Francis, the Pope who came from the ends of the earth

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, an Argentine outsider among the leading papal candidates, appeared on the balcony of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace on March 13, 2013. Speaking in Italian with a strong Buenos Aires accent and exhibiting typical sacristy sarcasm, he presented his credentials to a packed St. Peter’s Square. “You know that it was the duty of the Conclave to give Rome a Bishop. It seems that my brother Cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth to get one, but here we are.”

The “ends of the earth” was not just a distant place, but also a metaphor for how far his vision of the universal Church diverged from the doctrines of his predecessors. He was announcing revolution, passion, and sweeping changes. Twelve years after his arrival, Bergoglio has died in Rome from a lung infection. Today, one might say the Holy Spirit has deemed his reforms complete. It is now up to history — and his successors — to determine the extent and permanence of the transformation led by the 266th pope of the Catholic Church.

God is not afraid of change, Jorge Mario Bergoglio always replied to his critics. He was an influential cardinal who knew how to deftly move between the hallways of power in the palace and the smell of sheep in Argentina’s slums. If it’s difficult to imagine how any of us will age, it must have been impossible for Bergoglio, then a graduate in chemistry who began working in a food analysis laboratory in the 1950s, to even remotely imagine that one day he would become the Pope in Rome.

Yet in March 1958, at the age of 21, Bergoglio opted for religious studies, entering the metropolitan seminary of Buenos Aires and beginning his novitiate with the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. When he became Pope Francis, he explained that he had joined the Jesuits because he was “attracted by their status as a forward-thinking force in the Church, speaking in a military language, based on obedience and discipline, and oriented toward missionary work.”

On December 13, 1969, he was ordained a priest and began climbing through the ranks of the Church, a quest that would eventually lead him to the Chair of Peter. In 1971 he completed his spiritual exercises and the studies of his third probation (the final stage of Jesuit formation) in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. In April 1973, he took his perpetual vows in the Society of Jesus, and in July of that year, Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuits’ Superior General, appointed him Provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina, a position he held until 1979.

From that post, he lived through the years of Argentina’s military dictatorship following the 1976 coup, and his conduct during that time was later criticized in several reports published in the press in his home country. These reports accused him of collaboration, arguing that he failed to protect two priests from his order who were held in captivity and tortured for five months at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires. Bergoglio refuted these accusations in 2010, stating that he had sheltered several people fleeing military repression. In an autobiographical book of conversations titled The Jesuit, Francis said he did what he could, “given my age and the few connections I had.” But that shadow would always haunt him — likely hanging over him when he made the decision never to return to his country.

His pastoral and intellectual career caught the attention of Cardinal Quarracino, and thanks to his influence, Pope John Paul II elevated Bergoglio to an episcopal position in the see of Auca, and he became auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires in 1992. From that moment on, Bergoglio’s rise in the ecclesiastical hierarchy was unstoppable. In 1998, he succeeded Quarracino as head of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires and Primate of Argentine. John Paul II conferred the cardinal’s hat on him in February 2001, in a ceremony attended by 43 other new cardinals. In 2005, he was appointed president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, a position from which he maintained a tense relationship with the political leadership of Presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Bergoglio, who always knew how to read the moment, was already among the list of papal contenders after the death of John Paul II. There was speculation at the time of the conclave that elected Joseph Ratzinger suggesting the Argentine cardinal had come in second in the final vote count. Eight years later, after a turbulent pontificate marked by scandals, the College of Cardinals decided it was time for a change of course — and that no one was better suited to lead it than the Argentine.

Pope Francis’s main legacy, beyond the structural reforms he undertook within the Curia, will undoubtedly be his vision of a Church focused on the underprivileged. He dispensed with luxury from day one: simple clothing, a silver ring, modest shoes, and a residence outside the opulence of the Apostolic Palace, choosing instead to live among the nuns of Santa Marta. Poverty, the marginalized, and the world’s dispossessed were to become the gravitational center of his pontificate. And Francis understood that nothing embodied that reality more powerfully than the growing and harrowing phenomenon of migration — something he witnessed firsthand as bishop of Rome, the capital of a country through which the greatest influxes of migrants passed in the last decade.

