Pope
Francis, groundbreaking Jesuit pontiff, dies aged 88
Death of
267th head of Catholic church triggers period of global mourning and Vatican
conclave of cardinals to elect successor
Angela
Giuffrida in Rome and Harriet Sherwood
Mon 21 Apr
2025 10.50 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/21/pope-francis-dies
Pope
Francis, the pontiff revered by millions of Catholics around the world whose
popular appeal reached far beyond his global congregation, has died at the age
of 88.
Cardinal
Kevin Ferrell, the Vatican camerlengo, said: “At 7.35 this morning, the bishop
of Rome, Francis, returned to the home of the Father. His entire life was
dedicated to the service of the Lord and of his church.″
Francis, who
had chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was
admitted to Gemelli hospital in Rome on 14 February for a respiratory crisis
that developed into double pneumonia. He spent 38 days there, the longest
hospitalisation of his 12-year papacy.
The pontiff,
who was discharged from hospital on 23 March, made his last public appearance
on Sunday, when he briefly spoke to the crowds gathered in St Peter’s Square
for Easter mass.
In recent
weeks, he left his home in Casa Santa Marta on several other occasions,
including visiting prisoners at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison on Thursday and
making a surprise visit to St Peter’s Basilica, wearing plain attire, a week
before.
Loved by
many Catholics for his humility, Francis simplified rites for papal funerals
last year and previously said he had already planned his tomb in the basilica
Santa Maria Maggiore in the Esquilino neighbourhood in Rome, where he went to
pray before and after trips overseas. Popes are usually buried with much
fanfare in the grottoes beneath St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
Amid intense
mourning over the coming days and weeks, manoeuvring within the Vatican over
who is to succeed Francis and become the 268th head of the Catholic church is
certain to begin. Cardinals from around the world will head to Rome for a
conclave, the secret, complex election ritual held in the Sistine Chapel and
involving about 138 cardinals who are eligible to vote.
Some of the
potential contenders mooted before Francis’s death were Matteo Zuppi, a
progressive Italian cardinal, Pietro Parolin, who serves as the Vatican’s
secretary of state, and Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, from the Philippines.
His death is
likely to exacerbate sharp divisions within the curia, with conservatives
seeking to wrest control of the church away from reformers.
During his
12-year papacy, Francis – the first ever Jesuit pope – was a vocal champion of
the world’s poor, dispossessed and disadvantaged, and a blunt critic of
corporate greed and social and economic inequality. Within the Vatican, he
criticised extravagance and privilege, calling on church leaders to show
humility.
His views
riled significant numbers of cardinals and powerful Vatican officials, who
often sought to frustrate Francis’s efforts to overhaul the ancient
institutions of the church. But his compassion and humanity endeared him to
millions around the world
Francis, who
was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1936, was elected
pope in March 2013. He immediately signalled his style of papacy by taking the
bus, rather than papal car, to his hotel, where he paid his bill before moving
into the Vatican guesthouse, eschewing the opulent papal apartments. At his
first media appearance, he expressed his wish for a “poor church and a church
for the poor”.
He focused
papal attention on poverty and inequality, calling unfettered capitalism the
“dung of the devil”. Two years into his papacy, he issued an 180-page
encyclical on the environment, demanding the world’s richest nations pay their
“grave social debt” to the poor. The climate crisis represented “one of the
principal challenges facing humanity in our day”, the pope said.
He called
for compassion for and generosity towards refugees, saying they should not be
treated as “pawns on the chessboard of humanity”. After visiting the Greek
island of Lesbos, he offered 12 Syrians refuge at the Vatican. Prisoners and
the victims of modern day slavery and human trafficking were also highlighted
in his frequent appeals for mercy and social action. During his recent period
in hospital, he kept up his telephone calls to the Holy Family church in Gaza,
a nightly routine since 9 October 2023.
One of the
biggest issues Francis had to contend with was that of clerical sexual abuse
and the church’s cover-up of crimes committed by priests and bishops. In the
first few years of his papacy, as wave after wave of scandals engulfed the
church, Francis was accused by survivors and others of failing to understand
the scale of the crisis and the urgent need to proactively root out abuse and
its cover-up.
In 2019,
Francis summoned bishops from around the world to Rome to discuss the crisis
and later issued an edict requiring priests and nuns to report sexual abuse and
its cover-up to the church authorities, and guaranteeing protection for
whistleblowers. It was a significant move towards the church taking
responsibility for the scandals, and went much further than his predecessors.
Also during
his tenure as the head of the Catholic church, Francis was obliged to respond
to repeated acts of terrorism and persecution. He was at pains to stress that
violence had no part to play in true practice of religion, and that people
should not conflate acts of terrorism with Islam. “I think it is not right to
identity Islam with violence,” he said after the murder of a Catholic priest in
France in 2016. “I think that in nearly all religions there is always a small
fundamentalist group,” he said, adding: “We [Catholics] have them.”
Francis
spoke with compassion on issues of sexuality (famously responding “Who am I to
judge?” to a question about gay priests), the family and the role of women in
society – while adhering to traditional Catholic doctrine on marriage,
contraception and abortion. Although many on the left strove to claim Francis
as one of their own, he could not easily be defined as liberal or conservative.
On his many
trips abroad, Francis was greeted like a rock star, with hundreds of thousands
– sometimes millions – waiting for hours for a glimpse of the diminutive,
white-robed figure in his open-sided popemobile. His appeal was particularly
strong among young people, whom he frequently urged to reject materialism and
overdependence on technology. “Happiness … is not an app that you can download
on your phones,” Francis – who had nearly 19 million followers of his English
Twitter account– told Catholic youth in April 2016.
Although
part of one lung was removed after a teenage infection, the pope was in
remarkably good health until recent years. But he still kept up a busy schedule
and last September embarked on his longest trip, to south-east Asia.
In July
2021, he had surgery to remove 13in of his large intestine, spending 10 days in
hospital after the operation. Francis underwent further intestinal surgery in
June 2023, almost three months after being hospitalised at Rome’s Gemelli
hospital with bronchitis.
The
deliberations and final choice of the Catholic church’s cardinal electors in
the coming days and weeks will determine whether Francis’s efforts to reform
its institutions and to shift its emphasis towards the poor will be a durable
legacy.
The College
of Cardinals is expected to convene for the conclave within 15 to 20 days of
Francis’s death.
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