VATICAN CITY (AP) — He was a pope who understood the power of a simple touch: caressing the deformed head of a man in St. Peter’s Square, washing the feet of a Muslim prisoner, sinking to his hands and knees to implore South Sudan’s rival leaders to make peace.
Pope Francis charmed the world with those poignant acts of love, humility and informality, starting with his first appearance as pontiff on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica with a remarkably normal, “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) to his cheering flock below.
Francis, the first Latin American pope, died Monday at age 88. It was just a day after Francis imparted what would become his final public blessing from that very same loggia on Easter. “Brothers and Sisters, Happy Easter!” he said.
He suffered from chronic lung disease after part of a lung was removed as a young man. He entered Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025, for a respiratory crisis that developed into double pneumonia, and at 38 days became the longest hospitalization of his 12-year papacy. After his release, Francis led the church through the Easter season, and made what became a final farewell to the faithful with a ride in his popemobile through St. Peter’s Square following Easter Mass.
After that first rainy night of his election on March 13, 2013, Francis made even greater gestures, like bringing a dozen Syrian refugees home with him from a Greek refugee camp. Such actions won him wild popularity among progressives and signaled new priorities for the Vatican after the sometimes-troubled papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.
But Francis soon invited troubles of his own and conservatives grew increasingly upset with his focus on the poor and the environment, and his outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, at the expense of preaching Catholic doctrine. Some accused him of heresy.
His greatest test came when he botched a notorious case of clergy sexual abuse in Chile in 2018. Suddenly, the scandal that festered under his predecessors erupted anew on his watch and was used by critics to try to weaken him.
And then the crowd-loving, globe-trotting pope of the peripheries had to navigate the unprecedented reality of leading a universal religion through the coronavirus pandemic from a locked-down Vatican City.
He implored the world to use COVID-19 as an opportunity to rethink the economic and political framework that he said had turned rich against poor and rendered the Earth an “immense pile of filth.”
“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and di...
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