Francesco, the Pope who came from the end of the world, has died. Cardinal Farrell: 'At 7:35, he returned to the Father's house.

The Pontiff was in Rome, at Casa Santa Marta, where he had been moved after being hospitalized at Gemelli. He was 88 years old.

Pope Francis died today, Monday, April 21. The Pontiff was in Rome, at Casa Santa Marta, where he had been moved after being hospitalized at Gemelli. The news was announced by Cardinal Farrell: 'At 7:35, the Bishop of Rome returned to the Father's house

VATICAN CITY — Island of Sancian, December 3, 1552, shortly after midnight: in a hut, watched over by a Chinese friend, Francis Xavier, the first Jesuit missionary, dies while gazing toward China, the lifelong dream just a couple of nautical miles away.

Rome, July 31, 2013, Church of the Gesù: just over four months have passed since the conclave on March 13 elected Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio, and Francis, the first Jesuit Pope in history, celebrates Mass in the "mother church" of the Society on the feast day of its founder, Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

"I have always liked to think about the sunset of a Jesuit, when a Jesuit ends his life, when he sets," he says in the homily. And he recalls the image of Father Francis Xavier dying while looking toward China: "Art has portrayed this sunset, this ending of Xavier, many times. Even literature, in that beautiful piece by Pemán. In the end, with nothing, but before the Lord. It does me good to think of it that way."

The sunset of Francis, after 88 years of life and nearly twelve as Pontiff, carries with it the sense of something irreversible—the “revolution of tenderness” sparked by the resignation of Benedict XVI and fulfilled by that callejero priest, a man of the streets, the son of Piedmontese immigrants. His father, Mario, was an accountant working for the railways; his mother, Regina Sivori, a homemaker busy raising five children. He grew up at 531 Calle Membrillar, in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires, an Italian district where Alfredo Di Stefano—whom Pelé once called "the greatest of them all"—remembered seeing him play soccer with the other kids.

He earned a diploma as a chemical technician, followed his vocation, entered the seminary, and at 21 began his novitiate with the Jesuits in Córdoba, 700 kilometers from Buenos Aires, brought there by bus with his parents. Those were difficult years, because many Jesuit students came from well-off families. From that experience, he developed a sense of loneliness and a resentment toward that elitist mindset, which he would later call a “princely psychology.”
VATICAN CITY — Right from the start, everything was already there. The brother cardinals, in the Sistine Chapel, knew very well who they were voting for. Bergoglio had already been the name backed by the “progressives” in the 2005 conclave that elected Ratzinger. But the gloomy, stifling atmosphere that followed the Vatileaks scandal, and the need for a jolt—something Benedict XVI himself first sensed, deciding to resign—led one of the most conservative conclaves on paper (most of the electors were appointed by John Paul II and Ratzinger) to choose that cardinal who used to take the bus from Buenos Aires to the slums of the villas miserias, where families living in shacks often didn’t even know that the priest among them was the archbishop.

During the meetings of the cardinals before the conclave, on March 9, the Argentine Jesuit's speech already contained the blueprint for his pontificate: “The Church is called to go out of itself and move toward the peripheries—not only geographical but also existential,” he said. An open Church: “Sometimes I think Jesus is knocking from inside the Church, asking to be let out.”
He accepted the election as a “sinner” who trusted in God's mercy, and left everyone breathless when he said: “Vocabor Franciscus”—“I will be called Francis.” No pope had ever chosen the name of the saint of Assisi. “Don’t forget the poor,” the Franciscan Cardinal Hummes had told him, seated beside him. Four days later, the new pope pointed to his chest and recalled: “That word entered here: the poor, the poor... I immediately thought of Francis of Assisi. Then I thought of the wars, and Francis is the man of peace. And so, the name came to me, in my heart… Ah, how I long for a Church that is poor and for the poor!”

The white cassock, the exit from the Sistine Chapel. He immediately tried to call Benedict XVI, but the call didn’t go through to Castel Gandolfo. They would speak later, at 8:45 p.m. In the meantime, even Ratzinger discovered the new pope along with the rest of the world, as he appeared from the Loggia of Blessings:
“You know that the duty of the Conclave was to give a Bishop to Rome. It seems that my brother Cardinals went almost to the end of the world to get him. But here we are.”

It wasn’t just a line—it was the idea that would shape his entire magisterium. He called it “Magellan’s gaze,” after the great Portuguese navigator who, at the start of the 16th century, set out to circumnavigate the globe and, upon reaching the far end of the American continent, looked back at Europe from a new vantage point and saw something different. “Reality is better seen from the periphery than from the center.”

Thus, the Pope who came from “almost the end of the world” turned perspectives upside down—starting with the papal figure itself. He chose to remain in Room 201 at Santa Marta, the Vatican guesthouse where the cardinals had stayed during the conclave, saying “I can’t live alone,” discarding the image of an imperial court with few chosen ones admitted into the Apostolic Apartment, which he saw as “an inverted funnel.”
After one of the first nights, he saw a young Swiss Guard standing outside his door at dawn: “Have you been up all night, son?” He made him sit down and offered him breakfast.

