Pope Francis’s legacy

DERMOT ROANTREE (From Studies editorial, summer 2025) :: When Pope Francis died on 21 April, the public manifestation of mourning and of grateful tribute was extraordinary – in Rome alone, 250,000 people congregated in St Peter’s Square, and nearly 150,000 more lined the route from the Vatican to Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the four major basilicas in Rome, where Francis was interred. The Pope expressed his wish to be laid to rest there in his spiritual testament, which he wrote in 2022 as he sensed the end of his life approaching. ‘The suffering that marked the final part of my life,’ he concluded his testament, ‘I offer to the Lord, for peace in the world and brotherhood among peoples’.

Peace in the world, brotherhood – solidarity – among peoples: these were the constant themes of Francis’s papacy. In his first encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, he emphasised the need ‘to make the kingdom of God present in our world’ (176), a goal that requires ‘the liberation and promotion of the poor’ (187). Francis never tired of repeating this. What he did was bring the urgent need to address poverty into connection with other pressing needs. The message in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ is clear: ‘global solidarity’ begins with the realization that ‘everything is interconnected’ – human life and the natural world around us. ‘We are faced not with two separate crises,’ the Pope wrote, ‘one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental’ (139). Given this interconnectedness, he saw the economic, social, environmental, and cultural dimensions of life as constituent elements of an overarching ‘integral ecology’, (Ch. 4) ‘inseparable from the notion of the common good’. Pope Francis was not the first person to use the term ‘integral ecology’, but he set it in a theological frame and gave it magisterial weight, and that will count as an important part of his legacy.

Sadly, the world which he addressed in these encyclicals was rapidly drifting further and further from any effective sense of solidarity. In 2017, Oxfam reported that just eight men owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the world. And things have got even further out of hand since then. Billionaire wealth, Oxfam says now, rose three times faster in 2024 than in 2023, and at least five trillionaires are expected within a decade. Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990. Inequality is out of control.

The staggering levels of extreme wealth and chronic inequality are merely part of a widescale loss of solidarity. Again, everything is interconnected. Economic colonialism has devastated some of the poorest regions of the world; it has stripped them of natural resources and causes deforestation, desertification, and pollution. On top of the harrowing poverty, hunger and death that this has caused, it has exacerbated the ecological crisis, and the result is large numbers of climate refugees and economic migrants. And economic exploitation is also implicated in the rise of corruption and conflict in these regions, which in turn has led to unprecedented numbers of political refugees and asylum seekers. The knock-on effect continues then with the rise in destination countries of racism, xenophobia, and ethnonationalism. Not uncommonly, even in countries with robust democratic traditions, the rights of vulnerable people are eroded and legal protection is removed. We are in a world now, as Pope Francis wrote in Fratelli Tutti, ‘that races ahead, yet lacks a shared roadmap’ (31). And why? Because ‘the gap between concern for one’s personal well-being and the prosperity of the larger human family seems to be stretching to the point of complete division between individuals and human community’. The most depleted resource of all, it seems, is solidarity.

It is mercy, according to Francis, that gives rise to solidarity. Mercy is evidently the most prominent leitmotif in his teaching. It is, he repeated often, the name of God. But mercy for him is not solely about God’s mercy. It needs to be translated into the human world of the strong and the weak, of those who have the comforts of life and those who have been left without them. Not condescending mercy, bestowed out of the largesse of people who see themselves as superior; rather, humble mercy, mercy that takes its meaning and its range from justice and from love. Mercy, Francis told a general audience in 2016 ‘is a way of life’. It is also the way of life for a Christian. It is not optional. ‘Jesus’ teaching does not provide any means of escape:’, he continued; ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was in prison and you came to me. You cannot delay when faced with a person who is hungry: you must give something to eat. Jesus tells us this. The works of mercy are not theoretical ideas, but consist instead of concrete witness. We need to roll up our sleeves to alleviate suffering’.

Francis will be remembered, no doubt, for this kind of forthright and down-to-earth diction, but mostly his place in the tradition is assured because of his repeated insistence that mercy – both human and divine – changes everything.