Pope Francis, history’s first Latin American pontiff who charmed the world with his humble style and concern for the poor but alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and climate change, has died Monday. He was 88.

“At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the home of the Father. His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of his Church,″ Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the Vatican camerlengo, said in an announcement.

Bells tolled in church towers across Rome after the announcement.

Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025, for a respiratory crisis that developed into double pneumonia. He spent 38 days there, the longest hospitalization of his 12-year papacy.

From his first greeting as pope — a remarkably normal “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) — to his embrace of refugees and the downtrodden, Francis signaled a very different tone for the papacy, stressing humility over hubris for a Catholic Church beset by scandal and accusations of indifference.

After that rainy night on March 13, 2013, the Argentine-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio brought a breath of fresh air into a 2,000-year-old institution that had seen its influence wane during the troubled tenure of Pope Benedict XVI, whose surprise resignation led to Francis’ election.

But Francis soon invited troubles of his own, and conservatives grew increasingly upset with his progressive bent, outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics and crackdown on traditionalists. His greatest test came in 2018 when he botched a notorious case of clergy sexual abuse in Chile, and the scandal that festered under his predecessors erupted anew on his watch.

And then Francis, the crowd-loving, globe-trotting pope of the peripheries, navigated the unprecedented reality of leading a universal religion through the coronavirus pandemic from a locked-down Vatican City.

He implored the world to use COVID as an opportunity to rethink the economic and political framework that he said had turned rich against poor.

“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented,” Francis told an empty St. Peter’s Square in March 2020. But he also stressed the pandemic showed the need for “all of us to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.”

Reforming the Vatican

Francis was elected on a mandate to reform the Vatican bureaucracy and finances but went further in shaking up the church without changing its core doctrine. “Who am I to judge?” he replied when asked about a purportedly gay priest.

The comment sent a message of welcome to the LGBTQ+ community and those who felt shunned by a church that had stressed sexual propriety over unconditional love. “Being homosexual is not a crime,” he told The Associated Press in 2023, urging an end to civil laws that criminalize it.

Stressing mercy, Francis changed the church’s position on the death penalty, calling it inadmissible in all circumstances. He also declared the possession of nuclear weapons, not just their use, was “immoral.”

In other firsts, he approved an agreement with China over bishop nominations that had vexed the Vatican for decades, met the Russian patriarch and charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.

He reaffirmed the all-male, celibate priesthood and upheld the church’s opposition to abortion, equating it to “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”

Roles for women

But he added women to important decision-making roles and allowed them to serve as lectors and acolytes in parishes. He let women vote alongside bishops in periodic Vatican meetings, following longstanding complaints that women do much of the church’s work but are barred from power.

Sister Nathalie Becquart, whom Francis named to one of the highest Vatican jobs, said his legacy was a vision of a church where men and women existed in a relationship of reciprocity and respect.

“It was about shifting a pattern of domination — from human being to the creation, from men to women — to a pattern of cooperation,” said Becquart, the first woman to hold a voting position in a Vatican synod.

The church as refuge

While Francis did not allow women to be ordained, the voting reform was part of a revolutionary change in emphasizing what the church should be: a refuge for everyone — “todos, todos, todos” (“everyone, everyone, everyone”) — not for the privileged few. Migrants, the poor, prisoners and outcasts were invited to his table far more than presidents or powerful CEOs.

“For Pope Francis, it was always to extend the arms of the church to embrace all people, not to exclude anyone,” said Farrell, whom Francis named as camerlengo, taking charge after a pontiff’s death or retirement.

Francis demanded his bishops apply mercy and charity to their flocks, pressed the world to protect God’s creation from climate disaster, and challenged countries to welcome those fleeing war, poverty and oppression.

After visiting Mexico in 2016, Francis said of then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump that anyone building a wall to keep migrants out “is not Christian.”

While progressives were thrilled with Francis’ radical focus on Jesus’ message of mercy and inclusion, it troubled conservatives who feared he watered down Catholic teaching and threatened the very Christian identity of the West. Some even called him a heretic.

