Returning from Rio de Janeiro just a few months into his papacy, Pope Francis held the first of what would become his signature in-flight press conferences. He took questions from journalists for more than an hour, but one reply stood out. Asked about homosexuality, Francis responded with the now-famous answer-in-the-form-of-a-question: “Who am I to judge?”
The media—and Catholics worldwide—went wild.
Critics saw it as relativism gone amok, but others cheered the openness and humility of the new leader, who had already sent similar messages in the early moments of his papacy. This is the pope who greeted the world with a casual, “Buona sera!” and asked the crowd to pray for him.
He eschewed the fancy red velvet mozzetta and the grand papal apartment. On his first day as pope, he returned to his hotel and paid his bill. And he was the first pope to choose the name Francis, one of the church’s most popular saints and a model of humility and servant leadership. From the beginning, Jorge Bergoglio seemed intent on retaining his previous reputation as a “bishop of the slums” in Buenos Aires, where he cooked his own meals and rode the bus.
The contrast between this pope and his two predecessors was striking. Pope Benedict XVI, the former doctrine watchdog, had earned the nickname “God’s Rotweiller” for inflexibility in his defense of the faith. St. Pope John Paul II, the first celebrity pope of the digital media age, was complex: Although no economic neo-con, he was conservative in his required orthodoxy tests for prospective bishops and authoritarian in the way he consolidated power in the Vatican.
Francis, the first Jesuit pope and the first from the southern hemisphere, quickly gave a new face to the papacy that was welcoming and nonjudgmental. This prompted talk of a possible “Francis Effect,” with some even predicting a new evangelization marked by increased church attendance and vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
There were some positive signs: The church continued to grow, mostly in the Global South, though not at a significantly increased rate. Anecdotally, I noticed a number of Catholic parents using “Francis” as a first or middle name.
But baby names and church attendance are not the only, or most effective, way to measure the church’s health—or Francis’ legacy. Throughout his 12-year pontificate, Francis made significant changes in the way the church is perceived, shifting the mark of a true Christian from doctrinal purity to living Catholic social teaching in the world. The church, he said, should be a field hospital, binding the wounds of people who are hurting.
Some believe synodality—the process Francis used to increase collaboration in one of the most hierarchical institutions in the world—will be his most lasting legacy. It may certainly be part of it, if it continues. But more important, and lasting, will be his emphasis on mercy, inclusiveness, and caring for the poor and marginalized. While he was less successful in reforming the church internally, his redefinition of the papacy will be a hard act to follow.
In his 2015 book, called The Francis Effect (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), Catholic journalist John Gehring proposed that a “Francis revolution” could shake up a U.S. church that had been mired in scandal and monopolized by a vocal minority of culture warrior bishops, intellectuals, and activists.
Francis, whom Gehring described in the book as a “spiritual troublemaker with a disarming style,” could, through his radical embrace of the gospel, inject new and vital energy into the world’s most powerful religious institution. The early reaction from conservative Catholics who were not on board with Team Francis only cemented that something new was happening.
Ten years later, I asked Gehring whether the “Francis Effect” had come to pass. He acknowledged that this pope changed some of the narrative in public life, especially around issues such as the role of women in the church, the dignity of LGBTQ+ Catholics, and economic inequality and climate change.
“But while the tone, tenor and style of these narratives is different and refreshing because of Francis’ influence, this important narrative shift has not happened alongside a major institutional shift inside the U.S. church,” Gehring noted. “I also underestimated how fierce the anti-Francis backlash would be from some vocal Catholic leaders who prefer a fortress Catholicism that hunkers down and reinforces the barricades.”
An outward-facing church
Before a conclave begins, the church’s cardinals hold a series of meetings to discuss the needs and challenges facing the church. In 2013, then-Cardinal Bergoglio spoke about the need for the church to go out into the world, as contrasted with a church “living within herself, of herself, for herself.” He used the image of Jesus knocking on the door, but from within so “we will let him come out.”
His critique of a church that had become too self-referential may have gotten Francis elected pope, so it’s not surprising that much of his pontificate focused outward, on the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the age, as the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (On the Church in the Modern World) says. His first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (On the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World) was described by one commentator as Francis’ “manifesto” and by another as his “I have a dream speech.” In it, Francis called for a church of missionary disciples with a special passion for the poor and for peace.
His hallmark issue, if there was just one, was the plight of migrants. Not coincidentally, his tenure coincided with a massive displacement of people worldwide. Francis’ last communication specifically to the U.S. church—dated just four days before he entered the hospital—was an unprecedented letter to the country’s bishops decrying the Donald Trump administration’s immigration policies and explicitly rejecting Vice President JD Vance’s attempts to use Catholic theology to justify them.
Francis acknowledged that countries had the right to regulate their own borders, but he insisted that people also have the right to migrate to protect themselves and their families. The pope always emphasized that migrants, like all people, were to be treated with dignity and respect.
