Divinity Atlas

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Francis

Also Known As Pope Francis Titled form, and the one that separates him from Francis of Assisi.
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Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, was pope from 2013 until his death in 2025, the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, and the first to take the name Francis, chosen in honor of Francis of Assisi. His 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, on care for our common home, was the first papal encyclical devoted entirely to the environment, linking ecological crisis to poverty and consumer culture in a single moral argument. He emphasized simplicity in his own style of the office, living in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the papal apartments, and pursued a broader process of consultation across the church called synodality. He died on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, and was succeeded by Pope Leo XIV.

Facts
Life
Lifespan or Floruit
1936 to 2025 1
Office Held
Pope, 2013 to 2025; the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas 1Tradition: Christianity
Manner of Death
Died of natural causes 1
Manner of Death Detail
Died at the Vatican on 21 April 2025, Easter Monday, following a stroke; succeeded by Pope Leo XIV 1
Attestation
Historicity
Historically attested 1
Position Profile
Key Text
Beyond Laudato Si, his 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia opened a path for some divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive communion under pastoral discernment, a change conservative critics within the church contested sharply, and his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti extended his social teaching to human fraternity across national and religious lines. 1
Identity
Also Known As
Jorge Mario Bergoglio 1
Gender
Male 1
Practice
Lineage
Born to Italian immigrants in Buenos Aires, his father Mario Jose Bergoglio worked as a railway accountant after emigrating from Piedmont, and Francis often spoke of that immigrant background as shaping his later concern for migrants and refugees as pope. 1
Learn More
The First Pope Named for the Saint of Assisi

When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected in March 2013 following Benedict XVI's unusual resignation, he became the first Jesuit ever to hold the office and the first pope born in the Americas, a continent home to roughly forty percent of the world's Catholics but never before represented in the papacy itself. His choice of name broke with tradition in a different way: no previous pope had ever taken the name Francis, and he explained the choice within days, saying it came to him at the moment of election as a call to remember the poor, naming Francis of Assisi directly as the reference, a poor man who loved and cared for creation.

The choice set the tone for a pontificate that consistently emphasized simplicity and closeness to the marginalized over ceremony. Francis chose to live in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, a Vatican guesthouse, rather than the formal papal apartments his predecessors had occupied, continued wearing simpler vestments than some of his predecessors favored, and made visits to prisons, migrant camps, and the peripheries of major cities a recurring feature of his travel, presenting these choices as a deliberate echo of the saint whose name he had taken rather than as incidental personal preference.

Francis also pursued a distinctive process he called synodality, gathering bishops, clergy, and laypeople in extended rounds of consultation on the church's pastoral direction, most prominently in a multi-year Synod on Synodality convened in 2021, intended to make listening across the whole church, not only its hierarchy, a more permanent feature of how it discerns direction.

Laudato Si and Care for Our Common Home

Issued in May 2015 ahead of the Paris climate summit later that year, Laudato Si, taking its title from a line of Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Creatures praising God through Brother Sun and Sister Moon, was the first papal encyclical devoted entirely to the natural environment. Pope Francis argued that ecological degradation and human poverty were not separate problems but a single crisis, describing what he called an integral ecology in which care for the earth and care for the poor, who suffer environmental harm they did little to cause and have the fewest resources to escape, are inseparable moral obligations rather than competing priorities.

The encyclical drew explicitly on climate science, accepting the scientific consensus on human caused climate change as a starting point rather than a matter for theological dispute, a stance some political and religious commentators in various countries criticized as the church overstepping into a scientific and economic policy question, while others, including many scientists and environmental advocates outside the Catholic church entirely, welcomed it as a major moral voice entering the climate debate at a critical moment.

Laudato Si also criticized what Francis called a throwaway culture of excessive consumption, and market-first responses to ecological crisis that treat nature purely as a resource to be managed for profit rather than as a shared inheritance with its own claim on human responsibility, arguments he returned to and sharpened in a follow-up document, Laudate Deum, issued in 2023 as he judged the world's response to the original encyclical's warnings insufficient.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Francis directly: "post-synodal apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis, is the Catholic Church's own supreme teaching document on love in the family, issued following two synods of bishops."

Source Amoris Laetitia, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on love in the familyPope Francisthe holders' own account

This source names Francis directly: "text of the Common Prayer service Pope Francis led at the Lutheran Cathedral of Lund, Sweden, on 31 October 2016, opening the joint Catholic-Lutheran commemoration of the Reformation's five..."

This source names Francis directly: "Prefect on 2 April 2020, and that Pope Francis made the first ever papal visit to Mongolia in 2023."

Source Catholic Church in Mongolia (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

His 2015 encyclical Laudato Si argued care for creation and care for the poor are a single moral obligation, the first encyclical devoted entirely to the environment.

This source names Francis directly: "Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis visited in 1998, 2012 and 2015 respectively, and that Francis used his 2015 visit to press the Cuban government to give citizens greater freedom, means..."

Source Cuba-Holy See Relations (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Francis directly: "Episcopalis Communio, Pope Francis' 2018 apostolic constitution on the Synod of Bishops, is the Vatican's own current governing document for the institution."

This source names Francis directly: "Fatima on 13 May 2017, celebrated by Pope Francis on the centenary of the reported Marian apparitions."

This source names Francis directly: "It also records visits by Pope John Paul II in 2001 and Pope Francis in 2022, and a 2024 Vatican visit by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev."

