Pope Francis, who has died at the age of 88, was probably the most extraordinary man to ever sit on the Chair of St Peter. Among his 265 predecessors, stretching over 2,000 years, some have been ineffectual, some astute; some villainous, some saintly; some much loved, others despised. But Jorge Mario Bergoglio was unique — in his talent for manipulating world opinion; in his obscure and conspiracy-laden backstory; and in his extraordinary skill at destruction, sometimes creative, often not.
Bergoglio was born on 17 December 1936 in Flores, a working-class district of Buenos Aires. He was the eldest son of Mario and Regina, immigrants from Piedmont. There were five children in all, one of whom, his sister Maria Elena, survives him, but his relations with his family after he joined the Jesuits remained opaque. He was educated at a Catholic college run by the Salesians, and had several jobs after leaving school. That included being a nightclub bouncer, and an assistant in a laboratory, but at the age of 21 he decided to join the Jesuits, the premier Catholic religious order in those days.
Bergoglio went through the usual course of studies and was ordained a priest in 1969. Soon after he was made novice master, and put in charge of the training of entrants to the order. After that, in 1973, he was appointed provincial, the superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina. It was clear that Bergoglio was recognised as a man of great talents and energy, and his promotion had come early, yet his time as provincial was far from happy. He completed his six-year term, before becoming the rector of a theological faculty. After that, he went to Germany for further studies. By 1992, relations between Bergoglio and the Jesuits had completely broken down; on visits to Rome, he never once stayed in the Jesuit house.
“Jorge Mario Bergoglio was unique in his extraordinary skill at destruction, sometimes creative, often not.”
That something had gone wrong was clear — and Bergoglio himself has talked of a period of “great interior crisis” and a dark night of the soul occasioned by his broken relationship with the order. Despite the best efforts of biographers, both friendly and hostile, the reason for this estrangement has never been satisfactorily explained. It was perhaps partly personal, partly political. At this time, Argentina was being roiled by the Dirty War, and the Church was divided over its support for the dictatorship.
It still remains unclear where Bergoglio stood on both questions. To his many enemies in the Catholic Church, he was a Marxist and a revolutionary, though there is plenty of evidence that he was actually rather conservative in his religious beliefs and pious tastes. One example is his enthusiasm for folk religion, seen in his deep love for the figure of the Blessed Virgin. In the political sphere, meanwhile, the case of two radical Jesuits remains controversial. Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics were kidnapped by the government in May 1976. Though subsequently freed, they later accused Bergoglio of being complicit in their arrest, though this accusation was later withdrawn by Fr Jalics. Bergoglio himself only spoke of the case once, where he claimed to have worked behind the scenes to secure their release. Bergoglio, at any rate, was not an open opponent of the dictatorship, even as his relationship to Peronism remains characteristically obscure.
His period in the wilderness ended with his appointment as an assistant bishop in Buenos Aires in 1992. Five years later, he became the city’s archbishop, and in 2001 was elevated to the College of Cardinals. The initial promotion was dogged by controversy, which once more remains opaque. According to rumour, the Superior General of the Jesuits, Hans Peter Kolvenbach, wrote to Pope John Paul II begging him not to make Bergoglio a bishop, allegedly because he had done such damage to the Jesuits. But the Pope persisted. Both the letter and the Bergoglio file mysteriously vanished from the Vatican archives when Bergoglio became Pope, if indeed they ever existed.
This is just one of many conspiracy theories to dog Bergoglio. Yet given how murky so much of his life remains, it could easily be true. Certainly, his time in Buenos Aires remains hard to judge. He had the confidence of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, for he was seen as a man immune to the virus of Liberation Theology then sweeping Latin America. This doctrine, blending Marxist dialectical materialism with Catholic theology, was seen as fatal to the sacramental and transcendental message of the Church. Indeed, one could interpret Bergoglio’s ministry as archbishop as an attempt to outflank the Left.
He was assiduous, as he put it, about going to the margins. That meant founding parishes in the outer suburbs of the city, where the poor and deprived lived, and in promoting a Church closer to people in their actual lived situations. Bergoglio himself renounced many of the trappings of his high office; he was regularly seen using public transport, often accompanied, critics noted, by a photographer. Other acts of humility were well publicised too, notably his visits to prisons for Maundy Thursday foot washing. While admired by many ordinary Porteños, Bergoglio remained an aloof, enigmatic and authoritarian figure to more traditional Catholics.
In December 2011, Bergoglio reached the age of 75, and submitted his resignation to Pope Benedict, in accordance with canon law. But as there was no obvious successor, he was asked to stay on as archbishop for the time being. All the same, his career in the Church seemed to be at an end. Then came the unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict, and Bergoglio’s election as Pope in March 2013. For the second time in his life, his career experienced a sudden renaissance.
This was a huge surprise. After the death of John Paul II, in 2005, Bergoglio had been considered a candidate for the Chair of St Peter. But now he was 76 years old, and Benedict had resigned in the serene hope that he would be succeeded by Cardinal Angelo Amato (or so rumour had it — everything in the Vatican is rumour, of varying degrees of plausibility). Bergoglio largely owed his election to the so-called St Gallen Mafia. Named after the Swiss town in which it met, and representing progressive cardinals, it encompassed a group of cardinals including England’s Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.
