Shortly after his election to the papacy in March 2013, then seventy-six-year-old Pope Francis said that his pontificate would be short—four or five years. It turned out to be much longer, one of the many surprises of his eventful time on the throne of Peter.
The first surprise actually preceded his election: Benedict XVI’s resignation a month earlier. The outcome of the March 2013 conclave was the beginning of a nearly decade-long cohabitation in the Vatican between Francis and his predecessor, which was cordial and largely uneventful. But the circle around the “pope emeritus” became a hub for zealots and throwbacks and fueled the polarizing dynamic of militant Catholicism, which included a number of prominent prelates who were not just personally close to Benedict, but who also possessed a scant sensus Ecclesiae. That extraordinary cohabitation influenced how Francis viewed the option of the resignation: with skepticism about its possible effects on the Church.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio came to Rome as an outsider, and in many ways he remained one. He was never part of Roman pontifical academic or ecclesiastical-political circles, and he governed as such, while drawing on his Jesuit background. Institutions were never really his thing, and this actually extended to his relationship to the Society of Jesus itself. Even before his papacy, that relationship was a complicated one, and tensions lingered beneath the surface after he became pope—a notable difference from the closer interactions between prominent Jesuits and his predecessors in the post–Vatican II period. True, Francis relied on many individual Jesuits for important roles and positions, but that was in the context of expanding the role of members of religious orders in general, especially for episcopal appointments.
In the international, diplomatic, and political realms, Francis’s most distinctive contribution to the history of the papacy is his opening of Catholicism to a truly global dimension, and de-Europeanizing the Church in terms of its theological, cultural, and institutional points of view. This pivotal reorientation unfolded amid disruption of globalization and larger de-globalizing trends, including the return of nationalism and forms of imperialism. These trends accelerated during Francis’s pontificate, so much so that he came to face a crisis of democracies, even in the West, echoing the papacy of a hundred years ago and presenting him with a much different world than that confronting popes from Pius XII to John Paul II. His pontificate might actually be better understood in contrast to Donald Trump than to any other world leader, especially in terms of the populist and anti-immigration strains of the first Trump presidency and the opposition to abortion and gender issues of Trump-supporting Americans during Joe Biden’s presidency. Indeed, Francis's February 10 letter to the U.S. bishops was his political testament.
As the first pope from outside the geographical and cultural context of Mediterranean Europe, he also struck polemical notes against central tenets of Western tradition, from colonialism and capitalism to geopolitical and military adventurism. His papacy made space for different ecclesial “energies,” especially in distancing itself from the institutional system and intellectual elites. He was critical of integralism and fundamentalism, but also of contemporary neoliberal economics and aspects of Western culture. “Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations,” he said in a 2023 interview. His papacy spanned a series of upheavals challenging notions of a stable, Western-led order, including the rise of nationalism in Italy, the Covid pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent Israeli devastation of Gaza. This changing geopolitical reality put new pressures on the Vatican’s foreign policy and its efforts for world peace, migration, nuclear disarmament, and care for creation.
Francis played down Benedict XVI’s emphasis on Christianity as part of an axis around Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome; rather, he gave new legitimacy to a “multicultural” approach to the Christian faith (in this way, he was a true Jesuit). His Latin American background made his pivot to Asia easier—the September 2018 agreement (renewed in 2020 and 2022, and for five years in 2024) with the government of China on the appointment of bishops is probably the most significant and most controversial accomplishment in terms of international relations—but it also complicated relations with the United States and U.S. Catholicism. The gap between Francis and much of the U.S. episcopate was never bridged, due at least in part to Francis’s persistent distrust and critiques of clericalism. He shocked those who believed that the doctrinal and magisterial order set by John Paul II and Benedict XVI should not be upset, and this created tensions within Catholicism.
Francis’s relations with other Christian denominations, Judaism, and Islam reflected the complicated realities of trying to relativize the Euro-Mediterranean tradition of the Church. His relationship with Islam and the East (including Russia) was key to his effort to de-Europeanize Catholicism. But tensions with Judaism and Israel, both at the religious and diplomatic levels, were apparent. It may be one of the problematic legacies of his pontificate. But it’s also an honest acknowledgment that Jewish-Catholic relations following Vatican II’s Nostra aetate cannot be seen in the same way now.
