The Bishop of Rome and earth head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, has passed away. He was 88 and has died after a long, lingering condition.
He was the first Jesuit pontiff and the first pontiff to have been born in South America ( he was born into an Italian home in Argentina ). As the Jesuit get and the Roman Catholic Church in South America both tend to lean to the left, but also did the twelve years of his pope.
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Pope Francis ’ church was full of discussion, much of which he himself sparked with a remark that the Vatican finally explained was his own private mind, and not the place of the Church. The Catholic Herald reported in September 2024 that Pope Francis had declared that “all faiths are a way to God. ” He explained: “They are like different cultures in order to reach at God, but God is God for all. Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God. If you start to fight, ‘my spirituality is more important than yours, mine is real and yours is n’t’, where does that lead us? There’s only one God, and each of us has a speech to arrive at God. Some are [Sikh], Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are diverse paths [to God]. ”
Francis was evidently contradicting both Jesus ’ assertion:“ I am the way, and the facts, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me” ( John 14:6), as well the training of the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, which emphasized that it was “the stress of the Church’s preaching to claim the cross of Christ as the sign of God’s all-embracing like and as the fountain from which every grace flows. ” ( Nostra Aetate 2, 4 ) The Catholic Herald noted that in making these remarks, the pope had set aside his prepared remarks and was speaking extemporaneously.
Yet his official catholic statements, but, even included a great deal of stuff that led people to wonder if the age-old issue that was supposed to reflect that the response was clear, “Is the Pope Catholic? , ” really now admitted of a negative comment.
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Argentine President Javier Milei derided him as a “Communist ” and even as “the representative of the evil one on earth. ” In 2023, Pope Francis responded to a series of dubia ( “doubts ” ) that Cardinals Walter Brandmüller and Raymond Leo Burke, along with the support of three other Cardinals, Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Robert Sarah, and Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, had sent him the previous year, asking him to clarify his position on five issues where he had appeared to depart from the actual teaching of the Roman Catholic Church; Vatican News identified these as “the view of Divine Revelation, the gift of same-sex unions, synodality as a fundamental aspect of the Church, the religious ordination of women, and forgiveness as a necessary problem for holy absolution. ”
The most impressive feature of this event was neither the questions nor the pope’s answers, but the fact that it had happened at all, that it had been necessary to subject the custodian and outlet of the Roman Catholic faith over his own commitment to that belief. There was no concurrent to this in modern times, and it exemplified how little Francis was a very different sort of pope from the great majority of his successors.
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Francis even followed a communist line on most of the burning social issues of our time. In 2016, he declared that someone who built a boundary wall was “not a Christian. ” In February 2025, he sent a notice to the U. S. priests, excoriating Trump for securing America’s southern boundary. He repeatedly insisted that welcoming any and all migrants was a Christian work, and rejected “any estimate that implicitly or explicitly identifies the unlawful status of some migrants with criminality. “
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The pope worked hard also to build bridges with the international Islamic community, downplaying Islamic jihad terrorism, ignoring the rampant Muslim persecution of Christians in the Middle East and Africa, and even obliquely justifying the 2015 murders of cartoonists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo who had lampooned the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Francis said that “it is true that you must not react violently, but although we are good friends, if [an aide ] says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch, it ’s normal. You can’t make a toy out of the religions of others. These people provoke and then ( something can happen ). In freedom of expression, there are limits. ” This was, in essence, a submission to Islam’s blasphemy laws, which would, if followed, mean the end of free societies.
Before his final illness, Pope Francis had been planning to travel to Nicaea, the site of the first ecumenical council in the year 325, for the 1700th anniversary of this all-important council, and for joint Easter celebrations with the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. ” His Holiness Pope Francis wishes for us to jointly celebrate this important anniversary, ” Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew explained, and there had even been talk of the two Churches, which have been in schism with one another since 1054, agreeing to a common date for Easter, or even reuniting. But this was not to be.
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What will the Roman Catholic Church do now? Will it continue to follow in the way of Pope Francis, or will it heed the call of millions to return to a more traditional approach to the faith? The world watches and waits.
