Author: Eric Deabill

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis’ final moments were peaceful, and he managed to give one last farewell to his nurse, Massimiliano Strappetti, before slipping into a coma early April 21, Vatican News reported.

Among his last words were his thanks to Strappetti late April 20 when he said, “Thank you for bringing me back to the square,” referring to the pope’s surprise appearance after giving his Easter blessing from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica.

The 88-year-old pope, who was still recovering from pneumonia, did not attend the Easter Mass April 20, but he did appear shortly after noon to give the solemn blessing. With his voice still weak, he wished everyone a Happy Easter and he barely raised his arms as he made the sign of the cross.

“The pope wanted to make one last significant surprise by going to St. Peter’s Square for a ride in the popemobile,” Vatican News said in a report April 22. However, the pope was a little unsure and asked Strappetti, “Do you think I can do it?”

The nurse, who had been by his side for the 38 days he was hospitalized in Rome’s Gemelli hospital and then by his bedside 24/7 at the pope’s residence in the Domus Sanctae Marthae since his return March 23, reassured him that he could, Vatican News reported.

For 15 minutes, Pope Francis rode around St. Peter’s Square and a portion of the wide boulevard leading to the square, filled with about 50,000 people. He blessed a few babies and tried to wave; the crowds were thrilled, waving and running where possible to get a closer view.

Even though the pope made a number of surprise appearances in his wheelchair in St. Peter’s Basilica after he was discharged from the hospital and he appeared briefly in the square in his wheelchair at the end of the closing Mass of the Jubilee of the Sick and Health Care Workers April 6 and Palm Sunday April 13, Easter marked his first open popemobile ride since his one-day trip to Corsica in December.

Vatican News reported the pope returned to his residence April 20 “tired, but happy” and he thanked Strappetti for “bringing me back to the square.” The pope hired him to be his personal nurse in 2022.

The pope then rested that afternoon and had a relaxing dinner, Vatican News said.

The first signs that something was wrong happened the next day around 5:30 a.m. followed by “prompt intervention by those watching over him,” it said.

More than an hour later, the pope, who was lying on his bed in his apartment, gestured to wave farewell to Strappetti and slipped into a coma, it said.

“He did not suffer, everything happened quickly,” according to those who were with the pope those final moments, Vatican News reported.

The pope died at 7:35 a.m. from a stroke, the coma and heart failure, the Vatican said.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Cardinals already present in Rome and those who were able to get to the city after Pope Francis’ death April 21 held their first meeting at the Vatican April 22.

About 60 cardinals met in the Vatican Synod Hall at 9 a.m. to decide when to move the pope’s body from the chapel of his residence to St. Peter’s Basilica and when to hold the funeral, Matteo Bruni, head of the Vatican press office told reporters.

They decided the funeral Mass of Pope Francis will be celebrated April 26 in St. Peter’s Square after the deceased pope’s body is taken into St. Peter’s Basilica for public viewing and prayer early April 23. The public viewing was scheduled to end late April 25 with another prayer service to close the coffin.

During the cardinals’ meeting, which lasted about an hour and a half, the cardinals also drew lots to determine the three cardinals who will serve a three-day term to assist the chamberlain of the church, U.S. Cardinal Kevin J. Farrell, with the general governance of the church during the period without a pope.

The three cardinals chosen April 22 were Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, former Vatican secretary of state; Polish Cardinal Stanislaw Rylko, archpriest of Rome’s Basilica di St. Mary Major; and Italian Cardinal Fabio Baggio, undersecretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. After three days, cardinals present in Rome will draw lots once again for the three cardinals to serve the next three-day term, Bruni said.

The meeting began with a prayer of suffrage for the pope and a reading of the “Adsumus, Sancte Spiritus,” a prayer invoking the grace of the Holy Spirit for an assembly, he said.

Paragraphs 12 and 13 of the apostolic constitution, “Universi Dominici Gregis,” were read, offering guidance on how the formal pre-conclave meetings of cardinals, called general congregations, will work. They read aloud the oath written in paragraph 12 that is taken by cardinals entering the general congregations, Bruni said.

Cardinal Farrell also read aloud Pope Francis’ brief final testament in which he had asked to be buried at Rome’s Basilica of St. Mary Major and had offered his suffering for peace in the world.

The cardinals also decided that all beatifications that had been scheduled are postponed until the next pope decides the new date for the ceremonies.

Many cardinals arrived at the Synod Hall at the Vatican through a back entrance, while just a few passed through the Petriano entrance to the Vatican next to St. Peter’s Square and the flock of journalists crowding around it.

Among them was retired Italian Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi who, at 82, is no longer eligible to vote in a conclave.

