During 12 extremely influential years for the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has ventured into uncharted territory and done so in ways that will resonate long into the future.
The influence of the pope was felt far beyond the faith.
He changed the face of the Catholic Church, managed to connect with those outside it through interventions on major social issues, and helped decentralize the Vatican.
Pope Francis appeared with an informality and a smile that put people at ease when meeting them.
It was very symbolic of the principle of his belief that the Church should reach out to people and connect with them in their daily lives, wherever they live in the world.
In doing so, he became a sharp voice against the harmful actions of big countries and an outspoken pacifist.
Within Catholicism, there were certainly people who criticized it.
Some traditionalists in particular would often be angered by actions they considered too radical a departure from the teachings of the Church.
There were also those who thought it should have been more progressive.
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Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has seemed like a man in a hurry to shift the center of gravity of the Church, away from the hierarchy and deeper into the hands of the faithful, wherever in the world they may be.
"At the beginning of my papacy, I had the feeling that it would be short: no more than three or four years, I thought," Pope Francis said in his autobiography Hope, published in January 2025, a book that provides insight into the pope's thoughts on his own legacy.
One of his first acts as pope was to give up the papal apartment on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, choosing instead to live in the same guesthouse where he had stayed as a cardinal.
Some saw it as a sign that he was renouncing the ostentatious trappings of the papacy and a sign of the contrition for which he would certainly become famous - he had, after all, taken the name of a saint who championed the rights of the poor.
But the main reason for giving up the papal apartment, as he later explained, pointed to another of his main characteristics: he liked to be around people.
To him, the apartment seemed like an alienated and difficult place to receive guests.
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In the guesthouse he was surrounded by clergy and was rarely left alone for long.
On foreign trips to more than 60 countries, during audiences at the Vatican, and during countless other events, it was very obvious that being close to people, especially young people, was his life force.
Social issues and "imperfect Catholics"
Within Catholicism, it signaled a radical change of tone on some social issues.
"Everyone is welcome in the Church, even those who are divorced, even those who are homosexual, even those who are transgender," he wrote in his autobiography.
Given that the Church did not recognize divorce under canon law and that previous popes had spoken of homosexuality as a disorder rather than a "human fact," as Pope Francis did, this was a departure that also worried traditionalists.
But it seems the pope wanted the Church to explore and understand people's everyday struggles in a new light.
He acknowledged his own journey to seeing things differently from how he had viewed them in the past.
Progressives welcomed the pope's compassion for, as he put it, "imperfect Catholics," but there was also a widespread awareness that words of acceptance from the pontiff could have an effect on those outside the Church.
"The first time a group of transgender people arrived at the Vatican, they left in tears, moved because I held their hands, kissed them... as if I had done something extraordinary for them! But they are daughters of God," he wrote in Hope.
Pope Francis has openly condemned countries that criminalize homosexuality, and has spoken of divorce as sometimes "morally necessary," citing cases of domestic violence.
However, there are those who suggest that the pope could have gone further in encouraging a change in Church teaching.
Homosexual "acts" remain a sin in Catholicism, marriage can still only be concluded between a man and a woman, divorce is still not officially recognized, and the Pope himself has remained very firmly against gender reassignment and surrogacy.
Throughout his papacy, and long before that, Pope Francis also always remained firm in his belief that women cannot be priests.
He did, however, describe the Church as "woman" and encouraged congregations around the world to find more leadership roles for women in ways that are consistent with Catholic teachings that currently do not allow women to be ordained.
In 2021, Sister Raffaella Petrini was appointed Secretary General of the Papal States, and under Pope Francis, the Vatican began an ongoing process of exploring whether women could take on the role of deacon, assisting in worship services.
Still, some reformists remained disappointed that more progress had not been made on women's equality, in a faith where the majority of church members are women.
During the latter stages of his papacy, the pope launched an ambitious three-year consultation process aimed at assessing the opinions of as many as 1,4 billion Catholics.
Tens of thousands of listening sessions have been organized across the planet, with the intention of bringing to the surface the issues that Catholics care about most.
It turned out that the roles of women and ways the Church could become more inclusive for LGBT+ Catholics were high on that list.
Although the process itself did not lead to decisive action on either of these two fronts, it did speak volumes about Pope Francis' desire for his pontificate to be rooted not in Rome and the clergy, but in the lives of believers around the world.
Complex inheritance
Throughout his papacy, special emphasis was placed on reaching out to those on the economic and political margins, and his words and actions encouraged his priests to become closer to the disenfranchised.
The issue of dignity for migrants was of immense importance to him throughout his papacy, but so was building bridges to other Christian denominations, other faiths, and those who do not believe.
At times, some Catholic traditionalists have found the pope's public relations inappropriate for someone in his position, such as his visit to an asylum-seeker center near Rome in the spring of 2016, when he washed and kissed the feet of refugees who included Muslims, Hindus, and Coptic Christians.
In addition to becoming a passionate advocate for migrants – once going to lay a wreath on the waters where many of them had died on dangerous journeys – he also linked the impact of climate change to poverty.
In speeches, including those before the US Congress, and in one of his most important works, the encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis spoke about environmental degradation, which boils down to rich countries harming the poor.
Explicitly anti-war, the pope often spoke about how war is the same as failure.
He called the war in Gaza "terrorism" and called for a ceasefire from an early stage.
He met with the families of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, but spoke passionately about the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, especially children, and called daily at the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza City.
But some have sometimes seen the desire to build bridges as an obstacle to Pope Francis taking a firm stand against various abuses.
In the eyes of many, he failed to unequivocally condemn Russia's aggression in Ukraine or address the surveillance and persecution of Catholics in China.
From the very beginning of his papacy, he faced the enormous tasks of confronting abuses that were much closer to home.
The scourge of corruption has long ravaged the upper echelons of the Catholic Church.
Early on, Pope Francis closed thousands of unauthorized accounts at the Vatican Bank, and in the second half of his reign he introduced new rules for financial transparency.
It was perfectly clear from the way he addressed the horrors of child sexual abuse committed by those with ties to the Catholic Church that he knew this was something he would be judged on.
"From the very beginning of my papacy, I felt that I was expected to take responsibility for all the evils committed by certain priests," he wrote in Hope.
As an illustration of the scale of the ongoing problem, in 2020 the Catholic Church published a list of living clergy in the US alone who had been found to have been accused of sexual abuse - including clergy linked to child pornography and rape.
There were about 2.000 of them.
"With shame and repentance, the Church must seek forgiveness for the terrible harm that this clergy caused through the sexual abuse of children, a crime that leaves deep wounds of pain," he wrote recently.
Among other initiatives, Pope Francis introduced rules that meant that members of the Church had a responsibility to report abuse if they had knowledge of it, otherwise they risked being removed from office.
Although he made errors in judgment, at times publicly supporting the clergy despite allegations that he had failed to combat abuse, Pope Francis did not hesitate to apologize for his own mistakes and for the Church's grave failings.
Both in the Vatican and abroad, he would often meet with victims of Church abuse.
Apologizing for abuses was the main focus of some of his trips abroad.
A huge part of Pope Francis' legacy is the way he changed the upper echelons of the Catholic Church through his election of new cardinals.
Moreover, about 80 percent of the cardinals who will elect the new pope were appointed by Pope Francis himself.
What's fascinating about these choices is their diversity - many of them came from South America, Africa and Asia.
Part of Pope Francis' mission has been to consolidate the shift in Catholicism's center of gravity away from Europe, where it is in decline, toward places where it is flourishing, and to have this reflected in the leadership of the Church itself.
The posthumous flood of tributes to him from around the world could be one sign that the change is working.
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