The 12-year papacy of Pope Francis has been like a freight train. It began slowly with more smoke than movement. However, as time passed, the Pope built a full head of steam and rumbled through the Catholic Church in ways that will not be easily halted. The Francis “revolution,” if one dare call it that, is already reshaping the life of the Church in ways that not only affect its structures but also how Catholics live our faith.

But then what else would you expect from a man who has known suffering through much of his life and who hails from a country notable for political and economic instability? The Pope spent his pre-papal years, not as a Vatican “prince of the Church,” but as a diocesan bishop who greeted the homeless poor by name. He listened attentively to the voices of refugees, migrants, the poor and others who have been marginalized. He was a son of St. Ignatius of Loyola who emphasized personal discernment over adherence to rigid rules. 

These experiences fueled the Francis train as it rolled through the night toward its destinations of synodality and a faith lived through encountering Jesus in those excluded from mainstream society. Pope Francis was not only a paradigm buster but a leader who drew his sustenance from the Gospel. Some do not like the direction in which he has led the Church, but I daresay most are pleased, and many have been challenged to live a fuller Christian life.

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Every pope is unique, and Pope Francis was no exception. Pope John Paul II lived most of his pre-papal life under Nazism and communism. His papacy began amidst the polarization of the Cold War. He was a philosopher, a dramatic actor and a political actor, who spoke from strong, unequivocal principles.

Pope Benedict XVI lived in a world of ideas, a world turned inside out by the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Although briefly the head of a major archdiocese, he was less an administrator than a theologian.

Pope Francis was raised in Argentina, a country with a democratic heritage that fell into chaos during his lifetime. He too was a political actor but one who developed an affinity with the ultra-poor whose lives had been dehumanized by a degenerate form of capitalism. He was a member of a religious order and a spiritual director. As a Jesuit, he had a particular sensitivity to people’s desire for personal authenticity, a characteristic of the postmodern world. Yet, he also possessed a strong persona. He had conflicting desires of seeking a decentralized form of governance and wanting to impress his stamp on the Church. He became Pope at a time when the Vatican needed a strong hand on the throttle to deal with internal matters neglected during the nearly 35-year John Paul-Benedict era.

In a speech to the cardinals before the conclave that elected him Pope, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio argued the Church must come out of herself to evangelize. If the Church is self-focused, she gets sick and becomes worldly. Instead of mirroring the light of Christ to the world, she believes the Church herself is the light.

The speech touched a chord with the cardinals, and perhaps they got more than they bargained for by electing the Argentine prelate. Certainly, this Pope never shied away from saying what he thought, and sometimes you had to wonder whether his actions were designed to tweak the noses of the Church’s more conservative elements. Nevertheless, throughout his papacy he remained true to the words he spoke to the cardinals.

Cardinal Bergoglio became Pope unexpectedly but in broad daylight. In the 2005 conclave that elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as pope, Bergoglio was the runner-up, garnering 35 per cent of the votes on the penultimate third ballot. However, Ratzinger had been expected to be elected pope in 2005 and to serve in that office for a good number of years. Bergoglio was 68 at that time, and by the time of the next conclave he would be much too old to become pope — or so we thought.

Mostly, people did not think about it even when Pope Benedict XVI made his shocking decision to resign less than eight years later. By then, Bergoglio was 76 and eagerly waiting for his replacement as Archbishop of Buenos Aires to be named. He was on no one’s list of leading papabile in March 2013. Nevertheless, he was seen as a man of holiness who was outside the Vatican system but capable of reforming it. He was elected on the fifth ballot.

The new Pope Francis immediately sent signs that things would be different in his pontificate. First came his choice of name — Francis, without the Roman numeral “I” — a symbol of his commitment to the poor and the life of poverty. When he was introduced to the throng of people in St. Peter’s Square, he asked them to bless him. In silence, be bowed to receive that blessing.

Then, instead of retiring to the papal quarters in the Apostolic Palace, he returned to the hotel on a minibus with the cardinals. In the following days, he stayed with other cardinals in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, which had been their residence during the conclave. After the cardinals returned to their dioceses, Pope Francis made the residence his permanent home in the Vatican. 

On Holy Thursday, he went to a Roman prison to wash the feet of inmates, including a Muslim woman. In July, he visited the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa where more than 500 migrants had been reported dead or missing the previous year. He deplored “the culture of comfort” that lulls people to think only of themselves rather than those who suffer. “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!”