“The first meeting is less theoretical, it will be the ones that follow — once cardinals arrive from all over the world — that there will be indications on the points of view that will be taken up by who participates in the conclave, as happened in 2013,” he told reporters before entering the Vatican.

The first meeting of cardinals “is more organizational,” focusing on the ceremonies associated with a papal death, he explained, “also because Pope Francis wanted them to be simplified and calmer.”

The cardinal said that Pope Francis’ decision to be buried in the Basilica of St. Mary Major “with a particular simplicity” is a kind of “final message that he gives, above all recalling that he wanted to be buried in the shadow of a woman, in this case Mary, and this is significant also for the desire that the church do more for women.”

Cardinal Ravasi, who was president of the Pontifical Council for Culture from 2007-2022, said the late pope had an “instinctive sensibility regarding contemporary culture,” particularly in cultural matters concerning women, young people, science and technology, including artificial intelligence, and communications.

“He was above all someone who was innovative with the language of the church itself,” the cardinal said, recalling phrases the pope would often invoke: “Third World War in piecemeal, the smell of the sheep, the field hospital.”

“All of these expressions were very influential and allowed people to feel directly and immediately in sync” with the church, he said.

The next closed-door meeting for all cardinals who are able to be in Rome will be April 23 in the afternoon, Bruni said.

The faithful were invited to gather in St. Peter’s Square to pray the rosary for the repose of Pope Francis’ soul led by Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica, at 7:30 p.m. local time April 22.

ROME (OSV News) – In the last years of his papacy, the world saw the more serious, concerned and suffering face of Pope Francis. But with one group he was always beaming, always smiling and always cheerful: the poor.

“Pope Francis put the poor in the center of his papacy because this meant precisely being in the center of the Gospel,” Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, prefect of the Dicastery for the Service of Charity, kept repeating throughout the pontificate when asked about initiative after initiative for the Roman homeless and disadvantaged.

For Francis, taking care of those in need meant turning the Vatican upside down. The poor were regularly welcomed inside Casa Santa Marta, where the pope lived, and the Swiss Guards were saluting them as they made their way to the Elemosineria Apostolica – the Apostolic Almsgiving office – for lunch with Cardinal Krajewski. Francis made it perfectly clear – they’re one of us, and they deserve the Vatican to be their home.

The revolution was easy to predict as the cardinal who became Pope Francis was a regular guest in the slums of Buenos Aires and a priest who wouldn’t replace his glasses until they were falling apart. For the Vatican however, the scale of the revolution was shocking.

“The task of the Apostolic Almsgiving is to empty the account for the charity of the Holy Father for the poor, according to the logic of the Gospel,” reads the main banner on the website for Cardinal Krajewski’s office.

Five months into Francis’ papacy, in August 2013, the Polish prelate was picked for the job of distributing charity funds of the Vatican — an appointment that started a whirlwind of initiatives.

“The Holy Father told me to sell my desk,” Cardinal Krajewski told OSV News in November 2023. “You won’t need it,” he recalled, pointing to the pope’s primary directive – to go out and be there where the poor need you.

In November 2014, the news broke that showers for the homeless would be built under the sweeping white colonnade of St. Peter’s Square — the decision following a request by the pope that showers for the poor be built in 10 Roman parishes. Over the years, an outpatient clinic for the poor was built in that same spot, in the touristy center of the Vatican.

“Around 150 people are treated there by doctors daily. Those doctors all work as volunteers, eight to 10 doctors every day — dentists, gynecologists, podiatrists, often professors of medicine! And you know what they tell me — that this is more important to put in their resume than the famous Gemelli clinic,” Cardinal Krajewski said in November 2024 of the privilege the doctors feel to serve the poor in the name of the pope.

“I remember that in one of the first public appointments with the press, Pope Francis said how he would like a poor church, which is poor and for the poor,” Massimiliano Signifredi, Community of Sant’Egidio’s coordinator of services for the homeless, told OSV News.

Sant’Egidio, founded in 1968 by the young Andrea Riccardi, now an esteemed professor of history, intellectual and successful negotiator of peace agreements, over the years has become a network of communities that tend to the poor, including migrants, and advocate for peace in more than 70 countries around the world.

For Francis, Sant’Egidio was a natural ally.

“The Holy Father got to know St. Egidio in the villas miseria, Spanish for shanty towns, in Buenos Aires, and he met many times with our community,” Signifredi stressed.

In 2016, when the pope unexpectedly took Syrian families with him to Rome on a papal plane from the Greek Lesbos island, Sant’Egidio was facilitating the visit and took care of the families in their new life journey.

A year later, Francis announced the first World Day of the Poor.

