Francis
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on 17 December 1936 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a family of Italian immigrants. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1958, was ordained in 1969, and served as Jesuit provincial of Argentina during the years of the military dictatorship. Named Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and a cardinal in 2001, he became known for an austere personal life — riding the bus, cooking his own meals, living simply — and for an insistent emphasis on the poor.
Elected on 13 March 2013 after the resignation of Benedict XVI, he took the name Francis, after the saint of Assisi — the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, and the first from the Southern Hemisphere. His early gestures captivated the world: the refusal of the papal apartments, the embrace of the disfigured, the washing of prisoners' feet, the disarming 'Who am I to judge?' He spoke ceaselessly of mercy, encounter, and a Church that 'goes out' to the margins, and for a time he was the most admired man on earth.
Yet the second half of his twelve-year pontificate was consumed by the sharpest doctrinal and liturgical disputes the Church had seen in generations — over Communion for the remarried, over blessings for same-sex couples, and above all over his 2021 suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass. He governed with a strong hand and left a Church more divided than he found it. He died on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, and was succeeded by Pope Leo XIV.
No pope in living memory spoke more of mercy, encounter, and unity — and none, in the sober judgment of this house, left the Church more divided than he found her. That is the tragedy of the Francis pontificate, and there is no honest way to soften it.
The wound has a name: Traditionis Custodes. On 16 July 2021 Francis reversed Benedict XVI's act of peace and moved to suppress the very Mass that had formed the saints for fifteen centuries. Where Benedict had declared the old rite 'never abrogated,' Francis pronounced the reformed books the 'unique expression' of the Roman Rite and set about closing the door his predecessor had opened. A measure given for reconciliation, he treated as though it had been the aggressor.
Worse than the act was the reasoning. Francis charged that the ancient liturgy had been 'exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements' — casting the families, the converts, the young, and the priestly fraternities who love that Mass as enemies of the Church's unity. It was a strawman. The communities he restricted — the Fraternity of St Peter, the Institute of Christ the King, and their faithful — accept the Council and the authority of the Pope; the caricature of a rite teeming with schismatics did not describe the people kneeling in the pews. To preach charity and then brand a devout minority 'divisive' is to inflict the very wound one claims to be healing.
Nor was the factual ground any firmer. Francis said he acted upon a 2020 survey of the world's bishops. Yet when the journalist Diane Montagna later obtained and published what she presented as the Congregation's own report, it appeared to show most responding bishops content with the old Mass, and warning that legislative change would do 'more harm than good' — the opposite of the crisis he described. The Vatican never authenticated the leak and called it 'partial'; but the doubt it cast has never been answered. A grave burden was laid upon the faithful, and the evidence offered to justify it will not bear the weight.
The confusion did not stop at the altar. Amoris Laetitia left the Church's teaching on Communion and marriage in a fog that four cardinals begged him, in vain, to lift — the dubia he never answered. Fiducia Supplicans set whole bishops' conferences against Rome. The Pachamama in the Vatican gardens, the long silences toward honest questions, the removals of faithful shepherds — each deepened the sense of a household at war with itself under a father who would not still the storm he had raised.
We do not write this lightly, nor for sport. Measured by its fruits — by the division it sowed, the consciences it troubled, the trust it spent — the pontificate of Francis must be reckoned among the most injurious to the unity of the Church in modern times. That is a hard sentence to pass upon a Successor of Peter, and we pass it with sorrow, not satisfaction.
And yet he was our father, and he stands now before a Judge more merciful than any of us. He defined no false dogma; the gates of hell did not prevail. He loved the poor truly, sought the margins that the comfortable forget, and longed — however it miscarried — for a Church that goes out of herself. We owe him the prayers we owe every soul, and the very Mass he sought to restrain will be offered for the repose of his. The verdict on his governance is severe; the door of God's mercy, for him as for us, stands open. Requiescat in pace.