Those visits and those words struck the tone for his papacy. Francis was a Pope who believed wisdom comes from those who live on the margins of society more than from experts and those in the towers of political and economic power. He characterized the Church as “a field hospital after battle” where the wounded ones of society are healed.

Pope Francis’ first major document, The Joy of the Gospel (Evangelii Gaudium), was published eight months after he became pontiff. He began by stating, “The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures and a blunted conscience.” Despite that danger, there is hope, he proclaimed. An encounter with God’s love brings us to the true authenticity of serving others. 

It makes us more human, indeed more than human in that it liberates us from narrow self-absorption. A culture of encounter “means learning to find Jesus in the faces of others, in their voices, in their pleas.”

Throughout his papacy, he continued to witness the Gospel through simplicity of life and by reaching out to the poor. His party for his first birthday as Pope had an exclusive guest list: three homeless men who lived on the street near the Vatican and a small dog. When he visited Greece in 2016, he brought 12 Syrian refugees home with him to the Vatican. In launching the 2025 Jubilee of Hope, the second Holy Door he opened after the one in St. Peter’s Basilica was in a Rome prison.

Within the Church, he battled against careerism and clericalism. In his 2014 Christmas address to Vatican officials and staff, Pope Francis warned against 15 “curial diseases” that weaken the Church’s witness to Christ. Those diseases include excessive busyness, thinking one is indispensable, excessive planning, idolizing superiors and gossiping, grumbling and backbiting. It was a stern call for an examination of conscience during an event that often focused on words of thanks to the staff and those retiring from Church service.

The Pope worked hard to shake up the Church’s central bureaucracy. He limited the time in office of the heads of Vatican dicasteries (departments) to one five-year term. Others who did not share his vision of the Church, including Cardinals Robert Sarah and Gerhard Mueller, were sometimes abruptly sidelined. Even some of his favourites, such as Cardinals Luis Tagle and Peter Turkson, were removed from office if something went awry on their watch. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio had witnessed Vatican inefficiencies and even corruption from afar and wanted it all to end.

Nevertheless, it didn’t. Cardinal Giovanni Becciu, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, and nine other people, including four former Vatican employees, were charged and convicted in a Vatican court of an assortment of crimes, including embezzlement and abuse of office for their role in a $200-million (U.S.) London real estate deal. In December 2023, Becciu was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison. To his credit, the Pope acted quickly to deal with the scandal. In response, the Pope acknowledged that all people, even Church leaders, are sinners.

Although he took a harder line on clergy sexual abuse than did his predecessors, Pope Francis made missteps either by relying on bad information or not processing the information available to him. The most devastating case was that of the Chilean Bishop Juan Barros who was accused of covering up abuse cases and whom the Pope defended for more than three years despite the opposition of the country’s bishops to Barros’ appointment as bishop. The Pope eventually admitted he had made “grave errors” in handling the Barros case. In 2021, he thanked journalists for “helping us not to sweep (clergy sexual abuse) under the carpet and for the voice you have given to the abuse victims.”

Jorge Bergoglio, the eldest of five children, was born on Dec. 17, 1936, in a suburb of Buenos Aires. His father, Mario, was an Italian-born accountant, and his mother, Regina, a housewife of northern Italian origin. The couple met at Mass in 1934 and married within a year. Young Jorge was raised on pasta, soccer and Italian Catholicism. As he grew older, he worked as a bouncer and a janitor and earned a master’s degree in chemistry. 

Stories about his call to the priesthood vary. Some say he intended to become a priest early on, while another says he had a deep encounter with Christ in the confessional in 1954. In any event, he did not join the Jesuits until 1958 when he was 21. Shortly after entering the seminary, he came down with pneumonia and hovered between life and death for three days. Once the diagnosis was made, the doctors removed half of his right lung. The following years were filled with studies and teaching high school until he was ordained a priest in 1969. 

After making his final vows as a Jesuit in 1973, he became superior of the Jesuit province of Argentina and Uruguay for six years. These years were marked by controversy as Fr. Bergoglio opposed the theory of class struggle in liberation theology then held by more than a few Latin American Jesuits. He brought in conservative theologians to form the novices and recommended textbooks written in Latin.

