A non-European? A member of a religious order? From the Southern hemisphere? Following the surprise resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the announcement on 13 March 2013 from the loggia of St Peter’s that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the 265th successor of St Peter was equally unexpected. He would turn out to be ‘the pope of mercy’, ‘the pope of the peripheries’ and ‘the pope of synodality’.
When Bergoglio was elected he was unfamiliar to most Catholics outside Latin America. He had never worked in the Roman curia, had not travelled widely, and had less public profile than many considered papabili (candidates for the papacy).
Yet on the fifth ballot Bergoglio’s brother cardinals selected him. He joked that they’d been forced to go ‘to the ends of the earth’ to find a new Bishop of Rome. He would be ‘different’.
Born in Buenos Aires on 17 December 1936, this son of Italian migrants joined the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in 1958, was ordained priest in 1969, and became provincial (regional superior) soon after (1973-79). Pope St John Paul II appointed him auxiliary bishop of his hometown in 1992, archbishop in 1998, and cardinal in 2001.
He was President of the Argentine bishops from 2005 till 2011. He took part in conferences of the Latin American bishops (including Aparecida in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2007), the 2005 conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI (he is said to have been the runner-up), and the 2013 conclave that elected him pope.
The distinctive marks of Bergolio’s papacy quickly emerged. As the first pope to take the name of St Francis of Assisi, he signalled the centrality of humility and mercy, and of love for God, creation and the poor.
In his first address as pope, Francis humbly asked his hearers to pray for him. This reliance upon God and the Church might be expected from any Catholic prelate, but it was especially appropriate to someone in the Ignatian tradition.
Going back to the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius of Loyola, this tradition emphasises discernment: a deep and prayerful listening to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit in each heart. Francis insisted that only after prayerful discernment were the pope and curia, the synods (gatherings) of bishops, and the Church more locally to act.
In his first homily as pope, addressed to the Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel, Francis highlighted his goal: a Church that moves out of its comfort zone to new places, especially to ‘the peripheries’, with new companions, interlocutors and approaches—however perennial its Gospel.
To know what we must be and do requires not only personal discernment but ‘walking together’ with others, listening to them and through them to the Holy Spirit, and deciding together. Such ‘synodality’ was to become a signature of Francis’s pontificate.
Francis’s second homily, delivered in the Vatican parish church of Santa Anna, revealed his driving pastoral sensibilities. He emphasised the need to encounter forgiveness in Jesus. So fis motto as bishop and pope was ‘Miserando atque eligendo’ (having and choosing Mercy). This is God’s very nature and Christ’s central message: inexhaustible compassion and redeeming forgiveness.
Over the next 12 years Francis unpacked these themes in documents, preaching, pastoral journeys and legal reforms. His apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium (2013) set out a vision of a Church of ‘missionary disciples’ who, having encountered Jesus Christ and his mercy, take joy and hope to the world and especially to the most neglected.
Such disciples must be radically inclusive, calling “todos, todos, todos” (everyone) into the divine embrace, as he famously exclaimed at the Lisbon World Youth Day in 2023. That requires viewing all humanity as Fratelli Tutti—all our siblings—as he wrote in his 2020 encyclical of that name.
It means repudiating the ‘globalisation of indifference’ towards refugees and the poor, the ‘ideological colonisation’ of the developing world by the secularising West, and the ‘throwaway culture’ that discards those deemed useless, including the unborn and elderly. It assumes instead the tender concern and active care of the Good Samaritan.
In Laudato Si’ (2015) Francis extended this recognition of the interdependence of all people to an awareness of interconnection with all of creation, insisting that we must care for both the human household and the ‘common home’ that sustains them.
These driving passions made Pope Francis a critic of unbridled capitalism and consumerism, of war, gender ideology and clericalism, and of disfiguring the natural and social environments. He made tentative moves toward greater inclusion of the divorced and same-sex attracted, promoted greater openness toward displaced persons, and ensured an enlarged role for women in leadership.
Though a thoroughly ‘modern’ pope, he eschewed television, presented a traditional Christian morality, and regularly warned his flock against sin, the devil, and the hell of separation from God.
Bergolio was a compassionate man who cared deeply for those who suffer. He was renowned for his simplicity and pastoral activity in the slums of Buenos Aires, his symbolic gestures of care, and his unexpected phone-calls even as pope.
I experienced that solicitude in 2022 when attending meetings in Rome soon after burying my Mum. As soon as my turn came in the queue to kiss his ring and exchange a few words, Francis expressed his condolences to me on my mother’s death. I was mystified that he knew and moved that he cared.
He called upon my predecessor as Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, to assist him in rooting out financial corruption in the Roman Curia and putting the Vatican on a sounder financial footing—a task Francis was set by the conclave that elected him.
As ‘Secretary of the Economy’ and a member of the Pope’s inner Council, the Australian achieved a great deal before his work was truncated by false accusations and imprisonment in Melbourne. The Pope never lost his confidence in Pell, even if the two were sometimes ‘on a different wavelength’, and was very supportive during the Cardinal’s ‘troubles’.
Francis was what in ordinary people we call ‘stubborn’ or ‘wilful’ and in saints ‘clear-eyed’ and ‘zealous’.
He took no day off, no annual leave, rarely took advice from others, and persevered through old age and sickness in total devotion to his duties: keeping him confined in a hospital room during his last illness proved very difficult, and in the end he insisted on returning home!
He often spoke ‘off the cuff’, sometimes provoking controversies without clearly committing to one side or the other, and readily conversed with people of all religions and none. His simple messages and symbolic gestures drew many close who might otherwise have been very disconnected from the Church or who were ‘hanging on my the skin of their teeth’.
The pope from the peripheries was determined to reach out to those on the margins—the poor, elderly, disabled, unborn, refugees and prisoners.
We will always remember him stopping his vehicle to embrace a severely disabled man, joyfully greeting children who had broken through security barriers, washing and kissing the feet of prisoners on Holy Thursday, and visiting the developing world and detention centres, lending his voice to those too often forgotten.
Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, only hours after giving his Easter Sunday “Urbi et Orbi” blessing to the city and the world. He said, “From the empty tomb in Jerusalem, we hear unexpected good news: ‘Jesus, who was crucified, is not here, he has risen.’ Jesus is not in the tomb, he is alive! Love has triumphed over hatred, light over darkness, truth over falsehood, forgiveness over revenge. Evil no longer has the upper hand; it no longer has power over those who accept the grace of this day.”
Now Pope Francis has himself entered into the triumph of truth, goodness, mercy and love of the Risen Lord he served so well.
I met and talked with Pope Francis more than a dozen times. As the Australian bishops found during their ‘Ad limina’ visit to Rome in 2019, he was as informal as an Australian and very easy to talk to.
We are grateful for the years we had him and the little bit “extra” at the end. Now the Church grieves the passing of her chief shepherd under Christ and prays for a worthy successor. May he rest in peace.
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