Missionary of Jesus Sister Norma Pimentel is known for her work with migrants as executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. After meeting Francis in 2015, she attributed the pope’s concern for issues like immigration to his desire to love as Jesus did.
“What I see in him is a special love and care for the most vulnerable and those who are fragile. He just identifies so closely with them and wants to support and encourage them,” she told Global Sisters Report. “I think that’s why he asks us to pray for him so much, because he wants to always be filled with that love that he wants to give to everybody.”
In the midst of the 2016 presidential election and after a visit to the Mexican-U.S. border, Francis said about Trump: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges is not Christian.” In his last Lenten message, in 2025, Francis encouraged Christians to identify with the hardships of migrants to learn to “sympathize with their experiences.”
Migration was the focus of his first trip outside the Vatican, in 2013, to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where he celebrated Mass on a boat-shaped altar and prayed for migrants, mostly from Africa and the Middle East, who died at sea trying to reach a better life in Europe. There he used a phrase that would become a refrain throughout his pontificate, raising his concern about “globalized indifference.”
He would elaborate on this concept in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship): “In today’s world, the sense of belonging to a single human family is fading, and the dream of working together for justice and peace seems an outdated utopia. What reigns instead is a cool, comfortable and globalized indifference, born of deep disillusionment concealed behind a deceptive illusion: thinking that we are all-powerful, while failing to realize that we are all in the same boat.”
The pope’s concern for migrants went beyond mere words. Twice he arranged to bring groups of refugees back to Italy after papal trips: three Syrian families in 2016 from the Greek island of Lesbos and another group of asylum seekers from Cyprus in 2021.
Catholic social teacher
Immigration was not the only issue where Francis modeled and taught Catholic social teaching. Although not the first pope to address climate change, Francis’ response matched the increased urgency of global warming during his papacy.
His 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home), which addressed economic as well as environmental concerns, proposed an “integral ecology” that acknowledges the interconnectedness of creation. Francis suggested that since social and environmental crises are linked, so, too, must be solutions.
Laudato Si’ also drew on the Catholic social principle of the preferential option for the poor and marginalized by emphasizing the impact that climate devastation has on the poorest nations in the world. These themes would also be spotlighted during the Synod on the Amazon in 2019.
Prominent environmental activist and author Bill McKibben is not Catholic, but he has enormous respect for Pope Francis and for Laudato Si’, which he called “one of the most influential documents of recent times.” McKibben saw the encyclical as not just about global warming but a “sweeping, radical, and highly persuasive critique of how we inhabit this planet—an ecological critique, yes, but also a moral, social, economic, and spiritual commentary.”
The encyclical also reportedly inspired the United States’ second Catholic president, Joe Biden, who cited Francis in his decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office.
The Vatican, through Francis’ envoy, had pressed for a strong treaty when it was first signed. And on its fifth anniversary, the pope himself addressed the gathering (held virtually because of COVID-19) and committed the Vatican to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Francis’ popemobile had been electric since 2019, and in 2020 the Vatican announced it was working to replace all its service vehicles with an all-electric fleet.
Under Francis, Vatican City became a place of welcome to people experiencing homelessness, in another example of Catholic social teaching in action. He ordered that a portion of St. Peter’s Square be used to offer showers and haircuts and often marked his birthday by eating with unhoused people or making a gift to them. In this, he modeled his advice to clergy worldwide to be shepherds with the “smell of the sheep.”
Nowhere was this more visible than during the Holy Thursday foot washing ceremonies, in which Francis took the ritual outside the church walls to prisons and juvenile detention centers. In 2024, he was the first pope to wash only the feet of women when he visited a women’s prison. (He had previously changed the liturgical rules to make clear that the ritual could include women.)
Francis also will be remembered for making the changes to the Catechism of the Catholic Church that solidified the evolving church teaching on the death penalty, deeming it “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
He also began a shift away from the Catholic teaching of just war in Fratelli Tutti, writing that modern combat made it “very difficult” for countries to invoke the just war theory in pursuing violent conflict. A constant advocate for peace, he urged prayers for Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Myanmar, Sudan, and Kivu from his hospital bed, where, he wrote, “war appears even more absurd.”
Church reformer
Francis realized that refocusing the church outward would require internal reform, even of the papacy itself. Like his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, this pope believed he was called to “rebuild my church” and immediately created a new group, the Council of Cardinals or “C9,” to assist him in governing. Cardinal Sean O’Malley, formerly of Boston, has been a member since the group’s founding.
Francis’ attempts at reform included empowering local bishops’ conferences, decentralizing the curia, and trying to downplay previous preoccupation with doctrinal and liturgical arguments. Yet in an institution as massive and ancient as the global church, reform does not come easily or quickly, and much of Francis’ work on this project is incomplete.