Francis’s ecclesiology and doctrinal policy were the product of his reception of Vatican II—as both a Jesuit priest and a Latin American. He brought about a dialectic view of the relationship between movement and institution, between doctrine and pastoral care. He carried the message of human fraternity and care for the environment at a time when world politics went in the opposite direction, and also worked to de-escalate the so-called “culture wars” around issues of sexual morality that have roiled the United States. His emphasis on mercy over doctrine was well received by some Catholics but not by those who believed that Vatican II had already tipped the balance far too much toward the former.
Francis deployed a kind of strategic ambiguity when it came to doctrinal issues, allowing the old order to carry on alongside clear messages about the need for a new pastoral praxis. This was evident, for example, on the issue of LGBTQ Catholics—one of the pastoral reforms that was implemented but that remains on shaky doctrinal and catechetical ground. In other cases, like that of the role of women in the Church, Francis’s ambiguity reflected a real impasse between his genuine understanding of the need to open new paths and a sensibility (and language) heavily shaped by his formation. He was more prone to talking about “woman” than to listening to women.
Of his encyclicals, Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti are the most well known, even outside of Catholicism. These established bridges between the Church and the world at large, but within the Church the effect was different, deepening traditionalist opposition against him in certain countries, including the United States. His message on the unity of “the one human family” will remain a sign of the long-term trajectories of Vatican II for the Church in our multicultural and multi-religious world.
On the abuse scandal, Francis built on the work initiated by Benedict XVI. But he had to do it within the context of its growing into a global crisis, across all continents, made more complicated by the fact that “clerical sexual abuse of minors” was now also understood as abuse of authority and spiritual abuse that could be found at many levels. He inaugurated a cultural change, moving away from ideological and reflexive oversimplifications about the issue and the scapegoating of particular members of the Church. Still, on the global level, different churches in different parts of the world continue to have differing views on just how to think about clerical sexual abuse and what to do about it. And in some ways, Francis’s efforts were hamstrung by his non-systematic view of institutions, including the Roman Curia, in which over a nine-year period ending 2022 he implemented significant reforms. Emphasizing evangelization more than management, however, the overall effect has been to diminish the authority of the Vatican offices and the college of cardinals. Particularly consequential was the weakening of the Secretariat of State in a system of governance more and more centered on the person of the pope and his latest statements to the media. The reform in some ways remains in progress, given that there remains a significant shortage of money necessary for the Vatican to oversee its growing number of activities.
His proclivity to give interviews—far too frequently (more than three hundred by the end of 2024) and mostly to interviewers who avoided asking uncomfortable questions—did not, in the long run, help him govern or collaborate with those working around him. His tendency to go off script became particularly problematic when dealing with international situations, especially regarding Ukraine and Russia. It also created expectations that local bishops and priests could or would not meet—for example, on the issue of divorced and remarried Catholics (Amoris laetitia) and, later, on blessings for same-sex couples.
Of course, Francis’s most significant legacy for the Church is the rediscovery of synodality, which culminated in the “synodal process” of 2021–2024. This was his way of summoning the Church to a council-like event for a new missionary momentum, which for Catholic leaders in many countries means reinventing the way the Church operates, sometimes from scratch. Synodality still remains in its infancy, both from a theoretical point of view and in terms of its ability to influence the clerical model of government in national and local churches. Additionally, it’s been accompanied by new policies of centralization, with the power of the cardinalate somewhat diminished and papal control over lay-led ecclesial movements strengthened.
As pope, Francis showed us what it takes to be Church in the third millennium, building on the foundations of the first millennium and deciding what to do about the walls that were raised in the second. The Synod on Synodality used the term “tent,” and the idea of a bigger tent definitely sums up Francis’s ecclesiology. In his first groundbreaking interview as pope in September 2013, he called the Church “a field hospital” tending to the wounds of people on their different paths of life. During his pontificate, it became clear that becoming a field hospital requires not just reform, but the conversion of a weak and wounded Church in a weak and wounded world. As Francis’s papacy now becomes part of the past, it is uncertain whether the near future will see the conversion he so fervently sought to bring about.
