Pope Francis, who died today at 88, leaves behind a legacy shaped by climate action, compassion for migrants, and calls for global peace that redefined the moral voice of the Catholic Church.
It was just past dawn on Easter Monday when the Vatican confirmed the news: Pope Francis, the first Latin American and Jesuit pope, died at the age of 88. His final blessing had been delivered the day prior from a wheelchair in St. Peter’s Square, where he urged peace for Gaza and Ukraine and warned against the spiritual rot of indifference.
“At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father,” Cardinal Kevin Farrell said in a statement. That the pontiff died in the early morning light, after one final gesture of hope, felt characteristically deliberate.
In the twelve years since Jorge Mario Bergoglio stepped out onto the papal balcony and took the name Francis, his voice became one of the most urgent and unconventional of any spiritual leader in recent memory. He called for climate action when world leaders still referred to it in cautious terms. He embraced migrants at a time when national borders were tightening. He condemned war while geopolitical alliances strained under the weight of their own contradictions. Francis never offered neutrality. He offered presence.
Pope Francis’ legacy is shaped not only by the places he visited — from the slums of Buenos Aires to Rohingya refugee camps — but also by the moral clarity he brought to global discourse. In 2015, he issued Laudato Si’, a sweeping encyclical that placed the environment at the center of Catholic teaching for the first time in history. The 192-page document framed climate change as a matter of faith, justice, and survival. “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” he wrote. “We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation, and filth.”
The encyclical landed just months before the Paris Climate Agreement was signed, and diplomats credit it with galvanizing developing nations and reshaping conversations about moral responsibility. It was read aloud in UN chambers and environmental strategy meetings alike, unusual for a religious text. Laudato Si’ was pivotal; it gave the climate movement a soul.
Francis doubled down on those ideas in 2023 with Laudate Deum, a shorter, sharper warning that castigated global leaders for prioritizing short-term profits over planetary stability. “The consequences of climate change are borne by the most vulnerable,” he wrote, naming the global poor as climate’s first victims.
But Francis didn’t just write. He walked. He traded the Vatican palace for a modest guesthouse, shunned bulletproof cars for a Ford Focus, and arrived in the Central African Republic during civil war to open a Holy Door in Bangui — a gesture meant to offer peace. He embraced children, washed the feet of Muslim refugees, and welcomed transgender Catholics into private audiences. Even his smallest gestures reverberated.
His worldview, rooted in liberation theology and the lived experiences of the poor, made him both beloved and polarizing. Within the Church, his reforms were often met with quiet resistance. Outside of it, he drew praise from unlikely corners.
When the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, Francis responded not with condemnation, but an invitation. He convened oil executives and climate scientists at the Vatican. “There is no time to lose,” he told them. Later, he handed each participant a copy of Laudato Si’. Among the attendees was Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil.
The pope’s ecological commitment extended beyond carbon. In 2019, he hosted the Amazon Synod, elevating Indigenous voices and criticizing corporate greed. He called deforestation a form of “cultural destruction” and warned that loss of biodiversity was tantamount to erasing the divine.
Yet climate wasn’t his only moral battleground. Migration defined much of his work. From his very first trip to Lampedusa, the Italian island where thousands of African migrants had drowned at sea, he made clear that borders did not define human worth. “The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people,” he said in a homily there in 2013. “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference.”
He used the Vatican as a sanctuary, personally bringing home twelve Syrian refugees after a visit to Lesbos. He repeatedly condemned the policies of world leaders, including those of former President Donald Trump, whom he rebuked for family separations at the U.S. border.
Not all his interventions were received without criticism. His 2024 comments suggesting Ukraine should consider negotiations with Russia sparked fury among many Catholics and Ukrainians, who viewed it as appeasement. Francis later clarified that peace could not mean surrender. “A negotiated peace is not the same as submission,” he said. But the damage, in some eyes, had already been done.
Still, he remained a tireless advocate for diplomacy. He sent envoys to both Moscow and Kyiv, and repeatedly offered the Vatican as neutral ground for peace talks. He condemned weapons manufacturers and described war as a “defeat for humanity.”
Inside the Church, Francis made moves both symbolic and structural. He appointed cardinals from nontraditional dioceses — places like Tonga, Haiti, and the Central African Republic — shifting the global center of Catholic power southward. He eased the path for divorced Catholics to receive communion and launched synods focused on listening rather than decree. He recentered Catholicism around the Gospel rather than dogma, a move that may be remembered as his most radical act.
Yet critics accused him of not going far enough, particularly on the role of women. He opened commissions to study female deacons, but ultimately reaffirmed the ban on female priests. And his handling of the Church’s sexual abuse crisis drew both praise and scorn. He apologized to victims in Chile after initially siding with the accused bishop, and accepted mass resignations of the country’s clergy. But elsewhere, reforms moved slowly. Survivors’ groups remained vocal in their calls for more transparency.
Despite these tensions, Francis maintained a pastoral approach. In 2018, he met with a young boy whose father had died and was worried he wouldn’t be in heaven because he wasn’t a believer. Francis wept. He told the boy that God would not abandon a good man. The moment, captured on video, went viral. It felt like a glimpse of a Church less concerned with rules than with love.
And that was the paradox of Pope Francis: he was both a traditionalist and a reformer. A man of doctrine who championed tenderness. A pope who wielded his moral authority to shape the world not through decree, but through encounter.
Near the end of his life, as he became increasingly frail, often relying on a cane or wheelchair, his voice remained clear. Just a day before his death, he spoke to a crowd of thousands, warning against “the weapons of war and the machinery of death” and calling instead for fraternity, unity, and compassion.
“I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development,” he said yesterday. “These are the ‘weapons’”’ of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death!
“May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions,” he said.
“In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenseless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.”
Related on Ethos:
