Pope Francis dies at 88 after prolonged illness; world leaders mourn demise
Vatican City: Pope Francis, history's first Latin American pontiff who charmed the world with his humble style and concern for the poor but alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and climate change, died Monday. He was 88. Bells tolled in church towers across Rome after the announcement, which was read out by Cardinal Kevin Ferrell, the Vatican camerlengo, from the chapel of the Domus Santa Marta, where Francis lived. “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,? Ferrell said.
Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025, for a respiratory crisis that developed into double pneumonia. He spent 38 days there, the longest hospitalization of his 12-year papacy. But he emerged on Easter Sunday — a day before his death — to bless thousands of people in St. Peter's Square and treat them to a surprise popemobile romp through the piazza, drawing wild cheers and applause. From his first greeting as pope — a remarkably normal “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) — to his embrace of refugees and the downtrodden, Francis signaled a very different tone for the papacy, stressing humility over hubris for a Catholic Church beset by scandal and accusations of indifference. After that rainy night on March 13, 2013, the Argentine-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio brought a breath of fresh air into a 2,000-year-old institution that had seen its influence wane during the troubled tenure of Pope Benedict XVI, whose surprise resignation led to Francis' election. But Francis soon invited troubles of his own, and conservatives grew increasingly upset with his progressive bent, outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics and crackdown on traditionalists. His greatest test came in 2018 when he botched a notorious case of clergy sexual abuse in Chile, and the scandal that festered under his predecessors erupted anew on his watch. And then Francis, the crowd-loving, globe-trotting pope of the peripheries, navigated the unprecedented reality of leading a universal religion through the coronavirus pandemic from a locked-down Vatican City. He implored the world to use COVID-19 as an opportunity to rethink the economic and political framework that he said had turned rich against poor. “We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented,” Francis told an empty St. Peter's Square in March 2020. But he also stressed the pandemic showed the need for “all of us to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.”
Reforming the Vatican
Francis was elected on a mandate to reform the Vatican bureaucracy and finances but went further in shaking up the church without changing its core doctrine. “Who am I to judge?” he replied when asked about a purportedly gay priest.
The comment sent a message of welcome to the LGBTQ+ community and those who felt shunned by a church that had stressed sexual propriety over unconditional love. “Being homosexual is not a crime,” he told The Associated Press in 2023, urging an end to civil laws that criminalize it. Stressing mercy, Francis changed the church's position on the death penalty, calling it inadmissible in all circumstances. He also declared the possession of nuclear weapons, not just their use, was “immoral.” In other firsts, he approved an agreement with China over bishop nominations that had vexed the Vatican for decades, met the Russian patriarch and charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq. He reaffirmed the all-male, celibate priesthood and upheld the church's opposition to abortion, equating it to “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”
Roles for women
But he added women to important decision-making roles and allowed them to serve as lectors and acolytes in parishes. He let women vote alongside bishops in periodic Vatican meetings, following longstanding complaints that women do much of the church's work but are barred from power. Sister Nathalie Becquart, whom Francis named to one of the highest Vatican jobs, said his legacy was a vision of a church where men and women existed in a relationship of reciprocity and respect. “It was about shifting a pattern of domination — from human being to the creation, from men to women — to a pattern of cooperation,” said Becquart, the first woman to hold a voting position in a Vatican synod.
The church as refuge
While Francis did not allow women to be ordained, the voting reform was part of a revolutionary change in emphasizing what the church should be: a refuge for everyone — “todos, todos, todos” (“everyone, everyone, everyone”) — not for the privileged few. Migrants, the poor, prisoners and outcasts were invited to his table far more than presidents or powerful CEOs. “For Pope Francis, it was always to extend the arms of the church to embrace all people, not to exclude anyone,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell, whom Francis named as camerlengo, taking charge after a pontiff's death or retirement. Francis demanded his bishops apply mercy and charity to their flocks, pressed the world to protect God's creation from climate disaster, and challenged countries to welcome those fleeing war, poverty and oppression.