In July 2013, anticipating all that would later unfold there, the Pope arrived on the island of Lampedusa to mourn the victims of the shipwrecks and celebrate a solemn Mass at an altar built from the wreckage of a boat on which dozens of migrants had died. It was an extraordinary gesture — one he would repeat many times with unforgettable moments, like his visit in April 2016 to a refugee camp in Lesbos, from which he returned aboard the papal plane with 12 migrants. His revolutionary commitment will undoubtedly remain as a true transformation of the Church. But it also opened several fault lines with the ultraconservative world, which criticized him for focusing more on members of other religions and secular society than on the problems of Catholics. That, in essence, was the great battle he fought throughout his papacy.

His dedication to those on the margins was also reflected in the 47 apostolic journeys to 66 countries, which always sought to plant the Vatican flag in corners of the world where Catholic minorities were either under threat or rapidly growing: Bangladesh, Myanmar, Congo, South Sudan, Japan, Mozambique, Madagascar, the Philippines… His aversion to entrenched power and the Western capitalist model led him to decline countless invitations for state visits to major powers like France, the United Kingdom, Spain, and even his native Argentina — a country he avoided returning to in order not to stir up old issues and disputes from the past. Yet that vision of building the Church on the margins of the world was also indelibly stamped into the makeup of the College of Cardinals, the Church’s most powerful body and the one now tasked with electing the next Pope.

Conclaves, including the one in which Bergoglio was elected in just two days and five ballots, used to be marked by the influence of Italians and the wealthiest churches: the German and the American ones. During his papacy, Francis sought to change that dynamic by appointing cardinals from remote places with no apparent connections to Rome’s power circles. The total number of cardinals has reached 252, and there are 138 electors. Of this select group, 110 — 79% — are creatures of Francis; 23 were appointed by Benedict XVI, and five by John Paul II. The rest are non-electors: cardinals over 80 years old. In 2013, when he became pope, Asia and Oceania had 11 cardinal electors. After the last consistory, this number grew to 28, with some hailing from regions that had never had cardinals before, and where the percentage of Catholics is minimal, such as East Timor, Singapore, and Mongolia. A significant shift that will undoubtedly create a completely different geopolitical dynamic in the election of his successor.

The change in the Church’s power structure, Francis’s great obsession, was the main cause of his rupture with a significant portion of the hierarchy, particularly in countries like the United States. Bergoglio, known as a progressive — though, in reality, his views on major issues like abortion and homosexuality were not very different from those of his opponents — had to coexist from day one with a pope emeritus, whom the conservative sector turned into a standard-bearer of theological correctness and purity. But also of what a good pope should be, even though many of those same cardinals and bishops were responsible for his resignation in 2013.

Francis was accused of heresy, and a group of cardinals presented him with a Dubia — requests for clarification — on Amoris Laetitia, the apostolic exhortation in which he opened the door to allowing communion for divorced men and women. But the conflict grew more intense, and a former archbishop and former nuncio in Washington, Carlo Maria Viganò, publicly called for his resignation in a campaign orchestrated and funded from the United States, accusing him of covering up the abuses of Cardinal Theodor McCarrick. The Pope would later strip the prelate of his rights as both a cardinal and a priest, returning him to a lay life with a violence that was hitherto unheard of.

Beyond the attempted overthrow of the Pope for power reasons, Francis had until then maintained a somewhat sporadic relationship with the fight against child abuse. Although he had implemented a series of new measures upon his arrival, such as the creation of a Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, it did not seem that his papacy took the issue very seriously. That changed when he traveled to Chile in January 2018 and had a confrontation with a journalist who reminded him of the case of Father Fernando Karadima, a serial abuser. Francis, with his spontaneous and somewhat authoritarian nature, made a grave mistake: “The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I’ll speak,” Francis said. “There is not one shred of proof against him. It’s all slander. Is that clear?” The scandal was enormous, but as often happened with Bergoglio, it became the catalyst he needed to initiate a process of reform in the system of prevention, oversight, and punishment for this issue.

Bergoglio’s 12 years as Pope were fast-paced, transformative, and, to a certain extent, revolutionary. But the unit of measure for the Church — an institution that has survived and governed the Catholic world for 2000 years — is the century. And all things considered, it was a good idea for someone from the ends of the earth to come and change as much as possible in the shortest time possible. Even if it was just so everything could remain the same.

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