Pope Francis dies aged 88

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Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.4bn Catholics, has died at the age of 88, the Vatican announced on Monday, weeks after he returned home from hospital having battled double pneumonia.

In his last public appearance on Sunday, he had greeted the faithful to wish them a happy Easter, and also had a brief audience with US vice-president JD Vance.

Cardinal Kevin Farrell, a senior Vatican official, announced that the pope had passed away at 7.35am on Monday.

“Dear brothers and sisters, it is with deep sorrow that I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis,” he said. “Francis has returned to the house of the Father.”

The Argentine pontiff had been hospitalised in February and spent weeks undergoing treatment for the latest in a series of respiratory problems. Since returning to the Vatican in late March he had made brief public appearances, including several times at St Peter’s Basilica and a visit to a prison on Thursday, but he appeared weak and frail and struggled to speak.

During his 12 years at the helm of the Catholic church, Francis had sought to reform and revitalise a 2,000-year-old organisation shaken by sex abuse scandals and serious financial mismanagement as the church and its leaders struggled to adapt to the modern world.

Farrell said on Monday that the pontiff had “taught us to live the values of the Gospel with fidelity, courage and universal love, especially in favour of the poorest and most marginalised”.

The end of Francis’s papacy is expected to unleash a fierce contest for the role, pitting conservative cardinals against those who wish to continue trying to make the church more inclusive.

At present, 136 Catholic cardinals under the age of 80 — the majority of them appointed by Francis himself — will be eligible to vote in a papal conclave that must be held within two to three weeks of the pope’s death.

Francis’s death will cast a shadow over the Catholic Church’s ongoing Jubilee, a special holy year of forgiveness that occurs every 25 years, draws millions of pilgrims to Rome and is considered critical for replenishing the Vatican’s depleted coffers.

The first non-European to lead the church since the eighth century, Francis ascended the papal throne in 2013 following the shock resignation of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, who lived out his final years as Pope emeritus before his own death in December 2022.

Francis, a Jesuit, carried out an extensive global consultation with the faithful to chart the future of the church — an unwieldy exercise that provoked the ire of traditionalists who accused him of undermining clerical authority.

The final 51-page document recommended greater involvement of women and lay people in the life of the church and its decision-making.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1936 as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Francis was chosen as pope after decades as a priest, archbishop and cardinal in Argentina. During that period, his homeland underwent periods of intense political and economic difficulty, including rule by a brutal military dictatorship.

During his papacy, Francis — who studied chemistry and worked in the field before becoming a priest — sought to make the Catholic Church more compassionate and engaged with contemporary challenges, including climate change and issues of social justice.

In 2015, he devoted an encyclical — a major church policy document — to the need to combat global warming. He embraced LGBT+ Catholics and held multiple meetings with them. This year he became the first sitting pope to publish his own autobiography.

An ardent peace advocate, he expressed anguish about conflicts including in Ukraine and the Middle East. During Israel’s year-long offensive in Gaza that followed Hamas’s October 7 2023 attacks on Israel, Francis talked nightly with Palestinian Christians sheltering in a Catholic church.

He was also an impassioned advocate for the plight of migrants at a time of hardening US and European attitudes against people entering countries without permission, whether fleeing war and persecution or in search of opportunity.

In February, Francis wrote a letter to US bishops expressing dismay at plans for mass deportations of migrants by President Donald Trump’s administration.

He wrote that “the rightly formed conscience” must “express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality”.

But Francis’s attempt to make the church more inclusive, grapple with contemporary issues and give ordinary Catholics more voice in the church’s future infuriated conservatives, who accused him of undermining the church’s traditional teachings on sensitive issues of personal morality.

These bitter doctrinal battles were playing out ever more openly, and are likely to ripple through the conclave to select Francis’s successor.

In 2023 an anonymous letter circulated in Vatican City calling Francis’s papacy “a disaster”.

The author was later revealed to be the late cardinal George Pell, once one of Francis’s most trusted advisers on financial matters. In an article published posthumously in the Spectator magazine, Pell called Francis’s synod to consult the Catholic faithful around the world a “toxic nightmare”.

Francis’s successor will also have to grapple with the Vatican’s severely strained finances, which have suffered from declining donations and chronic mismanagement.