End of a radical papacy born in the South

Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 1936, died on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, aged 88.

- Vashna Jagarnath

The symbolism was impossible to ignore: the head of the Catholic Church died at the heart of its most sacred weekend — Easter, the ancient commemoration of suffering, death and resurrection. In a faith built on ritual and meaning, this death echoed with a deeper clarity.

His papacy, too, had been a resurrection of sorts — of justice, humility and the throne of Peter held by a man who began his work as a priest in the shanty towns, the villas miserias, of Buenos Aires.

Francis was not perfect. He led an institution that has committed and concealed horrors across centuries. The Church under his watch still denied the ordination of women, still faltered in dealing with abuse, still allowed its conservative flank to rail against queerness, migrants and liberation theology.

But what Francis did do, more than any pope in living memory, was to refuse the version of Catholicism that ingratiates itself with the powerful while abandoning the poor.

To understand his significance, one must understand the institution he inherited. The papacy is not just a spiritual role. It is one of the longest-standing political offices in the world. For more than a millennium, the Catholic Church has held land, crowned emperors, bankrolled crusades and blessed colonial conquest. It helped codify European empire and white supremacy under the cross.

Even in the 20th century, parts of the Church hierarchy sided with fascism. The Vatican signed a concordat with Nazi Germany in 1933, and senior clerics remained complicit in Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy. Pope Pius XII, Francis's wartime predecessor, was widely criticised for his silence during the Holocaust.