His reform agenda was met with vocal criticisms, almost from the beginning, but the pushback reached its peak after the Vatican released a document allowing for blessings of LGBTQ+ people in 2024. Traditionalist Catholics, especially in the West, were already angry over Francis’ attempts to reign in the use of the Latin Mass, which he associated with ideological rejection of the Second Vatican Council.
The blessings document, Fiducia Supplicans, was the culmination of years of outreach to the LGBTQ+ community on the part of Francis. He regularly met with a group of trans women from Italy, and after years of exchanging letters with Loretto Sister Jeannine Gramick, cofounder of the LGBTQ+ Catholic advocacy group New Ways Ministry, Francis met with her in 2023. Grammick had previously been banned from work with LGBTQ+ people under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI.
But Francis was also caught using a homophobic slur—twice—and the synodal process, which had raised hopes for greater openness to LGBTQ+ Catholics, ended with a final document that did very little on that issue. Despite reports of substantial discussion on the synod floor, the document did not even use the term “LGBTQ”—which activist Marianne Duddy-Burke of DignityUSA termed “erasure.” The document did call for the church not to exclude people because of their “marital situation, identity or sexuality.”
Likewise, the Synod on Synodality ended without movement on restoring women to the diaconate, even though the issue of women’s leadership was raised in every continental report during the three-year process. The door has not been closed on the issue, however, and a third group has been created to study it. But Francis was criticized for not releasing the reports from his two previous commissions on women deacons.
Throughout his papacy, Francis held firm against the ordination of women to priesthood and the diaconate. And when the Synod on the Amazon recommended ordaining some married men, Francis declined to move the proposal forward, because he said the two-thirds vote in favor did not represent “true discernment.”
Yet his legacy on women’s issues is a mixed bag. He moved more women into leadership positions in the Vatican, even changing church law to allow women to head dicasteries, or Vatican departments—and named the first female head of a dicastery a month before he entered the hospital. He also allowed laypeople, including 54 women, to vote at the Synod on Synodality, which is essentially a meeting of bishops.
“We see change, but the change is slow,” Sister Maamalifar Poreku, a Missionary Sister of Our Lady of Africa from Ghana, said at a 2023 press conference sponsored by the International Union of Superiors General, the umbrella organization for leaders of Catholic women’s congregations. “What is important is that we need to work to change [the church’s] structure.”
A failure to comprehend
On the issue of sexual abuse by clergy, Francis sometimes seemed to have an inadequate understanding. Expectations were high after Francis created an abuse commission in 2014 and put O’Malley in charge of it. That group would have ups and downs over the years, with some members resigning out of frustration. Later, many questioned Francis’ handling of sexual, spiritual, and psychological abuse allegations made by adult women against a fellow Jesuit, Father Marko Ivan Rupnik, who seemed to receive preferential treatment by the Holy See.
For Francis, a trip to Chile in 2018 proved to be pivotal. Twice during that trip he defended a bishop he had appointed three years earlier, calling charges of cover-up against Bishop Juan Barros Madrid “calumny.” But after sending one of his most trusted clergy abuse investigators to Chile and meeting with survivors himself, Francis admitted he made “serious mistakes” and called all the Chilean bishops to Rome for a meeting. The day after the meeting, the bishops submitted their resignations, en masse. Eventually, seven would step down.
Juan Carlos Cruz, one of the survivors of abuse by the priest for whom Barros covered up, eventually became close friends with Francis. He said his first meeting with Francis “pulled me out of the grave.”
“I am not saying that Pope Francis is perfect or that he has solved everything that needs to be solved, but who is and who does?” Cruz wrote in the National Catholic Reporter. “He sincerely tries. I see it when he invites, cares and loves everyone.”
When the allegations of sex abuse by now-former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick exploded in the United States that same year, once again the Vatican was in the spotlight, although this time it was the two previous popes, especially John Paul II, who shouldered much of the blame for not only not removing, but promoting McCarrick and helping him to maintain such a high profile. The so-called “McCarrick Report,” ordered by Francis, was called a “huge step forward in transparency” by Catholic commentator Jesuit Father Thomas Reese.
Of all of Francis’ attempts to reform church structures, his move to transform a 2,000-year-old hierarchal institution into a more collaborative one through synodality was clearly his most ambitious project. Francis always saw synodality as not just a management shift but a spiritual one. Whether it is his most successful achievement will only be clear if it continues after his death.
In 2023, Francis would once again give a notable quote, getting young people to chant “Todos, todos, todos!” during World Youth Day in Lisbon, Portugal to emphasize that the church is for everyone. Like “Who am I to judge,” it was grounded in his view of the divine as offering mercy to all. In a 2016 book-length interview, Francis responded to the criticism that he overemphasized mercy at the expense of truth by noting that mercy, too, is doctrine. “Mercy is the first attribute of God,” he said. “The name of God is mercy.”
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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