The Vatican said today that Pope Francis passed away at the age of 88.
Due to an illness that progressed to pneumonia in both lungs, the Pontiff spent his last weeks in the hospital.
It will be at least 15 days until the Conclave, where cardinals convene in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel to select a successor.
Unlike most of his predecessors, Francis will be buried in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in the Esquilino neighborhood of Rome after his body is placed in state in St. Peter’s Basilica for an official period of mourning.
Just yesterday, on Easter Sunday, Francis welcomed Catholic faithful who had flocked to see him in St. Peter’s Square. After the high holiday service, he gave his ‘Urbi et Orbi’ benediction from a balcony facing the Piazza.
US Vice President JD Vance, who was spending Easter in Rome with his family, had a brief meeting with Francis on his way to the basilica. ‘Brief’: The Vatican described the meeting as lasting only a few minutes.
Francis was selected to succeed Pope Benedict XVI, who was retiring, making him the first non-European pope in 1,300 years.
Francis had maintained a hectic routine until his last weeks, despite a number of prior health problems and decreased mobility brought on in part by his growing years and swollen waist.
He visited Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Singapore on his 12-day tour of south-east Asia and Oceania in September 2024.
Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, Francis will be known for his rather liberal views on a number of issues, which made him both well-liked and divisive.
He made environmental concerns the focal point of his pontificate, showed tolerance for divorcees, and permitted priests to bless same-sex couples in some situations.
Additionally, he stated in 2023 that transgender individuals could be baptized provided it did not lead to “confusion” or controversy.
He did, however, maintain his position on abortion. Last year, the Vatican published a document signed by Francis that called terminations “an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense.”
As he continues to heal from a near-fatal case of double pneumonia, Francis came out of his convalescence on Easter Sunday to bless thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square and give them a surprise popemobile ride in the piazza. His actions drew raucous cheers and ovation.
“Viva il Papa!”—which means Long live the pope—and “Bravo!” the crowd shouted as Francis looped through the square in his open-topped popemobile and then up and down the main avenue leading to it. He stopped occasionally to bless babies brought up to him.
“Brothers and sisters, Happy Easter!” Francis said. He didn’t celebrate the Easter Mass in the piazza, delegating it to Cardinal Angelo Comastri, the retired archpriest of St. Peter´s Basilica.
However, Francis gave the apostolic blessing in Latin after the Mass concluded, spending more than 20 minutes on the loggia balcony above the basilica entrance. Francis spent around fifty minutes outside in total.
After Francis criticized the Trump administration’s handling of illegal migrants, Vance attempted to patch up his tense relationship with the Holy Father during a quick meeting in his hotel on his way to the basilica.
Vance, a mature Catholic convert, seemed to have been ignored by the Pontiff and was compelled to meet with Archbishop Peter Gallagher, the foreign minister, and Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state of the Vatican.
The Holy Father and the vice president had a “brief” meeting that lasted only a few minutes, according to the Vatican.
Regarding migration and the Trump administration’s intentions to deport large numbers of people, Vance and the Pope have been very entangled. During his pontificate, Francis has made helping migrants a priority.
On February 14, Francis was initially admitted to the hospital. He had to cancel engagements due to his treatment, including his weekly prayer to pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square.
He was hospitalized for three days in March 2023 due to bronchitis, which led to his terminal illness.
He underwent a three-hour procedure to fix an abdominal hernia in June of that year.
Due to the consequences of influenza and lung inflammation, he was also forced to postpone his November 2023 travel to Dubai for the COP28 climate meeting.
Additionally, he recently fell twice.
Following the first, he showed up for a ceremony to install 21 new Catholic cardinals in St. Peter’s Basilica in December 2024, sporting a big bruise on his chin.
His right arm had to be placed in a sling after he suffered an injury from a fall in January of this year.
Because Francis had to have a portion of one lung removed at the age of 21 due to pleurisy, his health was deemed more precarious.
December 17, 1936, was Bergoglio’s birthday. An Italian immigrant railway worker and his wife had five children, including him.
A girl named Amalia Damonte was his first romantic interest. He proposed to her in spite of their parents’ disapproval, she subsequently recalled.
Bergoglio allegedly told her, “If I can’t marry you, I will become a priest.” Damonte added: “Fortunately for him, I said no.”
After being inspired by a priest, the future Pope joined the exclusive Society of Jesus after working as a nightclub bouncer and receiving training as a chemical technician.
He became a Jesuit priest in his own right at the age of thirty-two.
He was in charge of the local Jesuit community within four years, and he was named archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998.
Three years later, Pope John Paul II made him a cardinal.
By that time, he had earned the moniker “Slum Bishop” for his efforts to alleviate poverty in Buenos Aires’ most impoverished neighborhoods.