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That era also marked the period of the Argentine military junta’s “Dirty War” against dissidents in which more than 22,000 people were killed or disappeared. Two Jesuits, Frs. Francisco Jalics and Orlando Yorio, were among those taken into custody, stripped and tortured for five days in a futile effort to get them to “confess” they were in league with left-wing guerrillas. At the time, the pair believed they were kidnapped after being betrayed by Bergoglio. That belief only intensified the divisions within the Argentine Jesuits. After Bergoglio became Pope, Jalics clarified that the new Pope had nothing to do with the kidnapping of the Jesuits. In fact, he had worked for their release and had helped many who were persecuted by the regime. 

During his time as Jesuit superior, Bergoglio suffered and was isolated. When it was over, he became rector of the seminary where he had studied before ordination. After six years in that role, he went to Germany to work on his doctoral thesis, a project he never completed.

In 1992, Bergoglio was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires, and the Jesuits asked him to no longer live in their houses because of his differing views. Papal biographer Austen Ivereigh wrote that from then until his election as Pope 21 years later he was in “virtual estrangement from the Jesuits.” At the time of Pope Francis’ election to the papacy, Jose Maria Poirier, editor of the Argentine Catholic magazine El Criterio, told Catholic News Service, “Half (of the Jesuits) liked him a lot, but half wanted nothing to do with him.”

Despite the divided opinions, Bergoglio remained a faithful interpreter of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises and became Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998. 

As archbishop, he rode public transit, cooked his own meals, lived simply and challenged the political authorities who neglected the poor. He was known especially for his acts of kindness to the forgotten ones on the streets of what today is the fourth largest city in the Americas. There, Bergoglio formed his view that the Church belongs with the poor. He built chapels and missions in the shantytowns and sent priests and seminarians to serve there.

He spoke out against the unjust treatment of temporary foreign workers and migrants who had been drawn into the sex trade. He campaigned against abortion and same-sex marriage. The archbishop was so outspoken that the country’s successive presidents, Nestor Kirchner, who died in 2007, and his wife, Christina Kirchner, who succeeded him, avoided attending Mass in the cathedral and went to churches in outlying areas. 

Bergoglio also had disputes with the adherents of the Latin Tridentine Mass in his archdiocese. That conflict took on global dimensions when Pope Francis in 2021 severely limited the use of the Latin Mass which had been widened by Pope Benedict in 2007. Pope Francis maintained that while his predecessor wanted to restore harmony in the Church by allowing greater use of the old Mass, his reform had had the opposite effect — increased division.

“Discernment” was the central watchword throughout Pope Francis’ papacy, one rooted in his Jesuit spirituality. He sometimes contrasted the discernment needed to resolve personal dilemmas with adherence to universal moral precepts. In The Joy of the Gospel, he noted that St. Thomas Aquinas had taught that Christ left His followers with few precepts and that those precepts should be applied with moderation to not burden the faithful and make their lives a form of servitude. 

Synodality can be seen as an attempt to restore trust in the Church in the postmodern world where trust in institutions and universal precepts is under siege. The Pope took what was essentially a notion of personal discernment of God’s will and combined it with Vatican II’s emphasis on the Church as the pilgrim People of God and the long tradition of ecclesial synods to devise the concept of synodality. Synodality refers to God’s will for the Church becoming understood through all the baptized praying and learning together. The role of bishops as the chief teachers of the Church is not cast aside, but there is a new emphasis on the shared authority of all the faithful.

Synodality is not simply a method of discernment but a new way of being Church. Clericalism would be broken down, and the laity would experience themselves as instruments of the Holy Spirit. The process that led to the Synod on Synodality in 2023 and 2024 began with grassroots consultation in every diocese worldwide. People expressed their hopes and frustrations with the Church at parish meetings, and the results were collated first at the diocesan, then the national and finally the global levels. 

“Synodality, if we look at that word, it really means togetherness,” said Gary Gagnon, an Alberta Metis representative who travelled to Rome with the Canadian bishops and Indigenous people in early 2022. “When we say walking together, we’ve really got to define that now. What does that mean? Are you walking just ahead of me or just behind me? Or are we walking side-by-side?”

Synodality was a bold move, and its implications may take centuries to fully play out. The process is controversial, stirring deep hopes and fears. Some hoped that the two synods would lead to the ordination of women deacons and married male priests in the Latin rite Church. Others feared traditional lines of authority would be eroded and the clarity of Catholic dogma lost. At this early date, neither the hopes nor the fears have come to fruition.