“The poor are not a problem: They are a resource from which to draw as we strive to accept and practice in our lives the essence of the Gospel,” Francis wrote in the message for the first observance Nov. 19, 2017. He asked the world to celebrate World Day of the Poor on the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time — usually the third Sunday of November.

“This Sunday, if there are poor people where we live who seek protection and assistance, let us draw close to them: it will be a favourable moment to encounter the God we seek,” the pope said, adding, “Let us never forget that, for Christ’s disciples, poverty is above all a call to follow Jesus in his own poverty.”

The pope practiced what he preached – every year making the Vatican press corps happy with unusual pictures of the pontiff dining with thousands of the poor, joking with children from disadvantaged families and sincerely laughing with migrants from all corners of the globe.

In 2019, another milestone of the revolution hit. The pope had an empty Roman palace to allocate.

“It is a beautiful building that overlooks the colonnade at St. Peter’s Square. You can see the dome perfectly,” Signifredi said, adding it could easily become a neat Vatican curial office or a five-star hotel, “maybe even more given the location.”

“Do you know how much money he could make if he turned this place into a hotel?” Silvano, a homeless man from Romania, asked OSV News in March 2023 in the premises of Palazzo Migliori. “Millions! But instead he renovated it and gave this place to us, to the poor.”

After extensive renovation carried out under the supervision of Cardinal Krajewski, and which left historical frescoes on the walls, Palazzo Migliori was opened in November 2019 in time for the third World Day of the Poor.

“It is not only a roof on top of their heads, or a bed with a bedside table, but it is the chance to start a new life,” Signifredi said.

There, in Palazzo Migliori, alms given to the homeless are transformed into “real change,” he said.

“When you give alms, you touch someone’s hand. In Palazzo Migliori, the Lord touches the hand of the poor, and with that — he touches their heart. He touches their life so that their life changes,” Signifredi explained.

“It’s not a shelter, it’s home,” added Silvano, who only gave his first name.

The biggest change for the homeless is the fact that after stepping through the threshold of the palazzo, they regain their dignity.

“The first thing you need to do with a homeless man is to accept him, talk to him,” Cardinal Krajewski said.

That is why when the cardinal was told in the spring of 2023 that “a homeless man without a face” lives in the Aventino area, he rushed to see him.

Miroslav, a Slovak man, had his face covered with cloth since his face was disfigured by cancer. “We took him to Palazzo Migliori and took care of him for two months,” Cardinal Krajewski told OSV News in September 2023.

“He was blind as the disease took his eyes, he didn’t have a nose, but for the last two months of his life he was surrounded by friends. Slovak bishops were paying visits to him. He had constant care and attention,” Cardinal Krajewski recalled.

“He would have his window open and would listen to Wednesday audiences of the Holy Father. And every time someone would come he just said, ‘Thank you.’ He never cursed his fate, did not hold a grudge against the doctors, because he was not surrounded by procedures, but people,” Cardinal Krajewski said.

The Polish cardinal celebrated Miroslav’s funeral in Rome’s St. Monica Church on Sept. 16, 2023. He was buried in the Prima Porta cemetery in Rome.

“At the beginning tending to people like Miroslav seems difficult, but only going against the current you will see that this is precisely being in the center of the Gospel,” he said.

“Over 20 centuries of Christian history reveal that the full adherence to the Gospel has gone along with love for the poor. When the church turned away from the poor, it also lost the Gospel,” Signifredi added, underlining Francis’ legacy that he hopes will last for decades and centuries to come.

Miroslav became a symbol of dozens of homeless men, whose funerals were celebrated by Cardinal Krajewski and other cardinals in multiple Roman churches — a goodbye on behalf of the Holy Father.

Community of Sant’Egidio volunteers and collaborators filled the churches on those occasions “dressed in their best clothes, like they were saying goodbye to their own family members,” Cardinal Krajewski emphasized.

“I think Pope Francis has renewed a tradition of the church that has been there since the beginning, and with great human wisdom he has led the church to rediscover the treasure – that is – the poor,” Signifredi told OSV News.

For Signifredi, Pope Francis has shown that “the poor are not a social category, but they are faces. They are hands to be held, to be accompanied. He showed this very concretely when on many occasions he just hung out with them.”

For some, this approach was “uncomfortable,” Cardinal Krajewski said of the many critics of the showers, clinics and shelters surrounding St. Peter’s.

“Jesus loved people so much he went to the cross for them. And why did people crucify Jesus? Because they did not understand him. The fact that someone did not understand Pope Francis does not mean we shouldn’t have done on his behalf what was done,” the Polish prelate emphasized in September 2023.

