After decades of conversative leadership, Francis tried to reset the course of the Roman Catholic Church, emphasizing inclusion and care for the marginalized over doctrinal purity.
Pope Francis, who rose from modest means in Argentina to become t he first Jesuit and Latin pontiff, was a change agent, having inherited a Vatican in disarray in 2013 after the stunning resignation of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, a standard-bearer of Roman Catholic conservatism. Francis clashed bitterly with traditionalists in his push for a mere inclusive Roman Catholic Church, and spoke out tirelessly for migrants, the marginalized and the health of the planet.
Francis steadily steered the church in another direction, restocking its leadership with a diverse array of bishops who shared his welcoming approach as he sought to open up the church. Many rank-and-file Catholics approved, believing that the church had become inward-looking and distant from ordinary people.
After some early stumbles, he took strong steps to address a clerical sex abuse crisis that had become and existential threat to the church. He adopted new rules to hold top religious leaders, including bishops, accountable if they committed sexual abuse or covered it up, though he did not impose the level of transparency or civil reporting obligations that many advocates demanded.
In his final years, slowed by a bad knee, intestinal surgery and respiratory ailments that sapped his breath and voice, Francis used a cane and then a wheelchair, seemingly a diminished figure. But that was a misleading impression. He continued to travel widely, focusing on exploited and war-torn parts of Africa, where he excoriated modern-day colonizers and sought peace in South Sudan.
His insistence on shaking up the status quo earned him no shortage of enemies. He demoted conservatives in Vatican offices, restricted the use of the old Latin Mass dear to traditionalists, opened influential meetings of bishops to laypeople, including women, allowed priests to bless same-sex couples and made clear that transgender people could be godparents and that their children could be baptized.
A NEW STYLE:
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of his papacy was that he became pope at all.
Francis was elected in March 2013 to take over from Benedict, the first pontiff to step down in nearly sic centuries, amid turmoil and intrigue about secret lobbies and financial chicanery.
The cardinal electors sought a reformer with a strong administrative hand, but few anticipated how Francis, then the 76-year old archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, would blend reformist zeal and folksy charm in a push to clean house and transform the church.
Francis signaled his humble from the outset. He paid his own bill at the Vatican hotel where he stayed during the conclave that elected him, rode about town in a modest Ford Focus, and lived in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the ornate papal apartments.
His humility could be disarming. When asked about a priest who said to be gay, he responded, “Who am I to judge?”
AN IMMIGRANT FAMILY:
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on Dec 17th 1936 in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires to Mario Bergoglio, both immigrants from Italy.
The family’s passage to Argentina would become part of Bergoglio lore: Booked in steerage on the ocean liner Principessa Mafalda, the future pope’s paternal grandparents missed their departure because of delays in selling their coffee shop in Turin, Italy. But frustration soon turned to relief: the ship sank at sea. A few months later, they arrived safely in Buenos Aires aboard another liner, the Giulio Cesare.
Jorge, who was the eldest of five siblings, is survived by a sister, Maria Elena Bergoglio.
Bookish, intelligent and deeply religious, Jorge also played basketball and loved to dance the tango. Barely six weeks short of his 17th birthday, he was rushing to meet his friends in Flores when he paused in front of the Basilica of St. Joseph.
“I felt I had to go in — those things you feel inside and you don’t know what they are,” he recounted. “Right there I knew I had to be a priest,” he said.
But Jorge hid his ambition from his family. In high school, he had demonstrated a scientific aptitude, and his mother hoped he would become a doctor. He worked in a chemistry lab and earned pocket money as a door at tango bars.
In November 1955, just after graduating from his school, he finally told his parents of his plans for the priesthood. His mother was unhappy and accused him of misleading her. “I didn’t lie to you, Mom,” his sister Maria Elena, recalled Jorge responding. “I’m going to study the medicine of the soul.”
After 13 years of training, Jorge Bergoglio was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1969. Latin America and Catholicism were in turmoil when Bergoglio, at 36, took charge of the Argentine Jesuits. Argentina was in the throes of a “dirty war” with a brutal military govt killing and torturing thousands of opponents.
His Jesuit leadership ended in controversy. He had cultivated a passionate and loyal cadre of priests, but he had also made enemies, partly because of what critics called an imperious and autocratic management style. Church authorities sent him into defacto exile in Germany and then to Cordoba, Argentina, a period he later described as “a time of great interior crisis.”
His exile, though, was interrupted in 1992 when a senior figure in the Argentine church unexpectedly named him auxiliary bishop of the Buenos Aires diocese. He became archbishop six years later. By 2006, he was a cardinal.
But he had chilly relations with the Vatican. It represented “the heart of everything that he believed the church should not be: luxury, ostentation, hypocrisy, bureaucracy,” his former press officer in Buenos Aires, Federico Wal, told Austen Ivereigh, one of the pope’s biographers. “He hated going.”
After passing the bishop’s retirement age of 75, he reserved a simple room at a Catholic seminary room, where he intended to live out his days in prayer and reflection, enjoying his beloved mate tea.
But Pope Benedict XVI changed all that Feb 11, 2013, when he announced that he would resign it. It was the first papal resignation since Gregory XII in 1415.
Bergoglia flew to Rome to help elect a new pope. He never returned.
