Key Events in the Life of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Known as Pope Francis, Who Passed Away on Monday:
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born on December 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the eldest of five children to Mario José Bergoglio, an Italian accountant, and Regina María Sívori, a daughter of Italian immigrants.
On December 13, 1969, he was ordained as a priest in the Jesuit religious order, which he would later lead as the provincial superior of Argentina during the country’s dictatorship in the 1970s.
On May 20, 1992, he was appointed as the auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires and succeeded Cardinal Antonio Quarracino as the archbishop of the Argentine capital in 1998.
He was elevated to cardinal by John Paul II on February 21, 2001.
In May 2007, he contributed to drafting the final document of the fifth meeting of the conference of Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, which outlined his future papal priorities concerning the poor, indigenous peoples, and the environment, emphasizing the need for a missionary Church.
On March 13, 2013, he was elected as the 266th pope, becoming the first from America, the first Jesuit, and the first to take the name Francis, honoring Saint Francis of Assisi.
On April 13, 2013, he established a council of eight cardinals from around the world to assist in governing the Church and reforming its bureaucracy.
On May 12, 2013, he canonized the “Martyrs of Otranto,” 813 Italians killed in 1480 for refusing to convert to Islam, nearly doubling the 480 saints canonized by John Paul II during his 25-year pontificate, which had exceeded the total number of saints canonized by all his predecessors in the previous 500 years.
On July 8, 2013, he made his first trip outside Rome to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa to meet newly arrived migrants and condemned the “globalization of indifference” towards asylum seekers.
On July 30, 2013, he remarked, “Who am I to judge?” when asked about a gay priest during a press conference, signaling a more welcoming stance towards the LGBTQ+ community.
On November 26, 2013, he issued a mission statement for his papacy in “Evangelii Gaudium” (“The Joy of the Gospel”), criticizing the global financial system that excludes the poor and stating that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”
On May 25, 2014, he made an unscheduled stop to pray at the wall separating Israel from the West Bank city of Bethlehem, demonstrating support for the Palestinian cause.
On June 8, 2014, he hosted Israeli and Palestinian presidents for prayers for peace in the Vatican gardens.
On March 20, 2015, he accepted the resignation of the “rights and privileges” of Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien after accusations of sexual misconduct from adult men.
On June 18, 2015, he issued his environmental manifesto “Laudato Si” (“Praise Be”), calling for a cultural revolution to correct the “structurally perverse” global economic system that exploits the poor and has turned the Earth into “an immense pile of filth.”
On July 10, 2015, he apologized in Bolivia for the sins and crimes of the Catholic Church against indigenous peoples during the colonial conquest of America.
On September 8, 2015, he reformed the annulment process to make it faster, cheaper, and simpler for divorced Catholics to remarry in the Church.
On September 24, 2015, he challenged Congress to rediscover American ideals by taking action on climate change, immigration, and poverty reduction during the first papal address at the U.S. Capitol.
On November 29, 2015, he inaugurated the Jubilee of Mercy by opening the Holy Door of the cathedral in Bangui, Central African Republic, rather than at the Vatican.
On February 12, 2016, he met with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill during a stopover in Havana, declaring “we are brothers” in the first such meeting between a pope and a patriarch in over a thousand years.
On February 18, 2016, he prayed for dead migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and later remarked that then-presidential candidate Donald Trump “is not a Christian” for wanting to build a border wall.
On April 8, 2016, he paved the way for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive communion, noted in a footnote of the document “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”).
On April 16, 2016, he visited a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, bringing 12 Syrian Muslims to Rome aboard his papal plane, calling for solidarity towards migrants.
On September 19, 2016, he was questioned in a letter by four conservative cardinals seeking clarification on his openness to divorced and remarried Catholics.
On December 1, 2017, he stated during a meeting in Bangladesh with Rohingya refugees from Myanmar that “God’s presence today is also called Rohingya.”
On January 19, 2018, he accused sexual abuse victims of slander during a visit to Chile, further undermining the Catholic Church’s credibility. He later ordered a Vatican investigation into Chile’s abuse crisis.
On April 12, 2018, he admitted “grave errors” in judgment regarding the Chilean sexual abuse scandal, subsequently summoning Chilean bishops to Rome to secure their resignations and inviting abuse victims to the Vatican to apologize.
On August 3, 2018, he declared the death penalty “inadmissible” under all circumstances in a change to official Church teaching.
On July 28, 2018, he accepted the resignation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick from the College of Cardinals and ordered him to penance and prayer while allegations of sexual misconduct with minors and adults were investigated.
