Pope Francis, the first Jesuit and Latin American and the first non-European in over a millennium to lead the Catholic Church, died at 7:35 a.m. on Easter Monday, April 21, at the age of 88, the Vatican announced.
The announcement was made at Casa Santa Marta, where Francis had resided, by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church who is tasked to administer the Church upon the death of the pope.
The Supreme Pontiff was hospitalized for over a month from Feb. 14 to March 23 for bronchitis and double pneumonia, his most serious health crisis in recent years. His condition had become critical despite intensive care, including oxygen therapy and blood transfusions.
The 88-year-old pope was so close to death during his recent health scare that his doctors even mulled discontinuing treatment.
Pope Francis’s final appearance before the public was at St. Peter’s Basilica on Easter Sunday, when he delivered his Urbi et Orbi (to the city of Rome and to the world) blessing from the balcony while in a wheelchair. Days before on Maundy Thursday, the pope even visited Rome’s Regina Coeli prison.
Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio on Dec. 17, 1936 to an Italian immigrant family in Argentina, Pope Francis served as archbishop of Buenos Aires before being elected to the See of Rome in 2013, following the historic resignation of the late Pope Benedict XVI, the first pope to abdicate in nearly six centuries.
Dubbed the “People’s Pope,” Pope Francis, during his visit to the Philippines in January 2015, drew the largest crowd for a papal event in history, with six to seven million Catholics attending his Mass at Rizal Park in Manila. His visit also marked the fourth time a pope visited UST, a pontifical university.
Pope Francis’s death triggers a sede vacante, or a vacant see, until a conclave of cardinals chooses his successor via secret ballot and lets smoke out of the Sistine Chapel as a signal to the world of the election of a new Vicar of Christ.
In November, the Holy See announced that Francis had simplified his own funeral rites, doing away with a triple coffin of cypress, lead, and oak and allowing for burial outside the Vatican walls.
The late pontiff’s remains are expected to be put out for public viewing in a simple coffin instead of an elevated bier at St. Peter’s Basilica. He had instructed for a burial at the Basilica of St. Mary Major, instead of the grottoes beneath St. Peter’s, where the first pope and many of his successors are interred.
Pope Francis sought to reform the Church in his nearly 12-year pontificate, calling for a four-year synodal process in 2021 that recommended a greater role for lay people and more consultative decision-making at all levels.
He railed against careerism in the Church and reformed the Curia, placing lay people and women as heads of key Vatican dicasteries or departments.
Seen as more welcoming of LGBT individuals, Pope Francis allowed generic blessings for same-sex and other couples in “irregular” situations under the controversial document Fiducia supplicans.
He also restricted the use of the old liturgy, which had been liberalized by his predecessor, Benedict XVI, and insisted on the validity of the liturgical and other reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
He elevated three Filipinos to the College of Cardinals: Cotabato Archbishop Orlando Quevedo in 2014, Manila Archbishop Jose Advincula in 2020, and Kalookan Bishop Pablo Virgilio David in 2024.
In his apostolic journey to the Philippines in 2015, Pope Francis visited Leyte to console the victims of Typhoon “Yolanda,” and in his closing Mass in Rizal Park entrusted the Philippines to the protection of the Santo Niño, the image of which was brought by Magellan in 1521 and gifted to the chieftain of Cebu, cradle of Christianity in the country.
Francis marked the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in the Philippines with a Mass at St. Peter’s on March 14, 2021, where he praised Filipinos for being bearers of joy to the world.
“Five hundred years have passed since the Christian message first arrived in the Philippines. You received the joy of the Gospel: the good news that God so loved us that he gave his Son for us. And this joy is evident in your people,” he said in his homily.
“Never be afraid to proclaim the Gospel, to serve and to love. With your joy, you will help people to say of the Church too: ‘she so loved the world!’ How beautiful and attractive is a Church that loves the world without judging, a Church that gives herself to the world. May it be so, dear brothers and sisters, in the Philippines and in every part of the earth,” he said.
