as he returned from five days visiting Indigenous communities in Alberta, Quebec and Nunavut from July 24 to 29, 2022.
“I condemned this too: taking away children, changing culture, changing mentality, changing traditions, changing a race — let’s put it that way, an entire culture. Yes, genocide is a technical word. … It’s true, yes, yes, it’s genocide. You can all stay calm about this. You can report that I said that it was genocide.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada had demanded a papal apology in 2015. But it was not until May 2021, when the Tk’emlups First Nation reported the discovery of 215 probable, unmarked graves near the Kamloops Residential School that one started to look likely.
Francis invited First Nations, Inuit and Metis leaders to meet with him in Rome at the end of March 2022. By April 1, he had issued the first public papal apology in Rome, followed by a promise to visit Canada on a “Pilgrimage of Penance.”
Francis’ July 2022 visit to Canada “demonstrated a deep sensitivity towards the plight of Indigenous peoples, and to the continuing effects of colonialism,” Catherine Clifford, a theology professor at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, told Canadian Affairs in an email.
More broadly, Francis’ papacy shifted the church’s focus in a way that was helpful, she says.
“Coming from the global south, he has brought to the centre of the church’s concern a deep awareness of the plight of more than two-thirds of the world’s Catholics who live in dire poverty,” Clifford said.
Catholic scholar Michael Higgins says Francis’ ability to say publicly what was on his mind and in his heart without ever straying from his office of global spiritual leadership annoyed a minority of Catholic conservatives, but heartened the millions of Catholics who live in poor countries and forgotten places around the world.
“He privileges the heart over reason,” said Higgins, who is Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College.
“The primacy of the heart — he’s responding in a way to the challenges of a highly mechanized world by recovering not only the priority of the heart but the necessity of the heart. This does not diminish the role of the intellectual, or the inventiveness of our pioneers — by no means.”
Climate change, AI
Francis was a lab technician under the Paraguayan biochemist and political activist Esther Ballestrino de Careaga before entering religious life at 21. Perhaps due to this experience, Francis was never afraid of the complexities or nuances of science.
In Laudato Sí, a 2015 papal letter on climate change, Francis urged the faithful and others to pay attention to what science is discovering, to rejoice in its accomplishments and to be aware of its unintended consequences.
“Science and technology are not neutral,” he wrote.
“From the beginning to the end of a process, various intentions and possibilities are in play and can take on distinct shapes. Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.”
Laudato Sí was not addressed to Catholic bishops, or even to the Catholic faithful. Instead he aimed his letter at “every person living on this planet” on behalf of “our common home.”
By 2024, the Pope was applying his mind and conscience to the challenges of artificial intelligence. He addressed the issue at that year’s G7 meeting, making him the first Pope to participate in the annual meeting of leaders from the world’s richest democracies.
In a January 2025 note on AI, Francis further articulated his views on the subject: “The vast expanse of the world’s knowledge is now accessible in ways that would have filled past generations with awe. However, to ensure that advancements in knowledge do not become humanly or spiritually barren, one must go beyond the mere accumulation of data and strive to achieve true wisdom. This wisdom is the gift that humanity needs most to address the profound questions and ethical challenges posed by AI.”
Francis’ ability to reach beyond the narrower confines of the church and speak the language of the 21st century is one of the things that sets the Francis papacy apart, says Clifford.
“In the case of Laudato Si, one would be hard pressed to find another moment when the staff of the United Nations was reading, in rapt attention, the latest papal teaching,” she said in her email.
Service to one’s neighbour
Another key accomplishment of Francis’ tenure was the Synod on Synodality, a global consultation held from 2021 to 2024 that was paired with a revolutionary set of meetings over two years.
The synod — which means “walk together” in Greek — was a direct attack on the rigidity, clericalism and arrogance that had crept into the church. Its aim was to produce a “listening church” by asking ordinary Catholics, church-goers and church-avoiders — including ex-Catholics and many who have been wounded by the church — what they believe the church should be.
“If the spectre of a more synodal church is unsettling for some (much of the resistance is here in North America), it should be recalled that [this] … was a response to the request of the bishops themselves, who identified this as a priority when consulted on possible themes for a future synod,” Clifford said.
As far as Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny is concerned, the synod worked and the resistance was unimportant.
“Pope Francis thoroughly renewed the church’s mission in the world and so enhanced the church’s role as a moral voice,” Czerny told Canadian Affairs in an email.
In Czerny’s eyes, it is not just the Synod on Synodality, but the entire sweep of papal teaching over Francis’ 12 years as Pope that will continue to transform the church through coming generations.
Czerny worked closely with Francis on one of the Pope’s greatest and most constant priorities — the plight of migrants around the world. In the first month of his papacy, the Pope travelled to the island of Lampedusa to draw attention to people drowning in the Mediterranean as they fled famine, wars and dire poverty. But he was also not dismissive of people’s worries about how a flood of migrants could change their societies.
“Having doubts and fears is not a sin,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. “The sin is to allow these fears to determine our responses, to limit our choices, to compromise respect and generosity, to feed hostility and rejection … The sin is to refuse to encounter the other, the different, the neighbour, when this is in fact a privileged opportunity to encounter the Lord.”
Fr. Jeffrey Burwell S.J., the Jesuit provincial superior for Canada, says he “was shaped by Pope Francis and his call for a poor church for the poor.”
“I came to see justice and reconciliation not as an idea but as an encounter; not a task to be completed but as a way of being,” Burwell said in an email.
In Francis, who lived under the religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, Burwell found a model of service to his neighbour.
“Pope Francis encouraged us to ensure that our ministries did not simply maintain past structures but responded dynamically to contemporary needs,” he said. “He challenged the church to listen before it spoke; to comfort those who suffer; and to seek justice not as an abstract ideal but as a lived reality.”
In March 8, 2013, Cardinal Bergoglio (as he was then known) made a five-minute speech to his fellow cardinals that set the pace and direction for what was to come under his leadership.
“The church is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not only in the geographic sense but also the existential peripheries — those of the mystery of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance, of doing without religion, of thought and of all misery,” he said. He warned against a church that becomes “self-referent and then she gets sick.”
He was elected Pope five days later.
As Francis strode onto the balcony above St. Peter’s Square that chilly night in 2013, he greeted the world by saying, “Buonasera” — Italian for “Good evening” — as if he had met us on the street on his way to dinner with friends. He wore a simple white cassock and an iron pectoral cross — no furs, no jewels. He asked us to pray with him and to pray for him.
As he takes his leave, we can only say, “Buonasera, good Pope. You have our prayers.”
