Pope Francis, whose papacy heralded many firsts in Catholic Church, dies at 88

VATICAN CITY, Holy See — Pope Francis, an energetic reformer who inspired widespread devotion from Catholics but riled traditionalists, died on Monday, aged 88, a day after making a much-hoped-for appearance at Saint Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday, the Vatican said in a statement.

“Dearest brothers and sisters, it is with deep sorrow that I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell in the statement published by the Vatican on its Telegram channel.

“This morning at 7:35 am (0535 GMT) the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the home of the Father.

“His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and His church.”

Francis’s death came just a day after he delighted the crowds of worshipers at the Vatican on Easter Sunday with an appearance on the balcony at Saint Peter’s Basilica despite still convalescing after a severe illness.

Francis had come close to dying twice earlier this year while suffering from pneumonia.

He spent 38 days in the hospital before he was released on March 23.

Francis will go down in history as a radical pontiff, a champion of underdogs who forged a more compassionate Catholic Church while stopping short of overhauling centuries-old dogma.

The first pope from the Americas and the southern hemisphere, unlike his predecessors Francis did not witness the Holocaust firsthand, and it did not shape his worldview as a young man.

While Francis was still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, he established a close friendship with local Buenos Aires Jewish leaders and with Rabbi Abraham Skorka, with whom he wrote a book and remained in contact.

He was the third pope in a row to describe antisemitism as a sin incompatible with Christian belief and visited Israel.

As pope, he visited Auschwitz, and while in Israel made the first pilgrimage by a pope to the tomb of Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl. He regularly denounced antisemitism, calling it “neither human nor Christian.”

However, he was at times less careful — or perhaps less attentive — than his two predecessors when it came to Jews and their sensitivities, leading to a sometimes contentious relationship with world Jewry and Israel.

That was particularly felt over the past two years against the background of the war in the Gaza Strip, triggered by the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, terror onslaught.

The pope met with hostages’ families and freed hostages on multiple occasions, praying with them and telling them he would do whatever he could to secure the release of those held in Gaza.

But many of his statements left Jews and Israelis feeling confused at times, and under attack at others.

In a November 2023 call with President Isaac Herzog, Francis reportedly said it was “forbidden to respond to terror with terror,” a reference to Israel’s military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza, remove it from power, and secure the release of the hostages.

Shortly after the October 7 attacks, hundreds of Jewish leaders and scholars wrote an open letter to Francis, asking the Catholic Church to unequivocally condemn Hamas’s attacks and to distinguish terrorism from Israel’s war on the group.

It took three months for the pope to respond in a letter that condemned antisemitism, reaffirmed the bond between the Church and Jews, and stressed that his “heart is torn at the sight of what is happening in the Holy Land, by the power of so much division and so much hatred” — but failed to mention Hamas.

Another letter from the pontiff, this one addressed to Middle East Catholics on the one-year anniversary of October 7, confounded those who care about Catholic-Jewish relations.

Francis decried “the fuse of hatred” lit the year before (though notably did not lay out who struck the match) and lamented “the spirit of evil that foments war.”

Then, quoting one of the New Testament verses most often used to justify Christian antisemitism, he wrote that this spirit was “murderous from the beginning,” and “a liar and the father of lies.”

In November 2024, Francis called for an investigation to determine if Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute “genocide,” according to excerpts from a forthcoming new book ahead of the pontiff’s jubilee year.

The reaction from Israel and Jewish groups, who reject that the military campaign against the Hamas rulers of Gaza is a genocide, was furious.

Israel then accused Pope Francis of “double standards” in December after he condemned Israeli airstrikes in Gaza at the top of his annual Christmas address to the Vatican’s Catholic cardinals.

A month earlier, a seasonal nativity scene at the Vatican was removed after backlash over its depiction of the baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh, the traditional scarf used by Palestinians as a national symbol.

The nativity scene drew criticism as it was suggestive of the trope that Jesus was a Palestinian rather than Jewish.