A few cardinals openly challenged him. Francis usually responded with his typical answer to conflict: silence.

He made it easier for married Catholics to get an annulment, allowed priests to absolve women who had had abortions and decreed that priests could bless same-sex couples. He opened debate on issues like homosexuality and divorce, giving pastors wiggle room to discern how to accompany their flocks, rather than handing them strict rules to apply.

St. Francis of Assisi as a model

Francis lived in the Vatican hotel instead of the Apostolic Palace, wore his old orthotic shoes and not the red loafers of the papacy, and rode in compact cars. It wasn’t a gimmick.

“I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he told a Jesuit journal in 2013. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”

If becoming the first Latin American and first Jesuit pope wasn’t enough, Francis was also the first to name himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century friar known for personal simplicity, a message of peace, and care for nature and society’s outcasts.

Francis sought out the unemployed, the sick, the disabled and the homeless. He formally apologized to Indigenous peoples for the crimes of the church from colonial times onward.

And he himself suffered: He had part of his colon removed in 2021, then needed more surgery in 2023 to repair a painful hernia and remove intestinal scar tissue. Starting in 2022 he regularly used a wheelchair or cane because of bad knees, and endured bouts of bronchitis.

He went to society’s fringes to minister with mercy: caressing the grossly deformed head of a man in St. Peter’s Square, kissing the tattoo of a Holocaust survivor, or inviting Argentina’s garbage scavengers to join him onstage in Rio de Janeiro.

“We have always been marginalized, but Pope Francis always helped us,” said Coqui Vargas, a transgender woman whose Roman community forged a unique relationship with Francis during the pandemic.

His first trip as pope was to the island of Lampedusa, then the epicenter of Europe’s migration crisis. He consistently chose to visit poor countries where Christians were often persecuted minorities, rather than the centers of global Catholicism.

Friend and fellow Argentine, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, said his concern for the poor and disenfranchised was based on the Beatitudes — the eight blessings Jesus delivered in the Sermon on the Mount for the meek, the merciful, the poor in spirit and others.

“Why are the Beatitudes the program of this pontificate? Because they were the basis of Jesus Christ’s own program,” Sánchez said.

Missteps on sexual abuse scandal

But more than a year passed before Francis met with survivors of priestly sexual abuse, and victims’ groups initially questioned whether he really understood the scope of the problem.

Francis did create a sex abuse commission to advise the church on best practices, but it lost its influence after a few years and its recommendation of a tribunal to judge bishops who covered up for predator priests went nowhere.

And then came the greatest crisis of his papacy, when he discredited Chilean abuse victims in 2018 and stood by a controversial bishop linked to their abuser. Realizing his error, Francis invited the victims to the Vatican for a personal mea culpa and summoned the leadership of the Chilean church to resign en masse.

As that crisis concluded, a new one erupted over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington and a counselor to three popes.

Francis had actually moved swiftly to sideline McCarrick amid an accusation he had molested a teenage altar boy in the 1970s. But Francis nevertheless was accused by the Vatican’s one-time U.S. Ambassador of having rehabilitated McCarrick early in his papacy.

Francis eventually defrocked McCarrick after a Vatican investigation determined he sexually abused adults as well as minors. He changed church law to remove the pontifical secret surrounding abuse cases and enacted procedures to investigate bishops who abused or covered for their pedophile priests, seeking to end impunity for the hierarchy.

“He sincerely wanted to do something and he transmitted that,” said Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean abuse survivor Francis discredited who later developed a close friendship with the pontiff.

A change from Benedict

The road to Francis’ 2013 election was paved by Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to resign and retire — the first in 600 years — and it created the unprecedented reality of two popes living in the Vatican.

Francis didn’t shy from Benedict’s potentially uncomfortable shadow. He embraced him as an elder statesman and adviser, coaxing him out of his cloistered retirement to participate in the public life of the church.

“It’s like having your grandfather in the house, a wise grandfather,” Francis said.

Francis praised Benedict by saying he “opened the door” to others following suit, fueling speculation that Francis also might retire. But after Benedict’s death on Dec. 31, 2022, he asserted that in principle the papacy is a job for life.

