On Easter Sunday 2025, Pope Francis appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, too weak to read his own blessing, and then rode through the crowd in St Peter’s Square in his open popemobile. He died the next morning, April 21, 2025, at his residence in the Vatican. He was 88. The Vatican said he died of a stroke and heart failure, weeks after a long stay in hospital with double pneumonia.
Buenos Aires
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires on December 17, 1936, the son of Italian immigrants. He trained as a chemical technician before joining the Jesuit order and was ordained a priest in 1969. He became Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, where he was known for taking the bus, cooking his own meals and spending time in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, and was made a cardinal in 2001.
The first Jesuit pope
When he was elected on March 13, 2013, after the resignation of Benedict XVI, he became the first pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit pope and the first to take the name Francis, after Francis of Assisi. He chose to live in the Vatican guesthouse, Casa Santa Marta, rather than the papal apartments. His remark about gay priests, “Who am I to judge?”, in 2013 and his 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato si’, signalled a change of tone, and he spent much of his papacy in conflict with conservatives in his own church over issues including divorce, migration and the role of women.
Illness and burial
In February 2025 he was admitted to the Gemelli hospital in Rome with bronchitis that developed into double pneumonia, and he spent 38 days there. He returned to the Vatican in March and kept making short public appearances. At his own request he was buried not in St Peter’s but in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the first pope buried outside the Vatican in more than a century. In May 2025 the cardinals elected Robert Prevost, an American, as Pope Leo XIV.
Francis ended his papacy as he had begun it, among the crowds in St Peter’s Square, on the most important day of the Christian year.