During his 2014 visit to Israel, Francis visited Jerusalem, slipping a prayer note between the cracks of the Western Wall.

He also made an unscheduled stop at the concrete security barrier between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. According to his driver, they were driving by a section of the wall covered by graffiti comparing Bethlehem and the Warsaw Ghetto when the pope asked to be let out. The image of him praying at that spot excited Palestinians and angered Israelis.

In 2021, Francis told an audience that the law of the Jewish Torah “does not give life, it does not offer the fulfillment of the promise because it is not capable of being able to fulfill it. The Law is a journey, a journey that leads toward an encounter… Those who seek life need to look to the promise and to its fulfillment in Christ.”

Israel’s Chief Rabbinate sent a letter in protest, saying, “This is in effect part and parcel of the ‘teaching of contempt’ towards Jews and Judaism that we had thought had been fully repudiated by the Church.”

In a statement posted to X following the announcement of the pontiff’s death, Herzog sent his condolences to Christians worldwide.

“I send my deepest condolences to the Christian world and especially the Christian communities in Israel – the Holy Land – on the loss of their great spiritual father, His Holiness Pope Francis,” Herzog said in a statement. “A man of deep faith and boundless compassion, he dedicated his life to uplifting the poor and calling for peace in a troubled world.”

“He rightly saw great importance in fostering strong ties with the Jewish world and in advancing interfaith dialogue as a path toward greater understanding and mutual respect,” Herzog wrote. “I truly hope that his prayers for peace in the Middle East and for the safe return of the hostages will soon be answered. May his memory continue to inspire acts of kindness, unity, and hope.”

Dubbed “the people’s pope,” the Argentine pontiff loved being among his flock and was popular with the faithful, though he faced bitter opposition from traditionalists within the Church.

He staunchly defended the most disadvantaged, from migrants to communities battered by climate change, which he warned was a crisis caused by humankind.

But while he confronted head-on the global scandal of sex abuse by priests, survivors’ groups said concrete measures were slow in coming.

From his election in March 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was eager to make his mark as the leader of the Catholic Church.

He became the first pope to take the name Francis after Saint Francis of Assisi, a 13th-century mystic who renounced his wealth and devoted his life to the poor.

“How I would like a poor church for the poor,” he said three days after his election as the 266th pope.

He was a humble figurehead who wore plain robes, eschewed the sumptuous papal palaces and made his own phone calls, some of them to widows, rape victims or prisoners.

The football-loving former archbishop of Buenos Aires was also more accessible than his predecessors, chatting with young people about issues ranging from social media to pornography — and talking openly about his health.

Francis always left the door open to retiring like his predecessor Benedict XVI, who in 2013 became the first pontiff since the Middle Ages to step down.

After Benedict died in December 2022, Francis became the first sitting pope in modern history to lead a papal funeral.

Francis suffered increasingly poor health, from colon surgery in 2021 and a hernia in June 2023 to bouts of bronchitis and knee pain that forced him to use a wheelchair.

His fourth hospitalization, of more than a month for bronchitis in both lungs, was his longest, raising speculation he might step down.

But he brushed off talk of quitting, saying in February 2023 that papal resignations should not become “a normal thing.”

In a 2024 memoir, he wrote that resignation was a “distant possibility” justified only in the event of “a serious physical impediment.”

Kissed prisoners’ feet

Before his first Easter at the Vatican, he washed and kissed the feet of prisoners at a Rome prison.

It was the first in a series of powerful symbolic gestures that helped him achieve enthusiastic global admiration that eluded his predecessor.

He also condemned plans by US President Donald Trump during his first term to build a border wall against Mexico as un-Christian.

After Trump’s reelection, Francis denounced his planned migrant deportations as a “major crisis” that “will end badly.”

In 2016, with Europe’s migration crisis at a peak, Francis flew to the Greek island of Lesbos and returned to Rome with three families of asylum-seeking Syrian Muslims.