Francis’ looser liturgical style and pastoral priorities made clear he and the German-born theologian came from very different religious traditions, and Francis directly overturned several decisions of his predecessor.

He made sure Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, a hero to the liberation theology movement in Latin America, was canonized after his case languished under Benedict over concerns about the credo’s Marxist bent.

Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed, arguing the spread of the Tridentine Rite was divisive. The move riled Francis’ traditionalist critics and opened sustained conflict between right-wing Catholics, particularly in the U.S., and the Argentine pope.

Conservatives oppose Francis

By then, conservatives had already turned away from Francis, betrayed after he opened debate on allowing remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments if they didn’t get an annulment — a church ruling that their first marriage was invalid.

“We don’t like this pope,” headlined Italy’s conservative daily Il Foglio a few months into the papacy, reflecting the unease of the small but vocal traditionalist Catholic movement that was coddled under Benedict.

Those same critics amplified their complaints after Francis’ approved church blessings for same-sex couples, and a controversial accord with China over nominating bishops.

Its details were never released, but conservative critics bashed it as a sellout to communist China, while the Vatican defended it as the best deal it could get with Beijing.

U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a figurehead in the anti-Francis opposition, said the church had become “like a ship without a rudder.”

Burke waged his opposition campaign for years, starting when Francis fired him as the Vatican’s supreme court justice and culminating with his vocal opposition to Francis’ 2023 synod on the church’s future.

Twice, he joined other conservative cardinals in formally asking Francis to explain himself on doctrine issues reflecting a more progressive bent, including on the possibility of same-sex blessings and his outreach to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.

Francis eventually sanctioned Burke financially, accusing him of sowing “disunity.” It was one of several personnel moves he made in both the Vatican and around the world to shift the balance of power from doctrinaire leaders to more pastoral ones.

Francis insisted his bishops and cardinals imbue themselves with the “odor of their flock” and minister to the faithful, voicing displeasure when they didn’t.

His 2014 Christmas address to the Vatican Curia was one of the greatest public papal reprimands ever: Standing in the marbled Apostolic Palace, Francis ticked off 15 ailments that he said can afflict his closest collaborators, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” lusting for power and the “terrorism of gossip.”

Trying to eliminate corruption, Francis oversaw the reform of the scandal-marred Vatican bank and sought to wrestle Vatican bureaucrats into financial line, limiting their compensation and ability to receive gifts or award public contracts.

He authorized Vatican police to raid his own secretariat of state and the Vatican’s financial watchdog agency amid suspicions about a 350 million euro investment in a London real estate venture. After a 2 1/2-year trial, the Vatican tribunal convicted a once-powerful cardinal, Angelo Becciu, of embezzlement and returned mixed verdicts to nine others, acquitting one.

The trial, though, proved to be a reputational boomerang for the Holy See, showing deficiencies in the Vatican’s legal system, unseemly turf battles among monsignors, and how the pope had intervened on behalf of prosecutors.

While earning praise for trying to turn the Vatican’s finances around, Francis angered U.S. conservatives for his frequent excoriation of the global financial market that favors the rich over the poor.

Economic justice was an important themes of his papacy, and he didn’t hide it in his first meeting with journalists when he said he wanted a “poor church that is for the poor.”

In his first major teaching document, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis denounced trickle-down economic theories as unproven and naive, based on a mentality “where the powerful feed upon the powerless” with no regard for ethics, the environment or even God.

“Money must serve, not rule!” he said in urging political reforms.

He elaborated on that in his major eco-encyclical “Praised Be,” denouncing the “structurally perverse” global economic system that he said exploited the poor and risked turning Earth into “an immense pile of filth.”

Some U.S. conservatives branded Francis a Marxist. He jabbed back by saying he had many friends who were Marxists.

Soccer, opera and prayer

Born Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the eldest of five children of Italian immigrants.

He credited his devout grandmother Rosa with teaching him how to pray. Weekends were spent listening to opera on the radio, going to Mass and attending matches of the family’s beloved San Lorenzo soccer club. As pope, his love of soccer brought him a huge collection of jerseys from visitors.