“The most beautiful thing in life is to become a purpose for another human being.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The funeral Mass of Pope Francis will be celebrated April 26 in St. Peter’s Square, the Vatican announced.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, will preside over the liturgy, which begins a nine-day period of official mourning and daily memorial Masses.

The deceased pope’s body, which was taken to the chapel of his residence late April 21, the day of his death, will be carried into St. Peter’s Basilica for public viewing and prayer early April 23.

The public viewing was scheduled to end late April 25 with another prayer service to close the coffin.

The rites and rituals for dressing the body, moving it to St. Peter’s Basilica and celebrating the funeral are published in the “Ordo Exsequiarum Romani Pontificis” (“Funeral Rites of the Roman Pontiff”).

The rites originally were approved by St. John Paul II in 1998 but were released only when he died in 2005. Modified versions of the rites were used after Pope Benedict XVI died Dec. 31, 2022, and Pope Francis revised and simplified them in 2024.

U.S. Cardinal Kevin J. Farrell, the chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, presided over a prayer service for the formal verification of the pope’s death April 21 in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, where Pope Francis celebrated an early morning Mass most days before his final illness.

Cardinal Farrell will lead the prayerful procession to take the pope’s body, already in its coffin, from the chapel, into St. Peter’s Square and then into the basilica.

According to the book of rites, he will say, “Dearest brothers and sisters, with great emotion we accompany the mortal remains of our Pope Francis into the Vatican basilica where he often exercised his ministry as the bishop of the church that is in Rome and as pastor of the universal church.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – In his brief final testament, Pope Francis asked to be buried at Rome’s Basilica of St. Mary Major and said he had offered his suffering for peace in the world.

“I offered the suffering present in the latter part of my life to the Lord for world peace and brotherhood among peoples,” he wrote in the document dated June 29, 2022, and published by the Vatican April 21, hours after he had died.

“Feeling that the sunset of my earthly life is approaching and with lively hope in eternal life, I wish to express my testamentary will only as to the place of my burial,” he wrote.

The document made no mention of the disposition of any possessions or of his personal papers.

As he had said publicly on several occasions, Pope Francis asked to be buried at St. Mary Major because he had entrusted his “priestly and episcopal life and ministry” to Mary.

“I wish my last earthly journey to end at this very ancient Marian shrine  where I would go to pray at the beginning and end of each apostolic journey to confidently entrust my intentions to the Immaculate Mother and to thank her for the docile and maternal care,” he wrote.

Pope Francis then specified that “my tomb be prepared in the niche in the side aisle between the Pauline Chapel — the Chapel of the Salus Populi Romani — and the Sforza Chapel.”

“The tomb should be in the earth; simple, without special decoration and with the only inscription: Franciscus,” he wrote.

Pope Francis said a benefactor already had covered the expenses for his burial and that he already had given specific instructions to Cardinal Rolandas Makrickas, the coadjutor archpriest of the basilica.

“May the Lord give a well-deserved reward to those who have loved me and will continue to pray for me,” he wrote.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis died April 21 after suffering a stroke and heart failure, said the director of Vatican City State’s department of health services. The pope had also gone into a coma.

“I certify that His Holiness Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on December 17, 1936, resident of Vatican City, Vatican citizen, passed away at 7:35 a.m. on 4/21/2025 in his apartment at the Domus Sanctae Marthae, Vatican City, from: cerebral stroke, coma, irreversible cardiovascular collapse,” said the statement, signed by the director, Dr. Andrea Arcangeli, and published by the Vatican press office.

The doctor said the pope also had a history of: “a previous episode of acute respiratory failure due to polymicrobial bilateral pneumonia; multiple bronchiectases; arterial hypertension; and type II diabetes.”

A heart monitor or ECG was used to ascertain his death, that is, that there was no longer any heart activity, he wrote on the signed declaration.

The doctor also read the statement aloud during a special prayer service that began at 8 p.m. local time April 21 in the late pope’s residence, the Domus Sanctae Marthae.

U.S. Cardinal Kevin J. Farrell, chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, presided over the rite, which included the formal verification of the pope’s death, the placement of his body in a coffin, and its transfer to the chapel on the first floor of his residence. The pope died in his third-floor apartment at 7:35 a.m. April 21.

Others present at the closed-door ceremony included Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals; the late pope’s aides, assistants and members of the papal household; Dr. Arcangeli; and Dr. Luigi Carbone, deputy director of the Vatican’s health department and the pope’s personal physician.

This was the first of three rites that are divided into three “stations” based on the place they occur: “at home, in the Vatican basilica and at the burial place,” according to the “Ordo Exsequiarum Romani Pontificis” (“Funeral Rites of the Roman Pontiff”). There will be separate services for transferring the body to St. Peter’s Basilica, the funeral, the burial and the memorial Masses that follow the funeral for the next eight days.

