The Death of Pope Francis: The End of An Era? - by Roberto de Mattei

At 7:35 a.m., on April 21, 2025, Easter Monday, Jorge Mario Bergoglio's soul separated from his mortal body to present itself to the Divine Judgment. Only on the day of the Last Judgment will we know what the sentence of the supreme tribunal to which each of us must one day present ourselves was for Pope Francis. Let us pray today for the suffrage of his soul, as the Church publicly prays in its novendials, and, precisely because the Church is a public society, let us join our prayers with an attempt at a historical judgment on his pontificate. 

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 266th Roman Pontiff, the first with the name Francis, was the Vicar of Christ for twelve years, although he has preferred to that name the one of bishop of Rome. But the bishop of Rome becomes the former the moment he accepts the Petrine munus following his election. By accepting the pontificate, the pope also assumes the titles, reported in the Pontifical Yearbook, of Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the Servants of God, and Patriarch of the West (the latter title restored in 2024, after it had been removed in 2006 by Benedict XVI).

 These titles deserve special honors, especially that of Vicar of Christ which makes the Pope, not the successor, but the representative on earth of Jesus Christ, God-Man, Redeemer of humanity. The Pope receives honors not because of his person, but because of the dignity of the mission Christ entrusted to Peter. Just as in the Christian sacraments a gesture expresses an invisible grace, in the same way honors (titles, robes, ceremonies) are signs for the senses of spiritual, even institutional, realities. Authority is a spiritual and invisible reality, but for it to be recognized, it must manifest itself visibly, through gestures and rituals. Without these, institutions risk becoming invisible and religious societies, like political societies, sink into chaos. Christianity is founded on this principle: the invisible God has taken on a face, a body, a name: “The Word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14); “No one has ever seen God; but through the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, that he was revealed” (Jn. 1:18). St. John the Evangelist is, among the New Testament authors, the one who most intensely elaborates a theology of the visibility of the invisible, in his Gospel, but especially in the Book of Revelation, in which the symbol becomes a prophetic vision, to show God's hidden action in history.

Pope Francis showed no respect for the decorum of the Papacy, from the first informal “Brothers and Sisters Good Evening,” addressed from the loggia of St. Peter's on the day of his election, to his public appearance last April 9, when he appeared in the Basilica in his wheelchair, wearing a striped poncho-like blanket, without any sign of papal dignity. To sacred symbolism Pope Bergoglio has preferred a media symbolism, made up of images, words and encounters, which have become messages that are often stronger than official documents: from “Who am I to judge?” to the washing of feet to women and Muslims, to his participation, in 2025, in the Sanremo Festival, through a video message. Some say that, in doing so, Pope Francis has “humanized” the Papacy, but in reality he has trivialized it and made it mundane. It is the institution of the Papacy, not the person of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, that has been demeaned by these and countless other gestures, which have made mundane the language and signs the Church has always used to express the divine mystery. 

The first to strip the Church of its majesty, however, was not Francis, but Paul VI, to whom we owe the renunciation of the tiara, which he laid on the “altar of the Council” on November 13, 1964, followed by the abolition of the sede gestatoria, the noble guard, and the papal court, which were not trappings, but signs of the honor due to the Roman Catholic Church, as a human-divine institution founded by Jesus Christ. In this respect, Francis' pontificate does not represent, as some think, a “break” with its predecessors, but instead appears as the fulfillment of a pastoral line introduced by the Second Vatican Council, whose course Benedict XVI has only partially attempted to reverse. 

 The apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia of March 19, 2016, certainly created a disorienting situation because of its openness to remarried divorcees and couples in “irregular” situations; the Document on Human Brotherhood signed with the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Mosque on Feb. 4, 2019, was a new step on the road to false ecumenism; the encouragement of immigration, the promotion of the global agenda, the proclamation of “synodalism,” the discrimination of traditionalists, the possibility of blessing same-sex couples, and that granted to lay people and women to rise to the leadership of a dicastery, are all events that have provoked legitimate reactions in the Catholic world. Thanks in part to this resistance, the goal that progressive bishops set out to achieve, such as the diaconal ordination of women, the marriage of priests, and the granting of doctrinal authority to bishops' conferences, did not happen under Pope Francis, disappointing his most ardent supporters. The most revolutionary aspect of his pontificate, however, remains the succession of words and deeds that transformed the public perception of the Primacy of Peter, making it mundane and weakening it.

Now an era closes, and we wonder what new era will bring. The next pope may be more conservative or more progressive than Francis, but he will not be Bergoglian, because Bergoglianism was not an ideological project, but a style of government, pragmatic, authoritarian, and often left to improvisation. Partly because of this lack of legacy, the strong tensions and polarizations that have developed under Francis' rule could explode as early as the days of the conclave. 

It should also be recalled that Francis proclaimed a Year of St. Joseph in 2021; consecrated Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on March 25, 2022; and dedicated his fourth encyclical, Dilexit nos, of Oct. 24, 2024, to the cult of the Sacred Heart: all gestures in line with the Church's traditional spirituality and quite different from the pagan cult for Pachamama to which, too, the Pope paid homage in the Vatican. Contradictions thus characterize the Bergoglian era. Francis denied, for example, the title of Co-Redemptrix to Our Lady and called her a “mestizo” of the Mystery of the Incarnation, but in his will he wrote that he always entrusted his life and ministry “to the Mother of our Lord, Mary Most Holy.” Therefore, he asked that his mortal remains “rest waiting for the day of resurrection in the Papal Basilica of St. Mary Major.” “I wish my last earthly journey to end in this very ancient Marian shrine where I used to go for prayer at the beginning and end of each Apostolic Journey to trustfully entrust my intentions to the Immaculate Mother and thank Her for her docile and maternal care.”

The Blessed Virgin Mary is now entrusted with her final journey as the Church faces a moment in her history of extraordinary gravity and complexity. And it is to her, Mother of the Mystical Body of Christ, that we entrust all our hopes today, in the certainty that the days of the Church's sufferings will soon be followed by those of her Resurrection and glory.