His first act as pope was to reject the traditional papal regalia. He refused to “judge” homosexual Catholics and later allowed non-ritual blessings of homosexual couples. And, to the surprise of many — especially within the very Church he led — he acknowledged that all religions could be paths to God.
From the beginning, Pope Francis was never one to conform to traditional expectations of a pope. The first pontiff from the Americas and the first to take the name “Francis,” he signaled early on that his papacy would be different from the others. Over the course of 12 years, he tested the pastoral limits of Catholic doctrines and practices once thought untouchable, stripping a centuries-old institution of the weight of its own rigidity.
Context gives a clearer picture of why Pope Francis did just that. When he stepped onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica in 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio inherited a Church in crisis. The world was becoming increasingly secular, and the Church — reeling from scandals of sexual abuse, homosexual discrimination, and financial opacity — began to look antiquated and out of touch.
Faced with these fractures, Pope Francis leaned on the essence of his office as “pontifex maximus” or the supreme bridge-builder. He embodied the “primary bridge between God and humankind” and served as a crucial link between change and tradition, doctrine and practice, and Rome and the peripheries.
Pope Francis sought to construct bridges in areas where the world built walls.
To homosexual Catholics long shut out by the Church, he extended a welcoming hand through non-ritual blessing, though he stood firm against same-sex marriage. To women and lay people, he opened the doors of Vatican leadership while upholding the male exclusivity of priesthood. To the family, he extended grace even to the divorced and the remarried, but he remained until the end a hardliner against abortion.
These and more of Pope Francis’s moves and statements prove his legacy — praised and condemned for the same reasons — is complex as it may be contradictory. His critics often invoke the approaches of his predecessors — John Paul II, intellectually dialogic, geopolitically adept, and communicatively bold and dramatic, and Benedict XVI, doctrinally fastidious and anti-relativist but very paternally solicitous— as standards to which Pope Francis supposedly did not measure up.
But to understand Pope Francis is to accept he was neither of the two. He blazed a different path and embodied a mix of tradition and progress, of pastorality and moral rigor. He refused to separate theology from human justice, as exposed as he was to the social reality of Latin America.
Pope Francis also envisioned the Church not as a fortress but as a field hospital, where the healers meet the faithful in their woundedness. In letter and in spirit, the pope dismantled the institutional trappings that had made the papacy appear unattached.
On April 21, Easter Monday, after 12 years of challenging the Church to put down its walls, and after building so many bridges to reach people once shunned by Catholicism, Pope Francis went gently into the good night, leaving behind a papacy that sought to soften, open, and humanize faith.
Fittingly, the Pope’s final send-off was a gathering of those at the margins: the poor, homeless, imprisoned, migrants, and transgender people. There was also an outpouring of tribute from leaders of other religions and nations for the pope, who had made synodality a hallmark of his mission.
For what it’s worth, Pope Francis’s pontificate would be best remembered not only for the debates it stirred, but for the walls it tore down and the bridges it built. And while it will take years for the full image of his legacy to crystallize, Pope Francis will for sure be best remembered for pushing the envelope of what it meant to be Catholic and what it took to be pope.
Thank you, Pope Francis. You taught us to love without measure, to serve with humility, and, fittingly now, to weep with hope. You brought the Church down from its pedestal and closer to the people it is meant to serve — and changed it, for the better or, if not, to challenge us further to make the Church worthy to be called indeed as the mystical body of Christ and the people of God.
