ROME—Tributes poured in from around the globe for Pope Francis I, who died the morning of April 21, Rome time. He was 88 and had recently returned from weeks of hospitalization.
His last and surprise public appearance was his Easter Urbi et Orbi—“To the city and the world”—address to thousands in St. Peter’s Square in Rome the day before, and then a tour through the crowd in the pope mobile. He had a surrogate read the pronouncement.
U.S. Catholic politicians, led by former President Joe Biden, the nation’s second Catholic president, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, eulogized Francis.
“Pope Francis will be remembered as one of the most consequential leaders of our time, and I am better for having known him,” said Biden in a statement on Twitter/X. “He was unlike any who came before him. For decades, he served the most vulnerable across Argentina, and his mission of serving the poor never ceased.”
Pelosi said Francis followed the gospel of Matthew, urging charity for those most in need. Francis “has, intellectually, been brilliant in taking the discussion to a place that is almost heavenly,” said Pelosi.
Vice President Vance visited the pontiff the day before his death. His visit was followed by a condemnation from the Pope of those who violate the rights of immigrants.
Pope Francis has been a steadfast advocate for peace and an end to war, particularly in Gaza. He expressed his deep concern for Gaza’s suffering, calling it “deplorable.” In his call to action, he urged the world to recognize the plight of the Palestinian children.
Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) honored the life of Francis, expressing gratitude for his unwavering voice for the most vulnerable, particularly for defending the dignity of the Palestinian people, the plight of refugees, and the “dangers of unchecked economic growth in the face of climate change.”
Other leaders worldwide, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, the president of the World Jewish Congress, the prime minister of Albania, and leading Muslim clerics, also eulogized the Pope. Flags were lowered to half-staff in the United Kingdom.
The Pope was a strong opponent of both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.
Francis was an outspoken critic of Republican President Donald Trump’s policies, especially Trump’s hatred of immigrants. Francis extended criticism to anti-migrant European leaders, too. He did not, however, chide the leaders by name.
Former Democratic President Barack Obama, who hosted Francis at the White House during the pontiff’s 2015 visit to the U.S. and address to a joint meeting of Congress, posted on Twitter/X: “Pope Francis was the rare leader who made us want to be better people.
“In his humility and his gestures at once simple and profound–embracing the sick, ministering to the homeless, washing the feet of young prisoners–he shook us out of our complacency and reminded us that we are all bound by moral obligations to God and one another…May we continue to heed his call to ‘never remain on the sidelines of this march of living hope,” Obama added.
Francis also came down hard on many right-wing U.S. church leaders. Some of them will be among the College of Cardinals, which will gather in Rome to name his successor. When right-wing cardinals demanded denial of sacraments to Catholic political figures who approved of abortion rights, even as those politicians personally opposed abortion, Francis put his foot down. He received at least one of those politicians, Biden, at the Vatican.
Francis, however, did not change the church’s opposition to abortion rights, disappointing most Catholics.
Argentine-born Francis, the first person from the Americas or the Southern Hemisphere to lead the world’s billion-plus Catholics, was a strong supporter of workers, unions, the poor, and the exploited.
He was also a strong critic of the capitalist class and their political handmaidens, especially in the United States. “No to an economy of exclusion,” Francis declared already a dozen years ago.
Threw away prepared text
In both an impromptu statement in Sardinia and in a later open letter to bishops, clergy, and laity, Francis laced into the criminal corporate class. In that longer and later statement in 2013, he also blasted governments, including the U.S. government, for ignoring people’s needs, or worse.
He condemned “the idolatry of money,” declaring, “Money must serve, not rule.” Francis declared.
The Pope was very specific even in condemning theories of trickle-down economics, “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world,” Francis said.
“This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”
Francis spoke and acted in the tradition of progressive Catholic Social Thought, which began with a pro-worker anti-capitalist papal encyclical in 1891 and was later taken up by two of his predecessors, Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul I.
Both also made a start towards opening up the church to more progressive ideas, but their pontificates were too short—five years for John and one month for John Paul—to make much headway against both the conservative Church bureaucracy and the right-wingers other popes installed in key positions.
And Francis’s words, while open, did not match what many progressive Catholics wanted: Ordination of women, reversal of the church’s opposition to abortion, full recognition of LGBTQ rights, including the right to marry and to marry within the church, and rooting out rampant sexual abuse by clergy worldwide, along with coverups by bishops and cardinals.
One of the few complaints after his death came from advocates for the ordination of women. Francis mandated greater participation of women in church advisory councils and at Mass, but stopped short of both ordination and of allowing priests to marry.
Both measures could alleviate the church’s variation of the “brain drain.” The sharp drop in the number of priests and seminary students in the last half-century. They could also open up the priesthood in the U.S. to increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking U.S. Catholics. The Pew Center’s survey of 35,000 people for its most recent survey of religion, in 2023-24, showed 43% of U.S. Catholics have one or both parents born outside of the U.S.
Francis also stood by opposition to abortion, even though Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical enshrining the ban caused massive defections from the church.
Francis, despite health problems which began in his teenage years in Buenos Aires, served 12 years, made some headway on those and other intractable issues, and against open and intractable opposition from conservative clerics..
Francis was mostly confined to a wheelchair in his last years. But he never retreated from his 2013 224-page pro-worker statement. It stands as a clarion call for change.
And he spent much time weeding out the foes—including conservatives among the cardinals, who will elect his successor in the coming weeks. Services for Francis, and his burial beneath St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, will be the week of April 21.
“We cannot passively and calmly wait in our church buildings,” Francis’s longer statement said, remembering his days as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, when he walked a fine line between criticizing the nation’s military regime and defending priests and laity, many of whom became “disappeared,” at the hands of the junta. “We need to move from a pastoral ministry of mere conservation to a decidedly missionary pastoral ministry,” Francis chided his own church.
Can we stand by?
“Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today, everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.
“As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized, without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”
“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘Thou shalt not,’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.”
The Pope also criticized corporate attitudes that “human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a ‘throw away’ culture that is now spreading.
“It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live. Those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised. They are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the ‘exploited’ but the outcast, the ‘leftovers,’” he wrote.
“To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference developed,” he added. People reject a need to help others, “as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own…A deadening culture of prosperity thrills” consumers with new possessions. “In the meantime, all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”
“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few.
“This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born.”
All this, plus “widespread corruption, self-serving tax evasion” and a “system which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits and…a deified market” is “a rejection of God.”
Despite all the accolades, both U.S. Catholic political and business leaders, at least those who identify with conservative causes and approve of evangelism, ignored Pope Francis’s words, or worse.
Thus, the archbishop of St. Louis, during Francis’s tenure, vigorously opposed the Carpenters’ organizing drive among Catholic schools there. The lay Catholic leaders of Chicago’s Resurrection Health Care system repeatedly broke labor law while defeating unionization at their hospital chain.
The Detroit diocese closed hundreds of Catholic schools, predominantly in neighborhoods of color. And U.S. Catholic universities, led by Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, tried to wrap themselves in what they called “freedom of religion” under the Constitution’s First Amendment to claim freedom from unionization of their faculty and staff.
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