The Vatican press office confirmed that, according to instructions guiding what happens after the death of a pope, the funeral and burial should take place “between the fourth and sixth day after death,” which would be between April 25 and 27.

The exact date will be determined at a meeting of all the cardinals able to reach the Vatican immediately after the papal death. The first meeting was being held at 9 a.m. April 22 in the Vatican Synod Hall.

The press office said the coffin would probably be brought to St. Peter’s Basilica April 23 for public viewing and prayer before the funeral. Instead of lying on a catafalque, that is, a kind of decorated platform, the body will be placed inside a zinc-lined coffin, which will remain open until the night before the funeral, which will be celebrated by Cardinal Re.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – When he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio had said he always tried to avoid traveling “because I’m a homebody.”

As Pope Francis, he was anything but.

In his 12 years as head of the universal church, Pope Francis took 47 trips abroad, visiting more than 65 countries and covering more than 270,000 miles, which is equivalent to 11 times around the Earth.

His diminishing physical abilities did not stop him from taking the longest trip of his papacy in September 2024. His final trip was to the Mediterranean island of Corsica, just two days before his 88th birthday.

Many of his international trips were to countries where Christians are a minority or where he could draw close to people on the fringes of the world’s attention.

Even in countries where it is typical for popes to visit, Pope Francis’ choice of activities was sometimes surprising and showed his desire to stay close to marginalized people and those who suffer.

During his apostolic visit to the United States in 2015, the pope received a regal welcome, he met with President Barack Obama at the White House and became the first pope to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress. Yet immediately following the historic moment, he ate lunch with homeless people at a local parish. In Philadelphia, he visited a maximum-security prison before celebrating Mass on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Other trips have seen the pope visit homes for the elderly, hospitals and refugee camps, including what had been the largest camp in Europe: in Lesbos, Greece. He took 12 refugees back to Rome with him after a visit in 2016 and, five years later, visited again and criticized world leaders for an “indifference that kills.”

Pope Francis visited some of the poorest countries in the world, such as Mozambique and Madagascar in 2019 and Congo and South Sudan in 2023.

In countries experiencing war, he pleaded for peace as he did during a visit to the Central African Republic in 2015, and in nations recovering from conflict, he promoted reconciliation as he did in Iraq in 2021.

He took part in four World Youth Days with the 2013 gathering in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, being the first foreign journey of his pontificate. He went to Kraków, Poland, in 2016; Panama City, Panama, in 2019; and Lisbon, Portugal, in 2023, after the COVID pandemic canceled the event in 2021.

On the road he made many of the statements that became emblematic of his papacy. For example, in Portugal he told young people, “There is space for everyone” in the church — “todos, todos, todos” — and on the papal plane from Brazil, he told reporters, “Who am I to judge?” referring to a person who is gay and searches sincerely for the Lord.

He returned to Latin America six times — but never went back to his native Argentina. He traveled to every continent, including Oceania, which he finally visited when he went to Indonesia, Timor-Leste and Papua New Guinea in 2024.

Reflecting his deep commitment to interreligious dialogue and Christian-Muslim relations, Pope Francis visited 14 Muslim-majority nations. He underlined the need to work together to face today’s global challenges and moral crises, and to condemn all forms of religious extremism.

Yet just as notable as the countries Pope Francis did visit are those he did not: Spain, Germany and England, all visited by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

And although he made several trips to Asia, he never got to fulfill his dream of traveling to China, a place where his predecessor, St. John Paul II, had also wanted to go but never managed.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – In his efforts to promote a holistic defense of human life, Pope Francis frequently denounced a “throwaway culture” where anyone not considered “useful” was seen as disposable — including the unborn and the aged.

But in connecting the sacredness of the life of the unborn and the lives of the poor, as well as in calling for the global abolition of the death penalty, Pope Francis often was accused of losing or at least watering down the church’s opposition to abortion.

In his 2018 apostolic exhortation on holiness, “Gaudete Et Exsultate,” (“Rejoice and Be Glad”), Pope Francis wrote that living a Christian life involves the defense of both the unborn and the poor.

“Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred,” Pope Francis wrote. “Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection.”

In questioning whether he was as committed to ending abortion as his predecessors had been, critics particularly pointed to Pope Francis’ decision in 2016 to rewrite the statutes of the Pontifical Academy for Life, retaining its primary focus as “the defense and promotion of the value of human life and the dignity of the person,” but expanding its areas of concern beyond the very beginning and the very end of life.