Source Holy See-Kazakhstan Relations (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Francis directly: "Paul II's 1984 pilgrimage and Pope Francis' September 2024 visit as the relationship's high points."

Source Holy See-Papua New Guinea Relations (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Francis directly: "Theory, published by Taylor and Francis, tracing how portraits of Guru Nanak became a popular fixture of Sikh homes and gurdwaras from the Singh Sabha Movement of the 1870s onward, and the social..."

This source names Francis directly: "Sheik, confirmed at its Taylor and Francis abstract page under DOI 10.1080/10137548.2017.1359108."

This source names Francis directly: "three months after the election of Pope Francis, responding directly to popular claims that Francis fulfills the Prophecy of the Popes' final entry, "Petrus Romanus." Staples opens by naming a book..."

This source names Francis directly: "a Resoudre, published by Les Editions Franciscaines in 2001, is the scholarly study that traced the so-called Prayer of Saint Francis, the widely known Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, to..."

This source names Francis directly: "Common Home, the 2015 encyclical of Pope Francis published through the Vatican's own Libreria Editrice Vaticana, is the Catholic Church's own papal teaching document connecting environmental..."

This source names Francis directly: "secretary Martin Junge alongside Pope Francis, the roughly five hundred worshippers at Lund Cathedral and the thousands more at the Malmo Arena afterward, and the separate humanitarian declaration..."

This source names Francis directly: "Kelley is an anthropologist and Harris Francis a Navajo cultural specialist, and this academic book, published by Indiana University Press, documents Navajo sacred geography, drawing on both..."

Source Navajo Sacred PlacesKlara Bonsack Kelley and Harris Francis

This source names Francis directly: "2015 film, published by Taylor and Francis."

This source names Francis directly: "Policy of Empowerment: Pope Francis in Cuba, Petra Kuivala's 2017 peer reviewed article in the International Journal of Cuban Studies, evaluates Pope Francis's September 2015 Cuba visit through..."

This source names Francis directly: "Today's contemporary report on Pope Francis's 28 July 2014 visit to the Evangelical Church of Reconciliation in Caserta, Italy, a Pentecostal congregation."

This source names Francis directly: "On 28 July 2014, Pope Francis traveled to Caserta, Italy, to visit the Evangelical Church of Reconciliation, a Pentecostal congregation, becoming the first pope to visit a Pentecostal church."

This source names Francis directly: "Church, its 2,300 page report to Pope Francis, the mass resignation of every active Chilean bishop and auxiliary in May 2018, and the pope's own acknowledgment of "serious mistakes" in his earlier..."

This source names Francis directly: "Post's contemporary report on Pope Francis's 28 July 2014 visit to the Evangelical Church of Reconciliation in Caserta, Italy, the first such visit by a pope to a Pentecostal church."

This source names Francis directly: "Nelson's 9 March 2019 meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican the day before, the first meeting in history between a president of the Church and a Roman Catholic pontiff, and quoting Nelson's..."

This source names Francis directly: "The dedication came one day after Nelson met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on 9 March 2019, the first meeting in history between a president of the Church and a Roman Catholic pontiff."

This source names Francis directly: "Francisco de Zurbaran painted this austere devotional picture around 1635 to 1639, showing Saint Francis of Assisi kneeling alone in fervent prayer, his clasped hands cradling a human skull against..."

Source The National Gallery, London, "Saint Francis in Meditation," NG230The National Gallery, London, catalogue entry

This source names Francis directly: "The Spiritual Franciscans were a rigorist current within the Franciscan order, insisting on absolute poverty exactly as they read it in Francis of Assisi's own founding rule and rejecting the more..."

Francis extended a vote to non bishops, including women, at the 2023 assembly on synodality.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

This source names Francis directly: "she left her family home to join Francis of Assisi's new movement, the founding episode of the Order of Poor Clares."

This source names Francis directly: "On 31 October 2016, Pope Francis and Lutheran World Federation president Bishop Munib Younan led a Common Prayer service at the Lutheran Cathedral of Lund, Sweden, opening a year of joint..."

This source names Francis directly: "The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, I Fioretti di San Francesco, is an anonymous medieval Franciscan compilation of legends; the atlas records no publisher and no exact publication year because it..."

Source The Little Flowers of Saint Francis (I Fioretti di San Francesco)Anonymous (Franciscan compilation)

This source names Francis directly: "and were beatified together by Pope Francis in 2019."

This source names Francis directly: "Vo Van Thuong's audience with Pope Francis, the two sides reached the Agreement on the Status of the Resident Papal Representative, permitting the Holy See a resident representative and office in..."

This source names Pope Francis directly: "(on the Pope's own initiative) by Pope Francis on May 9, 2019, establishing global legal procedures for the whole Catholic Church to handle allegations of sexual abuse and, distinctly, to hold..."

Source Vos Estis Lux MundiPope Francis

This source names Pope Francis directly: "letter issued motu proprio by Pope Francis on May 9, 2019, establishing global legal procedures for the whole Catholic Church to handle sexual abuse allegations and, distinctly, to hold bishops and..."

Source Vos Estis Lux MundiPope Francis

Belongs to Tradition

Named For

Chose the name at the moment of his election as a call to remember the poor and to care for creation.

Sources
1. Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes
Eamon Duffy, Yale University Press, 2006View the Source
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