Pope Francis Dies Aged 88 After Suffering Long Illness

The Pontiff, who died at 88 years old, leaves behind a legacy of attempted reform that was not without controversy.

Pope Francis arrives for a visit to Saint Theresa's Home, a Catholic nursing home, in Singapore on September 13, 2024. Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP

Pope Francis, the first leader of the Roman Catholic Church to come from Latin America, has died.

Pope Francis I—previously known as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina—passed away on April 21 at 7:35 a.m. He was 88 years old.

Hours before he died, the pope emerged on Easter Sunday to bless the thousands of people in St Peter’s Square in the Vatican, an independent enclave in the center of Rome.

Cardinal Kevin Farrell, 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. He taught us to live the values of the Gospel with faithfulness, courage, and universal love, especially for the poorest and most marginalised.”

Farrell’s duties include announcing the pope’s death, overseeing funeral and burial preparations, and organizing the conclave to elect the new Pope.

“With immense gratitude for his example as a true disciple of the Lord Jesus, we commend the soul of Pope Francis to the infinite, merciful love of God, one and tribune,″ he added.

The pope, who had part of one of his lungs removed as a young man, experienced a respiratory crisis in February that developed into double pneumonia.

He spent 38 days in the hospital before being released, but he remained frail.

He leaves behind a global church 1.3 billion strong, and a legacy that strove to inspire social and political reforms in and out of that church rooted in his interpretation of Jesus Christ’s teachings on mercy.

However, those reforms—particularly those concerning tolerance and care for the environment, illegal immigrants, and the LGBT community—were no stranger to controversy and conservative backlash.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told RAI’s TG1 program that the whole world will remember Francis for being the pope of the people.

“I will miss him too, we had an extraordinary personal relationship, he was a pontiff with whom you could talk about everything, he was very special,” Meloni said. ”This news saddens us deeply, because a great man and a great shepherd has left us.”

Before He Was Pope

Francis, then Bergoglio, was ordained a priest on Dec. 13, 1969, and dedicated more than 50 years to religious life. He was ordained auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires in 1992 and later installed as the Archbishop on Feb. 28, 1998. He was elevated to Cardinal in 2001, and participated in the conclave to elect Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.

But the road of his priestly vocation began on Sept. 21, 1953, when the sudden urge to go to confession on his way to a party ignited within the then-17-year-old Bergoglio the desire to become a priest.

“After confession, I felt that something had changed,” he recalled in 2013. “I was not the same. I had heard just like a voice, a call: I was convinced that I had to become a priest. This experience in faith is important. We say that we must seek God, go to Him to ask forgiveness, but when we go, He is waiting for us, He is first!  ... You go [a] sinner, but He is waiting to forgive you.”

He entered the Jesuit Novitiate, the order’s extensive education and training program, on March 11, 1958, after battling a severe case of pneumonia the year before, and losing part of his right lung in the process.

He professed his perpetual vows as a Jesuit in 1973 and served as the superior of the Jesuit Province of Argentina and Uruguay from that year through 1979.

During that time, he faced the abduction of two Jesuit priests, Fathers Ferenc Jalics and Orlando Yorio, by the military junta during Argentina’s “Dirty War.”

“In the neighborhood where he worked, there was a guerrilla cell. But the two Jesuits had nothing to do with them: They were pastors, not politicians,” the pope told a meeting of Hungarian Jesuits in Budapest in 2023. “They were innocent when taken prisoner. The military found nothing to charge them with but they had to spend nine months in prison, suffering threats and torture. Then, they were released but these things leave deep wounds.”

Bergoglio then served as the rector and theology professor at Argentina’s Colegio Maximo until 1985, then traveling to Germany to finish his doctoral thesis.

He took inspiration for his religious life from the story of Saint Matthew, the tax collector and public sinner that Jesus called to become an Apostle.

“It is the struggle between mercy and sin,” he said of St. Matthew’s story during a homily in 2017. “But how did the love of Jesus enter that man’s heart? What was the door for it to enter? Because the man knew he was a sinner: he knew it. The first condition to be saved is to feel in danger; the first condition to be healed is to feel sick.

“To feel oneself a sinner is the first condition for receiving this merciful gaze.”

Bergoglio Becomes Francis

His papacy began on March 13, 2013, and featured several firsts beyond his namesake. He was the first pope belonging to the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), the first pope to come from the Western Hemisphere, the first pope to address the G7 Summit, and he was the first pope to dedicate an encyclical, a papal teaching document, entirely to faith and climate change.

He was immediately praised as a man of humility, making his first appearance in simple white vestments instead of the more opulent royal vestments of his predecessors, and he immediately began attempting to demonstrate the mercy that inspired him.