In addition, during the 2015-2016 Holy Year of Mercy, Pope Francis gave all priests “the discretion to absolve of the sin of abortion those who have procured it and who, with contrite heart, seek forgiveness for it.” He made that permission permanent at the end of the Holy Year, ending the practice of requiring most priests to get permission first from their local bishop or from the Apostolic Penitentiary at the Vatican.

Vicki Thorn, the late founder of Project Rachel, a ministry promoting healing and forgiveness for those who regret an abortion, told Catholic News Service at the time that the pope’s decision did not downplay the gravity of abortion, but was a real sign of God’s love and mercy.

“For millions of women, in their hearts abortion is the unforgivable sin,” Thorn had told CNS. The papal act of mercy showed them there was a path to healing and forgiveness.

In his first major interview as pope, speaking with Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro in 2013, he said: “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”

Sometimes, though, when he did denounce abortion, he was criticized for being insensitive, particularly when he described abortion, as he often did, as “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”

On his flight back to Rome from Belgium in 2024, he was blunt: “Abortion is murder.”

“A human being is killed. And doctors who engage in this are — permit me to say — hitmen,” he continued. “They are hitmen. This cannot be disputed. A human life is killed.”

But Pope Francis’ most controversial pro-life act was his revision in 2018 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to assert “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and to commit the church to working toward its abolition worldwide.

The catechism’s paragraph on capital punishment, 2267, already had been updated by St. John Paul II in 1997 to strengthen its skepticism about the need to use the death penalty in the modern world and, particularly, to affirm the importance of protecting all human life.

Announcing Pope Francis’ revision in 2018, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, then-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said, “The new text, following in the footsteps of the teaching of John Paul II in ‘Evangelium Vitae,’ affirms that ending the life of a criminal as punishment for a crime is inadmissible because it attacks the dignity of the person, a dignity that is not lost even after having committed the most serious crimes.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – While Pope Francis often bucked formality and sidestepped some offices of the Roman Curia, one institution he believed in deeply was the Synod of Bishops and – even more – the notion of “synodality.”

He told cardinals and superiors of Roman Curia offices in December 2021: “The synod wants to be an experience of feeling ourselves all members of a larger people, the holy and faithful people of God, and thus disciples who listen and, precisely by virtue of this listening, can also understand God’s will, which is always revealed in unpredictable ways.”

While the ways could be unpredictable, Pope Francis was certain that God’s will was about mission and that synodality was key to taking the prayers, experiences and intuitions of Catholics all over the world and using them to discern new, better ways to share the Gospel message.

Not everyone appreciated the pope’s insistence on listening to everyone and discussing controversial issues like Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried, or the place of LGBTQ Catholics in the church or the possibility of ordaining women deacons — all issues that made headlines at recent synods even though they had been mentioned at synods under his predecessors, too.

Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, had told Catholic News Service in 2023 that he believed the first 10 years of Pope Francis’ pontificate were preparation for “the synodal conversation.”

The Second Vatican Council called Catholics to read the “signs of the times” and respond. And, the cardinal said, “this notion that we don’t have automatically prepared prescriptions for every challenge that faces us leads us to a fundamental tenet of our belief,” which is belief “in the Holy Spirit, the lord and giver of life.”

“Synodality is a way of being church,” Cardinal Tobin said. “It’s an ancient way of being church that is being recovered and lived in the circumstances in which we face ourselves today. And so, to my mind, that’s sort of the capstone of what Pope Francis has been working for over the last decade.”

Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago also thought Pope Francis had been laying the foundation for a new synod process — the multi-year process leading to the assemblies on synodality in 2023 and 2024 — since the beginning of his pontificate. “There’s an organic whole to all of this,” he said.

The cardinal said the whole process of the synod on synodality seemed, “in some way, the opportunity for him to pull everything together.”

Pope Francis’ efforts culminated in the three-year process of the Synod of Bishops on synodality, a process that included: listening to hundreds of thousands of Catholics in parishes across the globe; national and continental consultations; and two monthlong assemblies at the Vatican where, for the first time, “non-bishops” — lay women and men and men and women belonging to religious orders — had an equal vote with the bishops.

At the end of the second assembly, in October 2024, members passed a final document, which Pope Francis adopted as his own and asked bishops to begin implementing.

The document called on parishes and dioceses to move quickly to give life to the consultative bodies and broad participation in mission and ministry already foreseen in church law. It also urged bishops to hire more women and laymen to teach in seminaries and all Catholics to reach out to people who “experience the pain of feeling excluded or judged because of their marital situation, identity or sexuality.”

Calling for the “full implementation of all the opportunities already provided for in Canon Law with regard to the role of women,” synod members also noted that “the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open.”

