Online Reporter
Correspondents
Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, died aged 88, the Vatican announced on Easter Monday.
“Dearest brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow, I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father,” Cardinal Kevin Farrell, Camerlengo of the Apostolic Chamber, said in a statement.
The pontiff had been diminished by a series of health issues in recent years and was using a wheelchair for some of his recent public appearances. In February 2025, he was hospitalised with severe bronchitis and pneumonia in both lungs.
The cause of his death was a cerebral stroke leading to a coma and irreversible heart failure, the Vatican said.
It was one in a long line of health problems for the pope, who had part of a lung removed as a young man and had become increasingly frail over the years. He underwent two major intestinal surgeries in recent years: in 2021, to remove the left part of his colon; and again to treat an intestinal blockage in June 2023.
For the latter procedure, Pope Francis spent nine days in a Rome hospital and was filmed saying, “I’m alive”, while being escorted out of the hospital in a wheelchair, surrounded by reporters.
Pope Francis, who was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, was the first Jesuit pope and the first native of Latin America.
The young Bergoglio worked as a nightclub bouncer and floor sweeper, before graduating as a chemist.
At a local factory, he worked closely with Esther Ballestrino, who campaigned against Argentina’s military dictatorship. She was tortured, her body never found.
He became a Jesuit, studied philosophy and taught literature and psychology. Ordained a decade later, he won swift promotion, becoming provincial superior for Argentina in 1973.
His liberal views marked a noticeable break from more conservative predecessors and at times sparked push-back from Vatican hard-liners.
But his legacy is also one of complexities, compromises and contradictions, reflecting his often-difficult position as a progressive reformer in a conservative global institution.
Pope Francis was unafraid to wade into politics, publicly feuding with United States President Donald Trump over immigration and rebuking US Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, over apparently instrumentalising a theological point for migration policy.
Indeed, it seems the pontiff’s last diplomatic function was a lightning visit by Vance, whose motorcade remained in the Vatican for 17 minutes on Easter Sunday, according to media reports.
Pope Francis worked with Anglicans, Lutherans and Methodists and persuaded the Israeli and Palestinian presidents to join him to pray for peace.
After attacks by Muslim militants, he said it was not right to identify Islam with violence. “If I speak of Islamic violence, then I have to speak of Catholic violence too,” he declared.
Politically, he allied himself with the Argentine government’s claim on the Falklands, telling a service: “We come to pray for those who have fallen, sons of the homeland who set out to defend their mother, the homeland, to claim the country that is theirs.”
And, as a Spanish-speaking Latin American, he provided a crucial service as mediator when the US government edged towards historic rapprochement with Cuba. It is difficult to imagine a European Pope playing such a critical diplomatic role.
As a social reformer, Pope Francis will be remembered for taking a gentler view of homosexuality. He insisted being gay is “not a crime” and approved blessings for same-sex couples, while apologising in 2024 for using a slur to refer to gay men. But he also reiterated that homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of the Church.
On gender, the pontiff hewed closer to tradition in repeatedly ruling out ordaining female priests or deacons — although he named numerous women to roles in the Vatican, including appointing the first woman to head a major department.
He said women who had undergone an abortion should be “forgiven” — yet called a Belgian abortion law “homicidal” and initiated beatification for Belgian King Baudouin, who abdicated his throne for a day rather than sign the law that decriminalised abortion in 1990.
Fittingly, for the first non-European pope in 1 300 years since the Syrian Gregory III, Pope Francis criss-crossed the globe ministering to followers along the edges of the Catholic world — from Asia and the Middle East, to the Arctic and the Peruvian Amazon — although his travel plans were often disrupted by bouts of illness.
Sermons during his travels often drew upon themes of environmentalism, for which he was a champion. He took his name from St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and ecology, and his encyclical or papal doctrine called on people to take action for the environment.
In 2015, he said: “Clearly, the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures.”
Pope Francis was a fierce critic of war. He condemned Russia’s “repugnant” invasion of Ukraine and called for Ukraine to “have the courage to raise the white flag.” Although this latter comment, along with his urging of Russian youths to remember their “legacy” as heirs of a “great, enlightened Russian empire,” drew Ukrainians’ ire and forced the Vatican to walk back.
As recently as January 2025, he called the situation in the Gaza Strip “very serious and shameful,” saying in remarks delivered by an aide: “We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians.” He was previously criticised by an Israeli minister for calling for an investigation into whether the country’s military campaign in Gaza constituted genocide.
