The history of the papacy is a series of repetitions. One pope defines the tasks of his successor: Pacelli follows Ratti, Montini Roncalli, Ratzinger Wojtyła. A few, catching the spirit of their era, define the shape of ages to come: Hildebrand in the eleventh century, Pio Nono in the nineteenth. But some popes are different. Some popes stand alone.
From the moment Francis first appeared on the loggia—sans stole, rochet, mozzetta—it was clear he was one such pope. And Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s life looks little like that of a future pope. He was born far from Rome, in 1936 Buenos Aires, to Azione Cattolica activists escaping Mussolini’s rule. His was, for the time, a late vocation, one received suddenly after a confession at age seventeen. And he was, as no pope before him had been, a Jesuit who had entered the order’s novitiate aged twenty-one, after an illness and convalescence not unlike Saint Ignatius’s own.
As a teacher in Jesuit schools he passes on his love of literature: Dostoevsky, Manzoni, Borges, the last of whom, at Bergoglio’s request, visits his class. As a student he discovers formative Jesuit influences, such as the Ignatian dialectician Gaston Fessard, who believed that to unify one must first, always, divide.
By the time Jorge Bergoglio is ordained as a priest in December 1969, his homeland’s divisions have multiplied. Two military governments are deposed in the space of a year; a third gives up power in elections held in March 1973. One month later, on April 22, Bergoglio vows to serve in the Jesuit order until death.
Soon afterwards, he’s called to lead it. In July 1973, aged only thirty-six, Bergoglio is appointed provincial of the Argentine Jesuits, a province that had shrunk, in just a decade, by one-half. Those remaining had splintered. Engagé priests devoted to social action feud with conservatives sympathetic to military rule. Bergoglio clashes with both.
Over the six years of his provincialate, his reputation becomes an index of division. His defenders sometimes call him santito, the little saint; his detractors label him pre-conciliarist, peronista, Laodicean—neither hot nor cold. One nickname sticks. La Gioconda: Mona Lisa. For a smile that seems to reveal everything; a smile that gives nothing away.
Ambiguity will prove to be an asset. In 1976, the military regains power, beginning a campaign of terror against “subversion.” By the time the junta falls in 1983, somewhere around thirty thousand Argentines have been murdered by the state.
Bergoglio keeps the regime happy—and the Jesuits out of the firing line. But he also keeps the persecuted alive. Working alone, Bergoglio saves the lives of up to a hundred dissidents during the “Dirty War.” A pattern is set. Under the junta and throughout its long afterlife, as a priest and a bishop, Bergoglio will continue to work in secret, to keep silent, to refuse answers. To smile, and give nothing away.
After his provincialate, Bergoglio returns to teaching: between 1980 and 1986 as rector of the Colegio Máximo in Córdoba, and from 1986 to 1990 as a chair in pastoral theology there. He reads—the “wild Thomist” Methol Ferré, the “theology of the people” of his confrère Juan Carlos Scannone. He surprises. Turning college grounds over to farming, he instructs students to feed pigs before study. He tells others to venerate Marian images beloved by the poor—not, one remembers thinking, “something Jesuits do.”
In 1986, pursuing a doctorate in the thought of Romano Guardini, Bergoglio moves to Germany. He returns, homesick, after a few months. In 1990, the divisions of Bergoglio’s provincialate return: Removed from teaching positions, he’s “exiled” from the order he had given his life to. Years of silence and solitude follow; then the course of his life changes, radically, once again. On June 27, 1992, he is ordained to the order of bishops.
As an auxiliary in Buenos Aires, Bergoglio adopts an austere, self-effacing lifestyle; he is named “the bishop of the slums” for his closeness to the poor. In 1997, Bergoglio is appointed coadjutor; the next year, his archbishop dies. In the first days of his succession, Bergoglio avoids the media to go on a silent retreat.
His archiepiscopacy is noted for good relations with evangelicals, Catholic charismatics, and the Society of Saint Pius X and poor relations with the oligarchy that enriched itself in the boom years of the 1990s and with the populists who rose to power at the boom’s cataclysmic end. In 2001, he is made a cardinal; in 2005 elected president of Argentina’s Bishops’ Conference; in 2007, he drafts the Aparecida document on behalf of the Latin American Church. At the beginning of 2013, he chooses a room in a retirement home and plans to finally complete his Ph.D. One month later, Pope Benedict XVI resigns. Bergoglio flies to Rome for the conclave, a return ticket in his pocket. He never goes home again.
In office, Francis signs one encyclical, Lumen fidei, composed by his predecessor. In more than twelve years as pope, he writes three more: Laudato si’ in 2015 and Fratelli tutti in 2020, on social doctrine, and in 2024 Dilexit nos, on the Sacred Heart. Significant documents of his pontificate include his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium; the motu proprio Vos estis lux mundi, establishing universal norms in reporting clerical abuse; and the apostolic constitution Praedicate evangelium, the first reform of the Curia since 1988.
Francis’s pontificate was marked by division. He was praised for his austerity of life, love of the poor, and outspoken opposition to war. He was criticized for his mishandling of abuse cases, his restrictions on the Vetus Ordo, that is, the Tridentine form of the Mass, and perceived doctrinal ambiguities, in teaching and in speech.
Perhaps most divisive of all was Francis’s own personality: authoritarian and anarchic, austere and ambiguous; the silence and the noise. He remained, always, La Gioconda: wearing a smile that seemed to—and perhaps did—reveal everything. And yet, to the last, he gave nothing away. He died the morning after the day of the Resurrection, on April 21, 2025.
Some popes are different. The man who was once known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio was such a pope. Often, popes leave us with answers; Francis leaves us with questions. In the pages that follow, we attempt to answer only a few. Such answers are unlikely to be final. In death, as he was in life, he will remain a sign of contradiction.
This essay is the introduction to a symposium on the life and legacy of Pope Francis. Read other contributions from Diarmaid MacCulloch, Edward Feser, Santiago Ramos, Makoto Fujimura, Piers Paul Read, Zena Hitz, Stephen P. White, Margaret Hebblethwaite, Robert Wyllie, Christopher Beha, Philip Jeffery, Thomas Pink, Massimo Faggioli, Leah Libresco Sargeant, Michael Hanby, and Matthew Walther.