After visiting Mexico in 2016, Francis said of then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump that anyone building a wall to keep migrants out “is not Christian.” While progressives were thrilled with Francis' radical focus on Jesus' message of mercy and inclusion, it troubled conservatives who feared he watered down Catholic teaching and threatened the very Christian identity of the West. Some even called him a heretic. A few cardinals openly challenged him. Francis usually responded with his typical answer to conflict: silence. He made it easier for married Catholics to get an annulment, allowed priests to absolve women who had had abortions and decreed that priests could bless same-sex couples. He opened debate on issues like homosexuality and divorce, giving pastors wiggle room to discern how to accompany their flocks, rather than handing them strict rules to apply.
St. Francis of Assisi as a model
Francis lived in the Vatican hotel instead of the Apostolic Palace, wore his old orthotic shoes and not the red loafers of the papacy, and rode in compact cars. It wasn't a gimmick. “I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he told a Jesuit journal in 2013. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.” If becoming the first Latin American and first Jesuit pope wasn't enough, Francis was also the first to name himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century friar known for personal simplicity, a message of peace, and care for nature and society's outcasts. Francis sought out the unemployed, the sick, the disabled and the homeless. He formally apologized to Indigenous peoples for the crimes of the church from colonial times onward.
And he himself suffered: He had part of his colon removed in 2021, then needed more surgery in 2023 to repair a painful hernia and remove intestinal scar tissue. Starting in 2022 he regularly used a wheelchair or cane because of bad knees, and endured bouts of bronchitis. He went to society's fringes to minister with mercy: caressing the grossly deformed head of a man in St. Peter's Square, kissing the tattoo of a Holocaust survivor, or inviting Argentina's garbage scavengers to join him onstage in Rio de Janeiro. “We have always been marginalized, but Pope Francis always helped us,” said Coqui Vargas, a transgender woman whose Roman community forged a unique relationship with Francis during the pandemic. His first trip as pope was to the island of Lampedusa, then the epicenter of Europe's migration crisis. He consistently chose to visit poor countries where Christians were often persecuted minorities, rather than the centers of global Catholicism. Friend and fellow Argentine, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, said his concern for the poor and disenfranchised was based on the Beatitudes -- the eight blessings Jesus delivered in the Sermon on the Mount for the meek, the merciful, the poor in spirit and others. “Why are the Beatitudes the program of this pontificate? Because they were the basis of Jesus Christ's own program,” Sánchez said.
Missteps on sexual abuse scandal
But more than a year passed before Francis met with survivors of priestly sexual abuse, and victims' groups initially questioned whether he really understood the scope of the problem. Francis did create a sex abuse commission to advise the church on best practices, but it lost its influence after a few years and its recommendation of a tribunal to judge bishops who covered up for predator priests went nowhere. And then came the greatest crisis of his papacy, when he discredited Chilean abuse victims in 2018 and stood by a controversial bishop linked to their abuser. Realizing his error, Francis invited the victims to the Vatican for a personal mea culpa and summoned the leadership of the Chilean church to resign en masse. As that crisis concluded, a new one erupted over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington and a counselor to three popes.
Francis had actually moved swiftly to sideline McCarrick amid an accusation he had molested a teenage altar boy in the 1970s. But Francis nevertheless was accused by the Vatican's one-time U.S. ambassador of having rehabilitated McCarrick early in his papacy. Francis eventually defrocked McCarrick after a Vatican investigation determined he sexually abused adults as well as minors. He changed church law to remove the pontifical secret surrounding abuse cases and enacted procedures to investigate bishops who abused or covered for their pedophile priests, seeking to end impunity for the hierarchy. “He sincerely wanted to do something and he transmitted that,” said Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean abuse survivor Francis discredited who later developed a close friendship with the pontiff.
A change from Benedict
The road to Francis' 2013 election was paved by Pope Benedict XVI's decision to resign and retire — the first in 600 years — and it created the unprecedented reality of two popes living in the Vatican. Francis didn't shy from Benedict's potentially uncomfortable shadow. He embraced him as an elder statesman and adviser, coaxing him out of his cloistered retirement to participate in the public life of the church. “It's like having your grandfather in the house, a wise grandfather,” Francis said.