While Pope Francis is widely seen as a reformer and even a “disturber,” he gave a high priority to personal devotion and holiness which has drawn scant attention. A man of deep personal prayer, he rose before 5 a.m. every day for years to pray for two hours before beginning his daily activities. As Pope, his 2018 apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (Rejoice and Be Glad: On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World) gave perhaps his fullest explication of personal discernment. Reliance on the Church’s moral norms is insufficient for knowing the correct way to act. Discernment is a supernatural grace that emerges out of “the silence of prolonged prayer.” 

“It involves striving untrammeled for all that is great, better and more beautiful, while at the same time being concerned for the little things, for each day’s responsibilities and commitments.”

Then, in October 2024, the Pope released his encyclical Dilexit Nos (He Loved Us) on the Sacred Heart, a devotion the Jesuits championed in their 17th-century disputes with the rigidly moralistic Jansenists. The devotion is needed again today because of the heartlessness that grows out of secular devotion to algorithms and self-centredness, Pope Francis wrote. “Christ’s love can give a heart to our world and revive love wherever we think that the ability to love has been definitively lost.”

Those are not the words of a disturber, although the Pope has drawn fire for his interventions on global issues ranging from his encyclical on the environmental crisis (Laudato Si’) to his return to soft diplomacy with authoritarian governments such as China. Laudato Si’ raised the growing cry of the papacy on the destruction of the Earth to a level that it finally captured media and political attention. After decades of discussion, Pope Francis finally declared unequivocally that there is no such thing as a just war. He went on to extend Vatican diplomacy to war zones such as Gaza and Ukraine. He mediated the long chill between the United States and Cuba to bring about mutual diplomatic recognition.

The Trump regime in the U.S. came under his critical glare as did right-wing populism throughout the Western world. Especially in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship), the Pope criticized populism for its narrow, exclusionary definition of “the people” and resulting hostility to immigration. During the COVID pandemic, he supported vaccine mandates and said people were morally obliged to receive the vaccine. 

Fratelli Tutti was also critical of a “liberalism… that serves the economic interests of the powerful.” This liberalism is a form of individualism where the community has no shared narrative. In the Pope’s hands, liberalism becomes neoliberalism which believes social problems can be resolved through a “magical” trickle-down of wealth to the poorest.

After much persuasion, Pope Francis brought his concern for the marginalized to Canada in July 2022 where he apologized for Catholic involvement in Indian residential schools, something he acknowledged in an unscripted moment was an act of genocide. In Maskwacis, south of Edmonton, the Pope issued the apology sought by the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, saying the schools were incompatible with the Gospel. 

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples.”

In Quebec City, he said the Church had been an agent of colonialism. 

“Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.” 

The Pope’s words were parsed over and over with differing views on whether his apology went far enough to bring about reconciliation with survivors of the schools and their descendants. Either way, it was an historic event, unimaginable mere decades earlier when a more hierarchical Church saw its missionary efforts as morally unassailable.

Now, under Pope Francis, the regions of the globe that in living memory had been mission territory were brought to the centre of the Church. No more was that evident than in his appointments to the College of Cardinals. As of Feb. 22, 2025, he had appointed 163 cardinals from more than 70 nations; 110 of those cardinals are eligible to vote in the papal conclave that will pick the successor to Pope Francis, including four Canadians: Toronto’s Cardinal Francis Leo and his predecessor Cardinal Thomas Collins, Quebec’s Cardinal Gerald Lacroix and Cardinal Michael Czerny. 

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At the 2005 conclave after the death of Pope John Paul, 69.6 per cent of the cardinal electors came from Europe and North America, a number that has been cut to 53.6 per cent today, with many appointments being awarded to bishops whose dioceses are well off the beaten track. Critics say Pope Francis has stacked the deck so the next pope will be a carbon copy of him. That seems unlikely. The needs of the world and the Church have changed since Francis was elected. Moreover, the cardinals are free men who will bring their own ideas and priorities to the conclave where the Holy Spirit may nudge them in ways that cannot be easily anticipated.

Yet, the question remains whether Catholics have or will ever assume the simple way of life Pope Francis displayed. An answer might be found in the papal motorcade after the papal Mass in Edmonton in 2022. The papal vehicle, a small white Fiat with an exhausted Pope Francis in the back seat, led the way down Stadium Road. Following was an armada of black limousines carrying Canada’s bishops off to their destination. Becoming the Church of the poor remains a challenge for us all.