The possibility of women deacons and of women in ministry more generally was one of the topics raised in the synod process that Pope Francis had taken off the 2024 agenda and assigned to study groups before the assembly met in Rome. Other groups were looking at issues like reforming seminary education, relations between bishops and religious communities and the role of nuncios; the groups were asked to work on proposals to give the pope by June 2025.

In 2015, marking the 50th anniversary of the restoration of the synods for the universal church, Pope Francis called them “one of the most precious legacies of the Second Vatican Council.”

The council’s vision of the church as the community where all the baptized are empowered to take responsibility for mission, especially outreach to those who are excluded or tossed aside by civil society, could take concrete shape only through a synodal process, he believed.

Another of the late pope’s constant refrains, though, was that the synod was not a parliament.

While emphasizing listening and shared responsibility, Pope Francis insisted that recognizing the baptismal gifts of all did not mean everyone in the church had the same ministry, role or vocation.

The International Theological Commission, a group of theologians appointed by the pope and working under the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published a lengthy scholarly document in March 2018 on “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church.”

In its Catholic understanding and usage, the commission wrote, synodality “promotes the baptismal dignity and co-responsibility of all, makes the most of the presence in the people of God of charisms dispensed by the Holy Spirit, recognizes the specific ministry of pastors in collegial and hierarchical communion with the bishop of Rome, and guarantees that synodal processes and events unfold in conformity with the deposit of faith and involve listening to the Holy Spirit for the renewal of the church’s mission.”

In other words, consulting and listening to all members of the church is essential for discerning a path forward, but those decisions cannot violate the truths of the Christian faith and must be verified by a priest, bishop or the pope, depending on whether the decision is local, diocesan or has a universal impact.

Still, Pope Francis said he envisioned a church that is “synodal” at every level, with everyone listening to one another, learning from one another and taking responsibility for proclaiming the Gospel.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Asserting that the Catholic Church needed the gifts and experiences of women, Pope Francis appointed several women to top positions in the Roman Curia, including the first female prefect of a major dicastery, and worked to ensure their contributions were recognized in parishes and dioceses around the world.

While affirming that only men could be ordained to the priesthood, he expanded the number of other official ministries open to women and gave women a voice in important deliberations, including as members of the dicastery that recommends candidates to serve as bishops and, particularly, by allowing women to be full voting members of the Synod of Bishops on synodality.

He opened the formal ministries of acolyte and lector to women and established the formal lay ministry of catechist – moves that were part of his overall push to encourage all the baptized to be more active in evangelization as missionary disciples.

He formed special commissions in 2016 and 2020 to study the question of women deacons. And, in response to a request by participants in the synod on synodality, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in 2024 that the commission would be revived to continue its research.

The pope resisted efforts that seemed to pursue change or “reform” for merely pragmatic reasons, such opening up the priesthood to women or married men as a remedy for a shortage of priests, or to “clericalize” the laity with fuller access to positions of power.

It is an error, he had said, to think laypeople, including women, can only truly contribute to the church or fulfill their call as Christians by being ordained or serving in top positions in the Catholic Church. He called it the risk of being “more concerned with dominating spaces than with generating initiatives.” Instead, all laypeople should be accompanied and supported in being active “agents of evangelization” in their public and daily lives, he insisted.

Pope Francis also was critical of any gender ideology that sought to erase differences between men and women, and he called radical feminism “machismo with a skirt.”

He championed women as possessing unique and vital gifts that must not be overlooked, diminished or demeaned, but insisted families, communities, the church and the world desperately need their contributions.

Women possess a “generative” power making the “nature of their vocation as ‘builders,’ cooperating with the Creator in the service of life, the common good and peace,” he told women taking part in an international conference on women in the church in early 2024.

He saw women as “the great gift of God” who is able to “bring harmony to creation.” Men and women are not the same, he said in 2017, but “one is not superior to the other” either. However, it is a woman, he said, who “teaches us to caress, to love tenderly and who makes something beautiful of the world.”

Especially in the early years of his pontificate, he would share stories and bits of wisdom he learned from his grandmother Rosa, with whom he had an especially strong, loving relationship. He often praised strong, confident and competent women in his life who had made a lasting impact on him, including his boss at the chemical factory where he worked as a young man and a nurse who, he said, helped save his life when he was hospitalized with a serious lung infection.

However, Pope Francis sometimes displayed outdated and even objectionable notions of women, such as his quips about problematic mothers-in-law or telling the International Theological Commission that the presence of women in its ranks was like having “strawberries on the cake.”

While that remark was “seriously offensive,” said Phyllis Zagano, an expert on women in the church and adjunct professor of religion at Hofstra University, “we must recognize his age, heritage and background.”