He was also committed to interfaith reconciliation, kissing the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in a historic February 2016 encounter, and making a joint call for freedom of belief with leading Sunni cleric Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb in 2019.

Francis reenergized Vatican diplomacy in other ways, helping facilitate a historic rapprochement between the United States and Cuba, and encouraging the peace process in Colombia.

And he sought to improve ties with China through a historic — but criticized — 2018 accord on the naming of bishops.

Climate appeal

Experts credited Francis with having influenced the landmark 2015 Paris climate accords with his “Laudato Si” encyclical, an appeal for action on climate change that was grounded in science.

He argued that developed economies were to blame for an impending environmental catastrophe, and in a fresh appeal in 2023, warned that some of the damage was “already irreversible.”

An advocate of peace, the pontiff repeatedly denounced arms manufacturers and argued that in the myriad of conflicts seen around the globe, a Third World War was underway.

But his interventions were not always well received, and he sparked outrage from Kyiv after praising those in war-torn Ukraine who had the “courage to raise the white flag and negotiate.”

‘Who am I to judge?’

Francis’s admirers credit him with transforming perceptions of an institution beset by scandals when he took over, helping to bring lapsed believers back into the fold.

He will be remembered as the pope who, on the subject of gay Catholics, said: “Who am I to judge?”

He allowed divorced and remarried believers to receive communion, and approved the baptism of transgender believers as well as blessings for same-sex couples.

But he dropped the idea of letting priests marry after an outcry, and despite nominating several women to leading positions inside the Vatican, he disappointed those who wanted women to be allowed to be ordained.

Critics accused him of tampering dangerously with tenets of Catholic teaching, and he faced strong opposition to many of his reforms.

In 2017, four conservative cardinals made an almost unheard-of public challenge to his authority, saying his changes had sown doctrinal confusion among believers.

But his Church showed no inclination to relax its ban on artificial contraception or opposition to gay marriage — and he insisted that abortion was “murder.”

Francis also pushed reforms within the Vatican, from allowing cardinals to be tried by civilian courts to overhauling the Holy See’s banking system.

He also sought to address the enormously damaging issue of sex abuse by priests by meeting victims and vowing to hold those responsible accountable.

He opened up Vatican archives to civil courts and made it compulsory to report suspicions of abuse or its cover-up to Church authorities.

But critics say his legacy will be a Church that remains reluctant to hand pedophile priests over to the police.

‘Raised on pasta’

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born into an Italian emigrant family in Flores, a middle-class district of Buenos Aires, on December 17, 1936.

The eldest of five children, he was “born an Argentine but raised on pasta,” wrote biographer Paul Vallely.

From 13, he worked afternoons in a hosiery factory while studying to become a chemical technician in the mornings. Later, he had a brief stint as a nightclub bouncer.

He was said to have liked dancing and girls, even coming close to proposing to one before, at age 17, he found a religious vocation.

Francis later recounted a period of turmoil during his Jesuit training, when he became besotted with a woman he met at a family wedding.

By then, he had survived a near-fatal infection that resulted in the removal of part of a lung. His impaired breathing scuppered his hopes of becoming a missionary in Japan.

He was ordained a priest in 1969 and appointed the provincial, or leader, of the Jesuits in Argentina just four years later.

His time at the helm of the order, which spanned the country’s years of military dictatorship, was difficult.

Critics accused him of betraying two radical priests who were imprisoned and tortured by the regime.

No convincing evidence of the claim ever emerged, but his leadership of the order was divisive and, in 1990, he was demoted and exiled to Argentina’s second-largest city, Cordoba.

Then, in his 50s, Bergoglio is seen by most biographers as having undergone a midlife crisis.

He emerged to embark on a new career in the mainstream of the Catholic hierarchy, reinventing himself first as the “Bishop of the Slums” in Buenos Aires and later as the pope who would break the mold.

Lazar Berman contributed to this report.