His first Easter, he changed a Holy Thursday ritual where the pontiff washes and kisses the feet of 12 clergymen in remembrance of Jesus’s washing the feet of the 12 Apostles to washing and kissing the feet of 12 prisoners, including some Muslims.

The following year, he presided over the marriage of several couples who had been living together and had children out of wedlock, an opportunity one of the brides said she thought she would never have.

He canonized nearly 1,000 Saints, 813 of which were canonized together as the Martyrs of Otranto. These were fishermen, farmers, artisans, and shepherds who were beheaded by the Ottomans in 1480 for refusing to convert to Islam.

Other Saints included past pontiffs who oversaw the Second Vatican Council, Pope Saint John XXIII, Pope Saint Paul VI, and Pope Saint John Paul II. He also canonized Saint Junipero Serra, a Franciscan friar called the “Apostle of California,” credited with establishing nine California missions, including San Diego, San Francisco, and Santa Clara.

He was also very active politically, addressing the European Union, World Economic Forum, G7, and G20 summits on matters ranging from immigration and environmentalism to artificial intelligence, hosting his own climate summit, and recently pushing his city-state into diplomatic matters between the United States and Cuba.

He called for immediate action on climate change and implored governments of Western nations to protect illegal immigrants in their countries while also criticizing both of the Trump administrations’ closed border policies.

His reign comes to an end during the Jubilee Year of Hope, which he hoped would be a year marked by, among other things, an end to ongoing conflicts the world over, peaceful resettlements of war torn regions, cures for diseases, and the forgiveness of debts.

Disputes

Francis’s time as pontiff, however, was not free of controversy and was outright born of it. He assumed the position after his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, decided to step down in 2013. This was only the third time in the Catholic Church’s history, and the first time in more than 600 years, that a pope stepped down rather than held his position until death.

Some of his teachings on compassion—specifically recent letters instructing on the blessing of homosexual couples, his stance against the U.S.’s crackdowns on illegal immigration, and his criticisms of capitalism—sparked dissent among conservative Christians, particularly in the United States, with some going so far as to label him a Marxist.

Francis seemed to address and defend allegations that he was a Marxist and communist, saying in an interview, “If I see the Gospel in a sociological way only, yes, I am a communist, and so too is Jesus. Behind these Beatitudes and Matthew 25, there is a message that is Jesus’s own, and that is to be Christian. The communists stole some of our Christian values.”

He also held fast throughout his reign to a level of tolerance of other faiths and practices that are in conflict with those of the church, sparking concern among many practicing Catholics that he had fallen into a moral relativism that sees all religions as equally right.

Speaking to priests, nuns, and lay church leaders in Indonesia in September 2024, he said, “This is important, because proclaiming the Gospel does not mean imposing our faith or placing it in opposition to that of others, but giving and sharing the joy of encountering Christ always with great respect and fraternal affection for everyone.”

Francis also entered into agreements with China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party that gave it a say in who he appointed to serve as Bishops in China, a stark contrast to the reign of Pope Saint John Paul II, during which the Catholic Church, especially in Europe, was seen as a weapon against atheistic communist regimes.

At the same time, Francis ordered investigations into some of the more conservative U.S. Bishops who spoke out in opposition against him, removing Bishop Joseph Strickland from his post as head of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, in 2023. The Vatican did not give a reason for Stickland’s departure.

On top of that, his supposed emphasis on dialogue restricted the use of the Traditional Latin Mass and antagonized the “backwardness” of the growing conservative traditional movement among the young faithful.

However, he has come out in defense of several of the Church’s beliefs and traditions, making clear that some things will never change, such as the necessity of the Sacraments, the openness of Holy Matrimony only between a man and a woman, an exclusively-male priesthood, and the necessity of Catholics to be pro-life.

One of his last messages came in a letter commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Theology Faculty of Triveneto, Italy, urging all educators to instill in their students an understanding of the faith while also being open to changing times.

“I encourage the entire academic family to persevere in its collaboration with the mission of the Church, to spread the message of Christ in the world, faithful to the genuine tradition, but open to reading the signs of the times,” he said on Jan. 28. “This means courageously taking on new challenges to effectively bring the truth of the Gospel to contemporary man.”

What Comes Next

In the coming days, Farrell will call the more than 100 Cardinals from around the world to gather in the Vatican Palace to elect the new pope.

Completely secluded from the outside world, they will pray, discuss, and vote in a secret ballot. This election requires a 2/3 majority vote and can take several days, with up to four votes happening in a single day. Ballots are burned after each vote sending a smoke signal to the outside world: black smoke means no majority, white smoke means majority has been reached.

Once the winning candidate accepts the position, the news is declared: “Habemus papam” (“We have a pope”).

Chris Summers contributed to this report.