Francis praised Benedict by saying he “opened the door” to others following suit, fueling speculation that Francis also might retire. But after Benedict's death on Dec. 31, 2022, he asserted that in principle the papacy is a job for life. Francis' looser liturgical style and pastoral priorities made clear he and the German-born theologian came from very different religious traditions, and Francis directly overturned several decisions of his predecessor. He made sure Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, a hero to the liberation theology movement in Latin America, was canonized after his case languished under Benedict over concerns about the credo's Marxist bent. Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed, arguing the spread of the Tridentine Rite was divisive. The move riled Francis' traditionalist critics and opened sustained conflict between right-wing Catholics, particularly in the U.S., and the Argentine pope.
Conservatives oppose Francis
By then, conservatives had already turned away from Francis, betrayed after he opened debate on allowing remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments if they didn't get an annulment — a church ruling that their first marriage was invalid. “We don't like this pope,” headlined Italy's conservative daily Il Foglio a few months into the papacy, reflecting the unease of the small but vocal traditionalist Catholic movement that was coddled under Benedict. Those same critics amplified their complaints after Francis' approved church blessings for same-sex couples, and a controversial accord with China over nominating bishops.
Its details were never released, but conservative critics bashed it as a sellout to communist China, while the Vatican defended it as the best deal it could get with Beijing. U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a figurehead in the anti-Francis opposition, said the church had become “like a ship without a rudder.” Burke waged his opposition campaign for years, starting when Francis fired him as the Vatican's supreme court justice and culminating with his vocal opposition to Francis' 2023 synod on the church's future. Twice, he joined other conservative cardinals in formally asking Francis to explain himself on doctrine issues reflecting a more progressive bent, including on the possibility of same-sex blessings and his outreach to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics. Francis eventually sanctioned Burke financially, accusing him of sowing “disunity.” It was one of several personnel moves he made in both the Vatican and around the world to shift the balance of power from doctrinaire leaders to more pastoral ones.
Francis insisted his bishops and cardinals imbue themselves with the “odor of their flock” and minister to the faithful, voicing displeasure when they didn't. His 2014 Christmas address to the Vatican Curia was one of the greatest public papal reprimands ever: Standing in the marbled Apostolic Palace, Francis ticked off 15 ailments that he said can afflict his closest collaborators, including “spiritual Alzheimer's,” lusting for power and the “terrorism of gossip.” Trying to eliminate corruption, Francis oversaw the reform of the scandal-marred Vatican bank and sought to wrestle Vatican bureaucrats into financial line, limiting their compensation and ability to receive gifts or award public contracts. He authorized Vatican police to raid his own secretariat of state and the Vatican's financial watchdog agency amid suspicions about a 350 million euro investment in a London real estate venture. After a 2 1/2-year trial, the Vatican tribunal convicted a once-powerful cardinal, Angelo Becciu, of embezzlement and returned mixed verdicts to nine others, acquitting one. The trial, though, proved to be a reputational boomerang for the Holy See, showing deficiencies in the Vatican's legal system, unseemly turf battles among monsignors, and how the pope had intervened on behalf of prosecutors.
While earning praise for trying to turn the Vatican's finances around, Francis angered U.S. conservatives for his frequent excoriation of the global financial market that favors the rich over the poor. Economic justice was an important themes of his papacy, and he didn't hide it in his first meeting with journalists when he said he wanted a “poor church that is for the poor.” In his first major teaching document, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis denounced trickle-down economic theories as unproven and naive, based on a mentality “where the powerful feed upon the powerless” with no regard for ethics, the environment or even God. “Money must serve, not rule!” he said in urging political reforms. He elaborated on that in his major eco-encyclical “Praised Be,” denouncing the “structurally perverse” global economic system that he said exploited the poor and risked turning Earth into “an immense pile of filth.” Some U.S. conservatives branded Francis a Marxist. He jabbed back by saying he had many friends who were Marxists.
World leaders mourn Pope Francis' demise
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni said the news of Francis' death “deeply saddens us, as we are saying goodbye to a great man and a great shepherd."
Pope Francis died Monday, the Vatican announced, history's first Latin American pontiff who charmed the world with his humble style and concern for the poor but alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and climate change.
Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025, for a respiratory crisis that developed into double pneumonia. He spent 38 days there, the longest hospitalisation of his 12-year papacy.
"I had the privilege of enjoying his friendship, his counsel and his teachings, which never failed me, not even in times of trial and suffering," Meloni said.