The year before he was appointed Pope, in 2012, Bergoglio made a forceful statement against Cristina Fernandez’s Argentine government.
He claimed that attempts to impose autocratic government, corruption, and demagoguery were plaguing his nation.
On March 14, 2013, Bergoglio was elected Pope Benedict’s successor.
The first conclave since John Paul II’s death in 2005 was sparked by the German pope’s unexpected resignation the month before.
It took the Cardinals five voting rounds to choose the world’s first Latin American pope.
They seemed to have had difficulty deciding whether to stick with a non-Italian papacy or go back to its historical origins.
On the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, Francis then made an appearance in his papal robes to speak to the throng of joyful Catholics gathered in the square below.
Author Robert Harris was inspired to write his 2016 best-selling papal thriller Conclave by a picture of the newly appointed Pope with some of the cardinals who chose him.
Late in 2024, the Ralph Fiennes-starring movie adaption came out.
It took home four Baftas this year, including best British film and best film, the first time a film has taken home both honors in the same year since 2019.
Speaking in Italian in his first address to the crowd in St Peter’s Square, Francis said, “Let’s pray for one another, for the whole world, so that there is great fraternity.”
He led the faithful in repeating the Lord’s Prayer and led the congregation in prayer for Benedict, who is now Pope Emeritus.
Claims that Francis had not publicly challenged Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship reappeared shortly after he was appointed Pope.
Bergoglio, like most Argentines, refrained from openly opposing the 1976–1983 junta.
He did little to assist individuals who vanished during the dictatorship, according to his detractors. Thousands of people vanished from view.
Myriam Bregman, a human rights attorney, charged Francis with permitting the junta murder squads to capture and torture his own Jesuit priests.
Church leaders were said to have been aware of the ‘Dirty War’ when it started in 1972, yet they sided with Juan Peron’s dictatorship and later the military junta.
Thousands of infants whose mothers were killed for being regime opponents were later taken in by families that the military dictatorship approved of.
The Argentinean bishops, under the leadership of Francis, issued an apology in October 2012 admitting that the church had failed to provide protection for its followers.
They also called on stolen babies to come forward and for information on the locations of the remains.
However, despite the apology, Bergoglio’s detractors continued to attack him for not testifying in court about the events of the 1970s until 2010, when some criticized his responses for being vague.
Additionally, he was charged of failing to save two of his own Jesuit priests from being tortured.
Supporters of the Pope, however, maintained that he did take certain risks behind the scenes, such as going to dictator Jorge Videla’s house to beg for forgiveness.
Despite the criticism, Francis demonstrated that he was a busy pope.
Naturally, his first international trip was to South America. The following year, he traveled to the Middle East after his seven-day stay in Brazil.
He prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City after touring the al-Aqsa Mosque in Israel.
Additional visits included trips to Iraq in 2021, Dublin in 2018, and Cuba and the US in 2015.
Francis brought up the sad topic of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church on multiple occasions.
‘Prepare for heavenly justice’ and turn yourself in, he advised abusers in 2018.
He first acknowledged the next year that nuns had previously been sexually molested by priests and bishops.
There have been reports of molested nuns in South America, Europe, Africa, and India.
He told reporters, “Should we do something more? Yes. Is there the will? Yes. But it’s a path that we have already begun.”
Francis pledged to ‘uproot the evil of child abuse’ in 2020 following the publication of a stinging report on the Vatican’s handling of accusations against US cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
“Evil must not be hidden,” Francis said to an audience of 30,000 people in Brussels in September 2024, while on a visit to Belgium at the end of an extremely hectic month. “It is necessary to expose evil.”
He met with 17 abuse survivors the day before, and then he gave his speech.
Francis’s final significant international trip was a 12-day journey that took him around south-east Asia and Oceania earlier in September.
Francis presided over one of the largest crowds of his pontificate when 600,000 people gathered in a field in Dili, the capital of the small Southeast Asian nation of Timor-Leste.
Singapore was the final stop of his itinerary. There, during their campaigns ahead of the US election, he attacked both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the then-candidate for president.
He described them as “one who discards migrants and one who kills children” in a rare voicing of his political views.
In the past, the Pope has cautioned that Americans must vote “in accordance with their conscience” and choose “the lesser of two evils.”
Just a few days into Mr. Trump’s second term following his election victory in November of last year, Francis criticized the large deportations of migrants carried out by the new government in early February of this year.
He warned in a letter to US bishops that the program to forcefully deport people purely because of their illegal status deprives them of their dignity and “will end badly.”
Francis’s health was in a particularly precarious position in his last years, as seen by his weight increase and his dependence on a wheelchair.
The one obstacle he was unable to surmount was his final hospitalization.