On August 26, 2018, retired Vatican ambassador Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published an explosive accusation claiming that U.S. and Vatican officials covered up McCarrick’s misconduct for two decades and called for Francis’s resignation.
On September 22, 2018, the Vatican and China signed a historic agreement on bishop appointments.
On October 14, 2018, he canonized murdered Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero after conservative cardinals delayed his sainthood process for decades.
On February 4, 2019, he signed the “Human Fraternity” document with the imam of Al Azhar, establishing collaborative relations between Catholics and Muslims.
On February 16, 2019, he reduced McCarrick to the lay state after a Vatican investigation found he sexually abused minors and adults.
On February 21, 2019, he opened the Vatican’s first summit on child protection, warning bishops that the faithful demand action, not just condemnation, on clergy sexual abuse.
On May 9, 2019, he issued a new Church law requiring internal reporting of clergy sexual abuse, setting procedures for investigating accused bishops, cardinals, and religious superiors.
On October 25, 2019, he apologized to Amazonian bishops and tribal leaders after conservative activists stole indigenous statues from a church near the Vatican and threw them into the Tiber River in opposition to the pope.
On November 24, 2019, he declared the use and possession of nuclear weapons “immoral” during a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
On December 17, 2019, he abolished the “pontifical secret” in clergy sexual abuse cases, allowing bishops to share internal documentation about abusers with law enforcement.
On February 12, 2020, he declined to approve the ordination of married men as priests after appeals from Amazonian bishops, avoiding the topic in the document “Querida Amazonia” (“Beloved Amazon”).
On March 27, 2020, he offered a solitary evening prayer to a world facing the coronavirus pandemic from St. Peter’s Square.
On October 4, 2020, he issued the encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” (“All Brothers”), arguing that the pandemic demonstrates the failure of market capitalism theories and that a new type of politics is needed to promote human fraternity.
On November 10, 2020, the Vatican’s report on McCarrick concluded that the Vatican, along with U.S. bishops, cardinals, and popes, minimized or ignored reports of misconduct, exonerating Francis.
From March 5-8, 2021, he became the first pope to visit Iraq, meeting with its top Shiite Muslim cleric.
On July 4, 2021, he underwent intestinal surgery at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital, having 13 inches of his colon removed.
On January 5, 2023, he presided over the funeral mass for Pope Benedict XVI.
On January 24, 2023, he stated in an interview that “being homosexual is not a crime.”
On March 29, 2023, he was admitted to Rome’s Gemelli Hospital with a respiratory infection and was discharged on April 1.
On June 7, 2023, he underwent surgery to remove intestinal scar tissue and repair a hernia in the abdominal wall.
On October 4, 2023, he opened a synod to make the Church more responsive to ordinary faithful, allowing women to vote alongside bishops for the first time.
On November 28, 2023, he canceled a visit to Dubai to address the UN climate conference and present a new ecological manifesto, “Laudate Deum” (“Praise Be to God”), due to a new case of acute bronchitis.
On December 16, 2023, a Vatican tribunal convicted Cardinal Angelo Becciu of embezzlement, sentencing him to five and a half years in prison in one of several verdicts in a complex financial trial exposing the Vatican’s dirty laundry and testing its justice system.
On December 19, 2023, he approved blessings for same-sex couples, provided they do not resemble marriage, sparking fierce opposition from conservative bishops in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.
On July 5, 2024, the Vatican excommunicated Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a leading critic of Francis, for schism.
On September 10, 2024, approximately 600,000 people, half the population of East Timor, attended Francis’s mass in Dili, believed to be the largest papal event in terms of population proportion.
On December 26, 2024, he opened the Holy Door of Rebibbia prison in Rome, two days after formally inaugurating the Jubilee of 2025.
On January 16, 2025, he appeared with a sling after a fall left him with a bruise on his right arm, just weeks after another apparent fall left him with a chin bruise.
On February 14, 2025, he was hospitalized after bronchitis worsened into a complex lung infection and bilateral pneumonia.
On February 28, 2025, his doctors briefly considered suspending treatment after a respiratory crisis but opted for an aggressive course that risked organ damage.
On March 13, 2025, he marked the 12th anniversary of his papal election while still hospitalized.
On March 23, 2025, he was discharged from the hospital after 38 days of treatment, appearing weak and frail upon greeting the crowd from a balcony.
On April 17, 2025, still recovering from bilateral pneumonia, he maintained his Holy Thursday tradition of spending time with the less fortunate, visiting inmates at Rome’s Regina Coeli Prison. Though unable to perform the foot-washing ritual for 12 individuals as a gesture of humility, he expressed his desire to be with them and “do what Jesus did on Holy Thursday.”