The Vatican announced this Monday, April 21, the death of Pope Francis at the age of 88. “This morning at 7:35 am, the bishop of Rome, François, returned to the father’s house,” Cardinal Kevin Farrell said in a statement published by the Vatican on his Telegram channel. The Argentinian pontiff had left the hospital on March 23 after being hospitalized for 38 days for bilateral pneumonia, his fourth and longer hospitalization since the start of the pontificate in 2013.
For the first time since his election in 2013, the chief of 1.4 billion Catholics had missed most of the meetings of Holy Week, including the Cross Stations at the Colosseum on Friday and the Pascale vigil on Saturday evening, whose presidency he delegated to cardinals. Easter mass was chaired by the Italian cardinal Angelo Comastri on Saint-Pierre square decorated with thousands of Dutch flowers in the presence of some 300 priests, bishops and cardinals. On Sunday, on the occasion of Easter celebrations, he appeared very weakened but had offered a crowd in daddy in the middle of thousands of faithful on Saint-Pierre square.
The closed face, visibly very tested, he had however been forced to delegate the reading of his text to a collaborator, being able to pronounce only a few words, the breathless voice. Hip problems, knee pain, operations, respiratory infections: the Pope, who was moving in a wheelchair, displayed declining health but had wanted to maintain a frantic pace, despite the warnings of his doctors.
Funeral over nine days
A constitution provides for funeral for nine days and a period of 15 to 20 days to organize the conclave, during which the cardinals voters, including almost 80 % chosen by François himself, will have the heavy task of electing his successor. Meanwhile, Cardinal Camerlingue, the Irishman Kevin Farrell, will ensure the interim. François had revealed at the end of 2023 that he wanted to be buried in the Basilica Sainte-Marie Majeure, in the center of Rome, rather than in the crypt of the Saint-Pierre basilica, a first for more than three centuries. In addition, the Vatican published in November a simplified ritual for papal funerals, including burial in a simple coffin of wood and zinc, signing the end of the three coffins nested in cypress, lead and oak.
In 12 years of pontificate, the first Jesuit and South American pope in history has committed tirelessly for the defense of migrants, the environment and social justice without questioning the positions of the Church on abortion or the celibacy of the priests. The alerts on his health had multiplied, while fueling speculation on a possible renunciation in the line of his predecessor Benedict XVI. The spiritual leader of nearly 1.4 billion Catholics had experienced two hospitalizations in 2023, including one for a heavy abdomen operation, and had been forced to cancel several commitments in recent months. From the age of 21, Jorge Bergoglio had suffered from acute pleurisy and the surgeons had to proceed to the partial ablation of his right lung.
Very committed to migration issues
Music and football lover, François, allergic to the holidays, often chained ten meetings per day. He had even made the longest trip of his pontificate in September, a 12-day journey on the borders of Southeast Asia and Oceania. In Rome as abroad, the “pope at the end of the world” elected on March 13, 2013 relentlessly denounced all forms of violence, from the trafficking of human beings to migratory disasters through economic exploitation.
On February 11, he still condemned the massive expulsions of migrants wanted by American president Donald Trump, attracting the wrath of the White House. A fierce opponent of arms trade, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, however, remained helpless in the face of conflicts in Ukraine or the Middle East, despite countless calls for peace. Faced with the drama of pedocrime in the Church, he lifted the pontifical and obligated religious and secular secret to report the cases to their hierarchy. Without convincing the associations of victims, who criticized him for not having gone far enough.
If this warm style pope has aroused great popular fervor, wishing every Sunday “good appetite” to the faithful Place Saint-Pierre, he was also harshly criticized by conservative opposition for his supposed lack of orthodoxy and governance deemed authoritarian. Evidenced by the shields of shields aroused by certain decisions, such as the opening of blessings of same -sex couples at the end of 2023, or the restriction of Mass celebrations in Latin. The 266th Pope, more interested in the “peripheries” of the planet than by the major Western countries, also redirected the debates within the Church, like its ecological and social encyclical “Laudato if” in 2015, a very noted requisisory against finance exalting the safeguard of the planet.