She added that “his teaching and legacy will not be lost. We bid farewell to the Holy Father with hearts full of sorrow, but we know that he is now in the peace of the Lord."
Following are the reaction from world leaders:
Ireland's foreign minister says Francis was a voice for the voiceless
Ireland's foreign minister, Simon Harris, expressed hope that Pope Francis' teachings will continue to inspire the world, saying the late pontiff's commitment to justice, peace and human dignity touched millions of people around the globe.
Francis' advocacy for the poor, calls for improved interfaith relations and focus on protecting the environment made him “a beacon of hope and a voice for the voiceless,” Harris said in a statement.
“Pope Francis bore his illness with great dignity and courage,” Harris said. “As so many people in Ireland and as Christians across the world mourn his loss, we find strength in his message of hope, mercy, and compassion, which will continue to inspire us to build a better world for all.”
Macron says Francis gave hope to the poor
French President Emmanuel Macron, whose country is largely Catholic, shared his condolences in a post on X.
“From Buenos Aires to Rome, Pope Francis wanted the Church to bring joy and hope to the poorest. For it to unite humans among themselves, and with nature. May this hope forever outlast him.”
Dutch prime minister says the pope was a man of the people
Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof paid tribute to Francis, saying the pope “was in every way a man of the people.
“The global Catholic community bids farewell to a leader who recognized the burning issues of our day and called attention to them. With his sober way of life, acts of service and compassion, Pope Francis was a role model for many – Catholics and non-Catholics alike. We remember him with great respect,” Schoof wrote on X.
Israel's president offers condolences to Christians
Israel's mostly ceremonial president offered condolences to Christians after the death of Pope Francis, calling him a man of “deep faith and boundless compassion.”
In a post on X, Isaac Herzog said the pope had fostered strong ties with Jews and advanced interfaith dialogue.
“I truly hope that his prayers for peace in the Middle East and for the safe return of the hostages will soon be answered,” he wrote, referring to the pope's repeated calls for an end to the war and the release of captives held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Francis had repeatedly criticized Israel's wartime conduct and said allegations of genocide, which Israel has adamantly denied, should be investigated.
Top EU leader says Francis was an inspiration for the entire world
Ursula von der Leyen, a top European Union leader, remembered Francis as an inspiration for the entire world, not just Christians.
“Today, the world mourns the passing of Pope Francis,” von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, wrote on X.
“He inspired millions, far beyond the Catholic Church, with his humility and love so pure for the less fortunate. My thoughts are with all who feel this profound loss. May they find solace in the idea that Pope Francis' legacy will continue to guide us all toward a more just, peaceful and compassionate world.”
JD Vance says my heart goes out to millions of Christians'
US Vice President JD Vance, who is in India and had met Pope Francis on Easter Sunday, said his “heart goes out to the millions of Christians all over the world who loved him”
“I was happy to see him yesterday, though he was obviously very ill. But I'll always remember him for the below homily he gave in the very early days of COVID. It was really quite beautiful,” Vance wrote on X. “May God rest his soul.”
The head of Church of England says Francis improved relations between religions
The acting head of the Church of England remembered Pope Francis' wit, compassion and commitment to improving relations between the world's religions.
The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said Francis' life was centered on service to the poor, compassion for migrants and asylum-seekers and efforts to protect the environment.
“I remember, in the brief times I spent with him, how this holy man of God was also very human,” Cottrell said in a statement. “He was witty, lively, good to be with, and the warmth of his personality and interest in others shone out from him.”
A note of criticism from the Women's Ordination Conference
The Women's Ordination Conference had been frustrated by Francis' unwillingness to push for the ordination of women.
“While we will continue to experience the gifts of Pope Francis' openness to reform, we lament that this did not extend to an openness to the possibility of women in ordained ministry,” the conference said.
“His repeated closed door' policy on women's ordination was painfully incongruous with his otherwise pastoral nature, and for many, a betrayal of the synodal, listening church he championed. This made him a complicated, frustrating, and sometimes heart-breaking figure for many women,” it said.
It said it had long prayed that Francis would be transformed by the testimonies of women sharing their sincere calls from God to ordained ministry and guide the church toward embracing the fullness of women's equality. “Yet when it came to the topic of women in ministry, he seemed stuck in bad theology and outdated tropes.”