He said he received his religious calling at 17 while going to confession, recounting in a 2010 biography that, “I don’t know what it was, but it changed my life. … I realized that they were waiting for me.”

He entered the diocesan seminary but switched to the Jesuit order in 1958, attracted to its missionary tradition and militancy.

Around this time, he suffered from pneumonia, which led to the removal of the upper part of his right lung. His frail health prevented him from becoming a missionary, and his less-than-robust lung capacity was perhaps responsible for his whisper of a voice and reluctance to sing at Mass.

On Dec. 13, 1969, he was ordained a priest, and immediately began teaching. In 1973, he was named head of the Jesuits in Argentina, an appointment he later acknowledged was “crazy” given he was only 36. “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he admitted in his Civilta Cattolica interview.

Life under Argentina’s dictatorship

His six-year tenure as provincial coincided with Argentina’s murderous 1976-83 dictatorship, when the military launched a campaign against left-wing guerrillas and other regime opponents.

Bergoglio didn’t publicly confront the junta and was accused of effectively allowing two slum priests to be kidnapped and tortured by not publicly endorsing their work.

He refused for decades to counter that version of events. Only in a 2010 authorized biography did he finally recount the behind-the-scenes lengths he used to save them, persuading the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so he could say Mass instead. Once in the junta leader’s home, Bergoglio privately appealed for mercy. Both priests were eventually released, among the few to have survived prison.

As pope, accounts began to emerge of the many people — priests, seminarians and political dissidents — whom Bergoglio actually saved during the “dirty war,” letting them stay incognito at the seminary or helping them escape the country.

Bergoglio went to Germany in 1986 to research a never-finished thesis. Returning to Argentina, he was stationed in Cordoba during a period he described as a time of “great interior crisis.” Out of favor with more progressive Jesuit leaders, he was eventually rescued from obscurity in 1992 by St. John Paul II, who named him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. He became archbishop six years later, and was made a cardinal in 2001.

He came close to becoming pope in 2005 when Benedict was elected, gaining the second-most votes in several rounds of balloting before bowing out.

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Legislation on bump stocks, devices that use the recoil of a semi-automatic rifle so that it fires at near-automatic speed, hasn’t gotten any consideration at the Capitol this year.

That includes a pair of bills (SB 1234, HB 6013) to repeal Florida’s ban on them and another legislative couplet to hike penalties for their use (SB 254, HB 1621).

With most committee action winding down, bills that haven’t been heard in committee yet are likely dead.

Florida’s bump stock ban went into effect March 9, 2018, less than a month after the deadliest school shooting in the state’s history. It was part of a sweeping gun safety package called the “Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act,” which also added a three-day waiting period for gun purchases and hiked the age limit to buy long rifles to 21.

President Donald Trump’s first administration imposed a national ban on bump stocks nine months later. The move, while close to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, was more in response to the October 2017 massacre in Las Vegas, where a shooter used the device. The high school shooter did not.

But on June 14, 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Trump administration did not follow federal law in implementing the ban and that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) had overstepped its authority.

That ruling inspired Palm City Republican Rep. Toby Overdorf to file HB 6013, his first bill of the 2025 Session. He told Florida Politics in February that the state’s law should comport with federal law.

“I would like for state law to comply with federal law,” he said, adding, “I’m a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. This is an infringement upon the Second Amendment.”

He added that Gov. Ron DeSantis has advocated for reversing the ban, including during his brief presidential run.

Of note, while the Supreme Court ruled that bump stocks are not machine guns and therefore couldn’t be regulated as such by the ATF, the ruling did not prohibit states or federal legislators from making laws about bump stocks.

Boca Raton Democratic Sen. Tina Scott Polsky, who sponsored SB 254, said she’s been dismayed seeing her GOP colleagues in the Legislature repeatedly try to roll back gun safety laws.

“I don’t understand this backwards trend we’re seeing,” she said. “As the Senator of Parkland, I want to do everything I can to keep that good work going and go further to keep Floridians safe.”

