Pope Francis I (Jorge Bergoglio) who recently died, was the first ever pontiff from Latin America and the first non-European one in 1,300 years. The 88-year old Argentinian’s 12-year papacy transformed the 1.3 billion-strong Catholic Church into one more inclusive of global South perspectives (its fastest growing congregations are in Latin America, Asia, and Africa), and 80 per cent of the more diverse cardinalate that will shortly elect a new Pope was appointed by Francis.

In a Europe where Catholicism had long become the religion of kings and queens and nearly empty churches have become museums, Bergoglio adopted the name of 13th- century saint,Francis of Assisi as a clear signal of a desire to follow the Italian friar’s pious commitment to Jesus Christ’s humble lifestyle, his commitment to the “wretched of the earth”, his outreach to Islam, and his attachment to nature. Pope Francis described himself as a “callejero” (a man of the streets), insisting: “My people are poor, and I am one of them.”

POOR PEOPLE’S POPE

A trained theologian, chemist, and philosopher who studied in Argentina, Chile, Spain, and Germany, Francis despised the Vatican’s ostentatious opulence. He thus declined to live in the plush 12-room Apostolic Palace apartment, opting instead for a modest two-room suite in the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta guest house, eating in the common canteen.

He surrendered the bullet-proof papal limousine for a small Ford Focus. As a “Slum Bishop” in Buenos Aires, Francis had similarly given up his official residence for a modest room, cooked his own meals, and travelled by public transport. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires (1998-2013), he established food kitchens, schools, and drug rehabilitation centres, though some criticised him for not directly confronting the brutal “Dirty War” and forced “disappearances” of Argentina’s military caudillos (1976-1983). As Pope, he continued to berate “peacock priests” and “airport bishops” who did not visit poor neighbourhoods to save souls.

The United Nations (UN) was founded 80 years ago by largely Christian nations on lofty Christian ideals, with its secretary-general sometimes referred to as the “Pope on the East River”. These were the very struggles that Francis embraced: poverty, human rights, conflict resolution, climate change, migration, and nuclear disarmament. He articulated clearly the UN’s concept of human security that sought to prioritise the security of people over that of states.

Francis’s first trip outside Rome as Pope in July 2013 was to the squalid migrant camp on Italy’s island of Lampedusa, where he comforted desperate African migrants fleeing poverty, persecution, and conflict. These were the invisible people who have been widely despised and denigrated across a Europe rife with xenophobia.

The new Pope castigated the “global indifference” towards Africa’s boat people, calling for a “reawakening of conscience” among rich nations. During Europe’s 2015 “migrant crisis”, Francis relentlessly spoke out for the rights of refugees fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He later gave sanctuary at the Vatican to a dozen Syrian refugees, noting: “Welcoming the stranger to the door is fundamental to the faith.” When Donald Trump pledged to build a wall to keep Mexican migrants out of America during his 2016 presidential campaign, Francis chided him as “not Christian”, arguing that countries should build bridges rather than walls. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021, the Pope consistently condemned the West’s “vaccine nationalism”.

FIGHTING POVERTY, DEFENDING HUMAN RIGHTS

Francis was the good shepherd who tended his flock, providing hope and succour to destitute, downtrodden, and desperate people in prisons and hospitals, often washing their feet while feeding and sheltering the homeless. Though a Jesuit, he did not embrace the Marxist-inspired “liberation theology” of many radical Latin American theologians. Francis was more pragmatic, arguing that while the Left worshipped the state, the Right tended to overglorify the market.

He, however, scathingly castigated an exploitative capitalism, which he dismissed as “greed looking for easy gain”, insisting that “money must serve, not rule!” For the pontiff, capitalism spawned perverse inequalities both within states and between the rich North and the global South, insisting: “Without a solution to the problems of the poor, we cannot resolve the problems of the world.”

Francis not only defended Catholics, but spoke out forcefully against Israel’s brutalities against Palestinians in Gaza. He championed the rights of Rohingya on visits to Myanmar and Bangladesh; defended Yazidis in Iraq; and apologised for the failure of the Catholic Church during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the abuse of First Nations indigenous children forcibly placed in Canadian Catholic schools between 1881 and 1996. Before his visit to the US in September 2015, Francis invited Black Lives Matter activists to brief papal advisers on America’s racial challenges.

During his address to the US Congress in Washington, DC, the Pope invoked African-American Nobel Peace laureate Martin Luther King Jr., who had been inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s use of Jesus’s love ethic in his non-violence struggles in South Africa and India. Francis also appointed Wilton D. Gregory, Archbishop of Washington, as the first black American cardinal in 2020. Francis discreetly worked with the first African American president, Barack Obama, to broker a deal between Washington and Cuba that led to a thaw in relations in 2014.

PROMOTING PEACE, PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT

The Pontiff was a peacemaker who declared the possession of nuclear weapons by any nation to be “immoral”, calling instead for total nuclear disarmament. He visited the world’s neglected “peripheries”, falling at the feet of South Sudan’s warlords, Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, exhorting them to turn swords into ploughshares. He did the same in the Congo – with its powerful Catholic Church – urging a silencing of the guns and an end to widespread rape. He further preached peace and reconciliation in Mozambique.

Francis called on everyone to protect “Mother Earth”, condemning the “iniquitous exploitation of natural resources”. He railed against the impact of climate change on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations, particularly castigating lacklustre politicians and climate change denialists. He bemoaned Washington’s withdrawal from the 2015 UN Paris Climate agreement because “the future of humanity is at stake”. The “green” Pope also organised environmental conferences with the UN and called a synod of bishops from Brazil’s pan-Amazon region in 2019 to draw attention to the plight of the 33 million people in the Amazon Basin facing an onslaught from exploitative multinationals and the country’s pyromaniac new right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro.

LEGACY

For all his smiling charisma and understated humility, Francis was an astute and sometimes ruthless political operator. He faced much opposition from powerful conservative cardinals in America, Australia, and Canada (often allied with well-funded right-wing movements) who had strongly backed the Eurocentric status quo of Polish Pope John Paul II and his German successor, Benedict XVI. These religious rebels often challenged Francis’s “heresy” and his perceived threat to a Western Christian identity. Unlike his autocratic predecessors who brooked no dissent, Francis allowed ideological debates to flourish.

He managed to reform the stuffy and opaque Roman Curia bureaucracy, restoring the Vatican’s finances, and sought to decentralise decision-making away from Rome to local parishes. His critics opposed many of his policies: his attempts to make the Church more racially, sexually, and gender-inclusive; his attacks on capitalist greed, climate change, and the arms industry; his reaching out to Muslim leaders by attending a conference at Cairo’s ancient Al-Azhar centre in 2017, and visiting Islamic religious leaders in the Arabian peninsula two years later to promote inter-faith harmony; his opposition to the death penalty as contrary to church teaching; and his impatience with continuing archaic Latin liturgical rites.

Even in death, Francis embodied humility, choosing to be buried not in Rome’s St Peter’s Basilica like most popes, but in the more modest St Mary Major Basilica with a simple tombstone bearing the inscription “Franciscus”. As we await the white smoke to emerge from the Conclave of the College of Cardinals that will elect a new pontiff, the world has much to celebrate in the legacy of the global South’s “Poor People’s Pope”: a true servant leader who was born a week before Christmas, and died on the day Christ is believed by his followers to have returned to Earth following his Resurrection.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.