By Justin McLellan / Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY – As the pope of the peripheries, Pope Francis brought the heart, mind and soul of the Catholic Church in Latin America from what he called the “ends of the earth” to the center of Christendom.
The late pope’s theology, governance of the Church and pastoral practices were steeped in his experience as a pastor during a military dictatorship and subsequent financial crisis in Argentina, and later as a servant of the poorest people of Buenos Aires who were living in “villas miserias,” or shantytowns.
He took the spirit of care and attention to the poor shown as archbishop of Buenos Aires with him to Rome, and as pope he reframed Latin America from a distant stronghold of Catholicism to seeing it as guiding light in many respects.
Born in Buenos Aires to Italian immigrants in 1936, the future pope would be deeply marked by his engagement with the poor and the context of the Church and region that formed him.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was ordained a priest in 1969, three years after the close of the Second Vatican Council and two years before the publication of Father Gustavo Gutiérrez’s 1971 book “A Theology of Liberation,” which popularized throughout Latin America the idea that poor people and marginalized groups should be placed at the center of theology. Although he disagreed with the politicization of liberation theology, he sympathized with its concern for the poor.
Residents of Villa 21-24, one of the poorest and most dangerous slums of Buenos Aires, recall “El Chabón” (“The Dude”), as he was affectionately called, arriving in their neighborhood by bus unannounced to celebrate Mass or just to sit with them and drink mate, a typical Argentine tea. He continued his engagement in poor communities as archbishop and increased the number of priests in the archdiocese assigned to work in the city’s slums.
And he translated his pastoral-first theology from practice into print by writing the final document of the Latin American bishops’ council meeting in Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007. Then-Cardinal Bergoglio led the committee that drafted the document, which insisted that evangelization in Latin America must involve close engagement with the faithful and especially those on the margins of society.
During the first months of his papacy, Pope Francis gave copies of the document to visiting heads of state and world leaders.
“Usually, European popes start thinking about theology from philosophy,” Emilce Cuda, secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, told Catholic News Service. But in Latin America, she said, looking at humanity’s relationship to God begins with common people.
Cuda said that’s because Latin America was “the first continent to take seriously the Second Vatican Council” and with it the idea that God’s will can be discovered by listening to all baptized members of the Church.
“In Latin America, theology of the peripheries is not a theology of philosophical categories, it is a theology mediated by culture,” she told CNS during a theology conference in Bogotá, Colombia.
In an interview with CNS, Mar Muñoz-Visoso, executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat of Cultural Diversity in the Church, likened the Aparecida document to Pope Francis’ first apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii Gaudium,” on proclaiming the Gospel in today’s world.
“One could say ‘Evangelii Gaudium’ takes the main tenets of Aparecida and re-proposes them for the universal Church,” she said, those tenets include the “rich tradition of collegiality and common discernment” in the Latin American Church.
The Aparecida document reflected what Muñoz-Visoso called the Latin American Church’s “strong sense of mission,” as well as its “communitarian” nature.
That attitude of communal discernment became central to Pope Francis’ governance of the Church. Just one month after becoming pope he established the Council of Cardinals to study a plan to reform the Curia. And to bring that spirit of group discernment to the universal Church, in 2021 he opened the three-year process of Synod of Bishops on synodality, which sought to gather input from all baptized members of the Church to inform discussions among the world’s Catholics on building a listening Church.
During his pontificate, Pope Francis returned to his native Latin America six times (through January 2024), beginning with a raucous visit to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for World Youth Day in 2013.
On that trip his charisma and personal style won over the more than 3 million people that blanketed Rio’s iconic Copacabana beach, but his visits to Latin America have not been entirely without scrutiny.
Large groups of protestors demonstrated outside nearly all the pope’s events during his 2018 trip to Chile, denouncing the local Church’s cover-up of abuse and Pope Francis’ public support for a bishop who failed to act against an abusive priest. At the end of his trip, the pope said that allegations against Bishop Juan Barros, the former bishop of Osorno, were “calumny.”
Pope Francis sent Archbishop Charles Scicluna, a canonical expert in clerical sexual abuse, to investigate the allegations immediately after his trip to Chile. He then invited abuse survivors to Rome and called all the Chilean bishops to the Vatican for a meeting that led to most of them offering to resign. In a letter to the Chilean people, the pope admitted that he was mistaken in his assessment and handling of the situation and said, “With shame I must say that we did not know how to listen and react in time.”
The late pope constantly demonstrated a willingness to bring Latin American perspectives and practices into the Vatican and apply them to the universal Church. He wrote in 2016 that popular piety and devotions, prominent in Latin America, were a way for people to draw close to God without the clericalism that plagues the Church worldwide. Highlighting Latin America’s most prevalent devotional figure, patroness of the Americas, in 2014 Pope Francis began regularly celebrating Mass each year in St. Peter’s Basilica on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
He also called on Catholics to “imagine a holiness with Amazonian features, called to challenge the universal Church,” in his apostolic exhortation “Querida Amazonia” (“Beloved Amazon”) following the 2019 Synod of Bishops on the Amazon. In the document, the pope discussed the challenges of inculturation, ecological care and migration unique to the Amazon region.
Pope Francis last visited Latin America in 2019 for World Youth Day in Panama. Although he never returned to Argentina after the conclave that elected him pope in 2013, he brought Argentina — and Latin America — with him to the Vatican. Visitors wearing Argentine soccer jerseys could be spotted at nearly all the pope’s weekly general audiences, which frequently broke out into Spanish-language chants of “Viva el papa!” (“long live the pope!”), and pilgrims got a kick out of handing the pope an Argentine mate gourd to drink his favorite tea; he regularly stopped the popemobile to take a sip.
Pope Francis met the Argentine soccer team at the Vatican in 2013, including future World Cup winner Lionel Messi. Two years later, he met Argentina’s most famous soccer legend, Diego Maradona, and images of their warm embrace circulated online in memes and were plastered around Latin American cities on stickers.
Finally, in January 2024, he said that a trip home was being considered for later in the year. Argentine President Javier Milei, who had been critical of the pope before his election, had formally invited him.
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