Allergic to the idea of “we’ve always done it this way,” he explained that “at the beginning, some walls fell: ‘The Pope can’t!’” Yet he would personally go to the optician or shoe store, carry his own luggage, and be baffled by people’s astonishment: “We have to try to be normal—normal in life.”

Then there were the journeys—the heart of his magisterium. On one hand, the big geopolitical challenges: the dialogue with China and the “provisional agreement” signed in 2018 regarding the appointment of bishops; the friendship with Islam and the “Document on Human Fraternity” signed in 2019 in Abu Dhabi with Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar and highest Sunni authority; the 2021 trip to Iraq—the first Pope in the land of Abraham—and the meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the Shia leader; the rapprochement with the Orthodox world, including the first-ever historic meeting between a Pope and the Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill, on February 12, 2016.

On the other hand, the peripheries. Francis gave a voice and visibility to the “discarded” of the earth, shining a spotlight—even if only for a few days—on peoples forgotten by global media. He had to be seen in Bangladesh, asking “forgiveness” on behalf of the world from the Rohingya, as a Muslim woman wept and said: “I want to show my pain to the leader of the Christians.” Or among the Mapuche and Amazonian Indigenous peoples: “We must set aside the logic of believing that some cultures are superior or inferior.”
His first trip was a surprise visit to migrants in Lampedusa, in the middle of the Mediterranean—now a “vast cemetery”—to denounce the “globalization of indifference” and the many “walls” destined to fall, as he would later repeat in Lesbos, Cyprus, Malta: “Bridges are always solutions, walls never.”

In his third encyclical, Fratelli tutti, he chose a verse from Virgil: “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt”—“There are tears for things, and mortal matters touch the heart”—to express, like Aeneas, the sorrow of human events that move both mind and spirit. Because “reality itself groans and rebels” in a world where “everything is connected”: environmental devastation, economic injustice, and a “throwaway culture” that harms the most vulnerable; the tragedy of migration; and the “third world war fought in pieces.”

Of course, there were also the “structural” reforms he started or completed—from Vatican finances to the Roman Curia. He pushed for decentralization in the Church, evident in the increasing role of the Synod of Bishops on delicate issues, and created a “Council of Cardinals” drawn from all continents. His cardinal appointments favored smaller, peripheral dioceses over historic sees, leading to a conclave increasingly less Eurocentric and more representative of the Global South.

But at the center of it all was a return to the essence of Christianity: “The Beatitudes and Chapter 25 of Matthew’s Gospel—everything is there.” The attitude that, on the Day of Judgment, will separate the righteous from the damned:
“I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to me.”
The kerygma, the Gospel in its purest form.

Returning from his first international trip—the World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro—journalists on the plane asked about the alleged “gay lobby” in the Vatican. Calmly, he responded:
“We must distinguish between being gay and forming a lobby. Lobbies are never good. But if a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”

He did all this without relinquishing the Pope’s authority, as one might expect from a Jesuit. At times, he was stern with collaborators. He upheld Ratzinger’s zero-tolerance policy on child abuse and went so far as to strip Theodore McCarrick, former Cardinal of Washington, of his title (an act with no precedent since 1927). He also removed the cardinalate privileges from Cardinal Angelo Becciu, allowing him to be tried over a financial scandal involving the Secretariat of State.

He made enemies, especially among the Catholic right in the United States and reactionary factions trying to pit him against Benedict XVI. But Francis brushed off talk of schism:
“There have been many in the history of the Church,” he said, choosing not to respond to provocation. “To those who seek only division and scandal, the only answer is the silence of Jesus. You don’t dialogue with Satan.”

Behind his apparent simplicity lay subtle, hidden references. In the Greek of the Gospels, the verb for Jesus’ compassion is splanchnízomai, from splánchna—the “womb” or “guts” of a mother. Touching wounds, feeling pain—the maternal depths of mercy.

On January 18, 2015, he celebrated Mass before six million people in Manila—“the largest papal event in history,” as Father Lombardi noted. But what remained in people’s memories was his stormy flight to Tacloban, an island devastated by Typhoon Yolanda. There, under pouring rain, facing survivors, he looked into the tearful faces of those who had lost everything—children, loved ones, homes—and set aside his prepared homily:
“I don’t know what to say to you. The Lord does—He knows what to say.”
And he delivered one of the most moving, spontaneous homilies of his pontificate.

He used to say that the first Christian proclamation he received was from a woman—Rosa, his paternal grandmother—and that’s why he loved the poem by Friedrich Hölderlin dedicated to his own grandmother. He would recite its lines slowly:
“May man keep what he promised as a child.”
Francis did. And even if, as he set, he too never made it to China, he opened the path. After Francis Xavier’s death, it was Matteo Ricci, another Jesuit, who fulfilled his brother's dream, landing in Macao on August 7, 1582.

Because, as Francis often said:
“Time is greater than space,”
and what matters is to start processes.
The rest will come.
“God always goes before us—He ‘primerea’ us.”