If passed, SB 254 or HB 1621 would expand the definition of “machine gun” in Florida Statutes to include any firearm modified to fire at a rate that mimics an automatic weapon.

Possession of a machine gun in Florida is a second-degree felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison for a first offense and $10,000 in fines.

Ocala Republican Sen. Stan McClain sponsored SB 1234. Homestead Democratic Rep. Kevin Chambliss filed HB 1621.

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Two bills meant to give property owners a clear route to compensation for damage done to their homes by blast mining are likely to die without a single hearing in either chamber of the Legislature.

The measures (SB 486, HB 303) are the most recent attempts by Hialeah Gardens Sen. Bryan Ávila and Miami Lakes Rep. Tom Fabricio to address years of complaints from residents, especially in Miami-Dade County, that nearby limestone quarry activities are hurting their homes.

But with the House ending most of its subcommittee meetings, there is little expectation that the companion proposals will advance this Session.

If passed, the bills would have guaranteed homeowners the ability to seek payment through a complaint filed with the Division of Administrative Hearings for damage caused by limestone mining.

The bills would also have provided that this state-level proceeding would preempt local claims processes.

There is a difference between the two similar proposals. Ávila’s three-page bill established the general setup for property owners to seek recompense. Fabricio’s five-page bill did that too, but also included standards of proof, limited claims to properties within three miles of a blasting site and provided that the Legislature could appropriate funds yearly to ensure payments.

For years, residents have complained that limestone blast mining damages their homes, and Fabricio made the issue a top campaign priority when he ran for office in 2020.

Lawmakers have worked to address the problem. In 2019, Republican Education Commissioner Manny Díaz Jr. and Republican Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez, then a Senator and Representative, respectively, passed legislation requiring the State Fire Marshal to set ground vibration limits and mandate that mines use seismographs to monitor explosions and ensure compliance. The following year, Ávila, Díaz and Democratic Sen. Shevrin Jones successfully sponsored another measure giving the Fire Marshal exclusive authority to regulate and adopt construction mining standards. The bill also established the Miami-Dade Mining Pilot Program to monitor and report each blast and require the Division of State Fire Marshal to hire a seismologist to oversee the program.

Today, a roughly one-page section of Florida Statutes covers the governing laws for blast mining statewide.

But Ávila and Fabricio maintain that more needs to be done. Last year, they again filed bills to reduce the strength of allowable mining explosions. Neither bill was heard.

House lawmakers also heard testimony from residents and experts on the issue. Industry professionals maintained that while quarry explosions may cause cosmetic damage to nearby buildings, including small cracks in drywall and other relatively weak materials, they are not strong enough to cause structural damage at the currently allowed levels.

Residents and members of a Miami-Dade advisory board tasked with analyzing the problem disputed that assertion, arguing that any damage, including photographed cracks in the concrete, floors, and roofs of their homes, is unacceptable.

Fabricio said at the time that his goal was to strike a compromise that would enable mining companies to continue excavating vital construction and road materials, while also delivering a peaceful and fair arrangement to his constituents.

“Our view is pretty simple. We believe that the limestone quarry blasting limits in the state are generally fine,” he said. “However, in situations where we are about 1,000 yards from a residential community, where the homes are shaking every day and causing damage to the homes, it’s a problem.”

Limestone from rock quarries is used in virtually every construction project in Florida, which consumes more than 130 million tons of the material each year, according to Ananth Prasad, President of the Florida Builders Association.

More than a third of that supply comes from Miami-Dade, some of whose county and city governments have formed advisory committees to examine and make recommendations on how to improve matters.

According to Fabricio’s office, six mining companies operating at eight quarries in northwest Miami-Dade detonate tons of explosive materials every week to dislodge rocks referred to as “aggregate” from underground.

Since 1996, White Rock Quarries, the largest mining company operating in Miami-Dade County, has made more than $480,000 in in-state donations to Florida lawmakers. Ávila is among its biggest beneficiaries, receiving $37,500 from the company between 2014 and 2024.

In total, nearly half of Florida’s 40 sitting Senators and a fifth of its Representatives have accepted contributions from the company.

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