POPE FRANCIS 1936-2025

An Argentine with a gift for empathy, a discomfort with opulence, and a profound love for the poor changed the face of the Catholic Church

- BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN

The first, in fact, from anywhere but Europe. There had been 265 before him, but no one had taken his name from St. Francis of Assisi, famous for ministering to the poor.

Until his death on April 21, at age 88, the first Pope Francis was known for his willingness to hear out different views on controversial issues—marriage, sexuality, the priesthood—that predecessors had been unwilling to debate. Though the church's corrosive, long-denied child-sex-abuse scandal had created a crisis of conscience, particularly among young Catholics, Francis exuded a level of empathy, humility, and mercy that people felt connected to in a way they said they had not with past Pontiffs. He served credibly as the world’s conscience. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Francis urged Vladimir Putin to “stop this spiral of violence and death.” While hospitalized for the pneumonia that nearly killed him in March, he kept up regular weekly chats aimed at comforting a Catholic parish in Gaza. As TIME explained in choosing Francis as its 2013 Person of the Year, he “changed the tone and perception and focus of one of the world’s largest institutions in an extraordinary way.”

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital city, the eldest of accountant Mario Bergoglio and Regina Sivori’s five children. His parents were Italian immigrants who had fled Benito Mus-solini’s fascist regime, and his grandmother Rosa Margherita Vassallo di Bergoglio was active in Catholic Action, formed by Italian bishops who wanted to maintain their independence from Mussolini’s authoritarian rule. His grandmother had the biggest influence on him, according to biographer Austen Ivereigh, who wrote in