They had apparently been meeting for years, plotting a strategy for the next conclave. This is a charge they always denied — influencing a conclave is against canon law — yet it’s clear Bergoglio had allies elsewhere too. One example is a speech given by Cardinal Prosper Grech before the conclave began. He argued for a shift after Pope Benedict, whose pontificate had ended in supposed failure. It was, many cardinals thought, time for a reformer, someone to shake up the sclerotic Vatican bureaucracy and bring the Church into the modern world.
This might well have been the Bergoglio plan. We don’t know for sure: he unsurprisingly never made his agenda clear, though many of his cheerleaders claimed that Pope Francis was determined to change the Church for good. The first real sign of this came during a synod, held over two sessions in 2014 and 2015, which in the end boiled down to the question of whether divorced and remarried Catholics could receive Holy Communion. The majority of assembled bishops were against this, appealing to Biblical tradition. Divorce and remarriage were forbidden by Christ himself, who deemed second marriages to be adulterous. Guilty of a serious sin, adulterers were precluded from receiving Holy Communion, unless they repented and confessed first, promising not to sin again.
The solution was a tremendous fudge, rammed through against all opposition and inserted as a footnote in the final document — a footnote that the Pope himself, the document’s author, claimed not to remember. Whatever the specifics, the consequences of this evasion are clear. The Church split. In Germany, those in irregular unions were welcomed to Holy Communion. Across the River Oder in Poland, they were not. Some nations’ conferences of bishops accepted the perceived new dispensation with alacrity, as in Argentina and Malta. In England, the clerics stayed prudently silent. Deep fissures were revealed in the seemingly monolithic Church, challenging the teaching that doctrine develops, but does not change, for the new teaching contradicted that of John Paul II. Was theology, as had long been accepted, a precise discipline? Or was it something more subjective, more ambiguous?
Further battles followed. In 2019, another synod looked set to authorise the ordination of married men, or even of women as deacons. But in the end, it swerved both issues. There was a further synod, in 2023 and 2024, on something called “synodality” and which supposedly made decision-making less centralised. But, at the same time, the Pope issued numerous decrees establishing his authority more firmly than ever. More than any of his predecessors, Francis was an activist, ruling on all sorts of minor matters and interfering in various religious orders and institutions, from contemplative nuns to the Knights of Malta, whose grandmaster was unceremoniously sacked. Bishops and cardinals suffered the same fate, driven to the edge of the Church by the man who claimed to care for the margins.
When it came to personnel, the Bergoglio papacy showed its least attractive and most damaging side. Favouritism, and its opposite, were much in evidence. Certain clerics, who should have been fired for the most obvious faults, particularly with regard to child abuse and sexual immorality, were protected — even against the very people the Pope had commissioned to clean up the Church’s act. Particularly notorious was the case of Bishop Barros, who was eventually driven out after a long effort by the Pope to keep him in place. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sins caught up with him remarkably slowly, while Bishop Zanchetta of Argentina was sheltered in the Vatican despite facing criminal charges. On the other hand, those who spoke truth to power suffered: Cardinal Raymond Burke was moved on from his Vatican jobs and even evicted from his Rome flat. Other bishops deemed too conservative, most of whom were champions of the Latin Mass, were removed from office. All the while, Francis put Latin worship under ever tighter restrictions.
The men promoted by Francis raised eyebrows too. Several unknowns were made cardinals, and have remained unknown ever since. Consider his pick for the Vatican’s doctrinal chief, an undistinguished Argentine cleric called Víctor Manuel Fernández. His previous writings, particularly a book on the theology of kissing, were found to be rather embarrassing. In diplomacy, meanwhile, matters were left in the hands of Cardinal Parolin, who oversaw a secret treaty with the Chinese government allowing the CCP to appoint Catholic bishops, an unheard-of usurpation of the Church’s independence in the modern age. This move was bitterly criticised by the former bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Zen, who could only meet the Pope in a public audience. Like so many others who had concerns about the Church’s direction, he was refused a private audience.
Yet if changing the Church irreversibly was indeed Francis’s aim, the plan seemed to falter by the end of the papacy. In December 2023, Cardinal Fernández, with the Pope’s approval, published a document that allowed for the blessing of gay couples, albeit in deliberately ambiguous language. The reaction was immediate. Conservatives fumed at the thought of the Church blessing sin; many had always suspected the thrust of the Bergoglio papacy was to liberalise Church teaching on homosexuality, and this seemed proof of that. Most importantly, though, the African bishops rose up and condemned the document. Despite saying there would be no clarifications, Fernández remarkably swiftly issued what amounted to a retraction. Amid the verbiage explaining that blessings were of individuals not couples, people detected a defeat for Pope Francis and his chief collaborator.
Vatican experts have long tried to explain Pope Francis — most of them floundering on the poverty of terms like conservative or liberal. Perhaps he was a radical; perhaps a Peronist. His reign was a time of great confusion for believing Catholics, though those outside the Church continued to applaud the way he reached out to the marginalised, while handily ignoring his constant baiting of traditional Catholics. In the end, though, little substantive was achieved. The Vatican finances remain a mess, its income falling steadily over his papacy. The Holy See has still not shown clear leadership around sexual abuse, even if this has started in the lower rungs of the Church. Ordinary clergy are demoralised and bewildered, and the numbers coming forward to be ordained have declined dramatically. As for changing doctrine, or even changing practice, little has happened. Perhaps there is no new model Catholicism in the offing, for the simple reason that none is possible. There is only the Catholicism of the past two millennia. Francis apparently raged against his critics in private, and many of those same critics died before him. Yet the Church itself survives him, just as it has his predecessors.