Born into an Italian family in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1936, he had spent his life as a priest, bishop and pope living, eating and working surrounded by men – mostly other priests – and had little contact with women, she told Catholic News Service in early 2024.

Perhaps aware of this echo chamber, he called on theologians to “de-masculinize” the church because, as he wrote in the introduction to a book, “the church is a communion of men and women who share the same faith and the same baptismal dignity.”

He had asked Salesian Sister Linda Pocher, a young Italian theologian, to organize a series of information sessions for him and his international Council of Cardinals to reflect on the role of women in the church, including in ministries.

When the pope first invited her to contribute in 2022, “I was explicitly told not to touch on the topic of ordination,” Sister Pocher said at a panel discussion in Rome in March 2024.

“However, later, in the meeting with the cardinals, it was the cardinals themselves who brought it up,” she said. “The issue of women’s ordination is a bit like the elephant in the room, that is, in certain contexts everyone sees it, but no one dares to mention it,” and it became clear that “it was impossible not to touch this theme.”

Zagano, who served on the pope’s first study commission on women deacons in 2016-2019, said that Pope Francis presented “a definite respect for women as intelligent beings” while he was also “immersed in a culture notable for its misogyny. That culture can be more accepting of women in management, while it continues to resist women in ministry.”

For example, the pope referred several times to a 20th-century Swiss theologian’s concept of Petrine and Marian principles to explain why only men are priests, but women, like Mary, have a “more important” role. The pope’s use of the terms “seem to restrict women from ministry while allowing them access to management positions as they might be broadly conceived, not as positions of jurisdiction or governance,” Zagano told CNS.

Some modern-day theologians have found the Petrine-Marian binary problematic, including Pope Francis’ characterization of the church being a woman, bride and mother.

The problem is not that there are differences between women and men, said Maeve Heaney, director of the Xavier Centre for Theological Formation at the Australian Catholic University and a consecrated member of the Verbum Dei community. What is wrong is “to radicalize or essentialize” differences, that is to carve out one monolith of qualities as belonging to women and another for men, she said at a Rome conference in March 2024.

“The identification of women with a certain kind of femininity which is, in turn, connected to a particular language and image of the church, has been off-putting on occasion to some women,” Anna Rowlands, a professor of Catholic social thought and practice at Durham University in England, told CNS in early 2024.

Pope Francis saw the need for more women theologians, reflecting his belief “that theology is radically incomplete if it is not written by women and does not reflect women’s physical, spiritual, ecclesial and political experiences, historical and contemporary,” she said.

“Essentializing women’s experience without more fully listening to women and enabling them to write and reflect out of their experience seems to some to illustrate the very problem,” Rowlands said.

With the 2021-2024 synod on synodality, the pope addressed the need to listen to women’s lived experience by completely reconfiguring the way a Synod of Bishops would be prepared and carried out. Women were invited to be full members of the 2023 and 2024 assemblies in Rome with unprecedented roles as facilitators and voting members, and countless more took part in the preparatory phases on the local, regional and continental stages.

Xavière Missionary Sister Nathalie Becquart, undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, said at a conference in Rome in March 2024, that the synod process made it clear that just as all the male participants did not have the same position on key issues, neither did the women.

Rowlands, who participated in the 2023 and 2024 synod assemblies, told CNS in early 2024, “Women played a truly remarkable role” during the entire synod process.

“Women with voting status also brought powerful testimony into the Synod Hall, speaking from a genuine diversity of social and theological viewpoints in their own right – not reliant upon being represented by bishops,” she said. “Pope Francis seemed delighted by the vibrant mix of voices and viewpoints and the presence of so many women.”

He hired many women to fill top positions in the Roman Curia and his reform of the Curia included creating the possibility of naming laypersons, not just archbishops and cardinals, to head a Vatican dicastery. While the reform went into effect in 2022, he appointed the first woman to be prefect of a dicastery in early 2025 (Jan. 6).

Naming Consolata Missionary Sister Simona Bramilla to lead the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, the pope also named a Spanish cardinal to be the dicastery’s pro-prefect, not to diminish the role or authority of the prefect, according to one canon lawyer, but because of possible situations that call for the exercise of holy orders.

He made concrete “practical efforts, rather than theoretical ones, to promote the presence of women,” Sister Pocher told CNS in early 2024, and he moved to promote respectful, mutual “listening to women, not just giving them roles.”

Zagano said Pope Francis worked with what he had to “bring the Church into the 20th century – not a typo. By that I mean, the writings of the Second Vatican Council are striking even now.”

The pope understood “the tension between and even within the ‘pro-Vatican II’ and ‘anti-Vatican II’ camps,” and moved “carefully – more slowly than some would wish – to let the voices of women be more widely heard and, more importantly, listened to,” she said.