22-04-2025
Pope Francis: why his papacy mattered for Africa — and for the world's poor and marginalised
The death of Pope Francis at his residence on April 21 marks the end of a significant era for the Vatican and the global Catholic following of 1.3-billion faithful.
The first pope from the Americas and also the first to come from outside the west in the modern era, Pope Francis was elected leader of the Catholic church on March 13 2013.
By the time the Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013 there was a general feeling that the Catholic church was reaching the end of an era. At the time, the church was beset by crises, from corruption to clerical sexual abuse.
Some of the challenges facing the church which the ageing Pope Benedict XVI could no longer handle included:
the readmission of a Holocaust-denying bishop into the church
mounting evidence of corruption in the Vatican Bank
multiple cases of clerical sexual abuse in many parts of the world
the confusion created in the English-speaking world with the translation of the New Roman missal into English.
Moreover, the church was reeling from the revelation of papal secrets of his predecessor Pope Benedict by the papal butler. A book detailing these secrets portrayed the Vatican as a corrupt hotbed of jealousy, intrigue and underhanded factional fighting.
The revelations caused the church a great deal of embarrassment.
It meant therefore that Cardinal Bergoglio was elected by the Catholic cardinals with a mandate to clean up the church and reform the Vatican and its bureaucracy. He was to institute processes and procedures for transparency, accountability and renewal of the church and its structures, and address the lingering scandals of clerical abuse.
The Pope's global legacy
Three key things defined his papal role and legacy.
First is concentrating on the core competence of the church: serving the poor and the marginalised. This is what the founder of the Christian religion, Jesus Christ, did.
Francis focused the Catholic church and the entire world on one mission: helping the poor, addressing global inequalities, speaking for the voiceless and placing the attention of the world on those on the periphery.
He also chose to live simply, forsaking the pomp and pageantry of the papacy.
Second, he changed the way the Catholic church's message is communicated. In his programmatic document, Evangelii Gaudium, he called the church to what he calls 'missionary conversion'. His thinking was that everything that is done in the church must be about proclaiming the good news to a wounded and broken world.
