Pope Francis, a "Pope of the Heart"

Pope Francis, Requiescat in Pace

December 17, 1936 – April 21, 2025

He was in many ways a “Pope of the Heart” – but the heart has its own paradoxes

By Christina Deardurff

Pope Francis embraces Vinicio Riva, a disfigured man who attended the Pope’s general audience November 6, 2013

When the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, was elected Pope on March 13, 2013, the world was still reeling from the surprise abdication of Benedict XVI.

Bergoglio was not generally well known, even though he had received a significant number of votes in the previous conclave that had elected Benedict.

So when he appeared on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s after Cardinal Dominique Mamberti, the senior cardinal deacon at the time, had announced “Habemus Papam!” — not wearing, incidentally, the customary red mozzetta and ornate papal stole — there was a strong element of curiosity as well as joy among those in St. Peter’s piazza. And around the world.

It took very little time for Pope Francis – the name he took to reflect his particular view of what the papacy should be, personified in “Il Poverello,” the Poor Man of Assisi – to carve out a very distinct place for himself in the pantheon of pontiffs.

Perhaps this was most clearly embodied in the subject of his last encyclical, Dilexit Nos, on the Heart of Jesus.

Pope Francis was indeed a Pope of the Heart.

“Our real personal history is built with the heart,” Francis said in Dilexit Nos. “At the end of our lives, that alone will matter.”

And live by the heart he did.

He had a heart for the poor. In his 2013 apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, he wrote, “This is why I want a Church which is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them…”

Pope Francis did not limit himself to trying to foster in Christians a love for the poor; he was also a firm critic of the structures and attitudes he believed contributed to world poverty.

He said in Evangelii Gaudium, “The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime, all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”

Though he never specifically criticized capitalism, he went on to say, “The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good…solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them.”

Environmentalism was also close to Pope Francis’ heart; he saw it as a form of charity to those helplessly suffering from damage to the environment.

Whether or not his sources were accurate on the exact causes of such damage (warnings about man-made climate change, for example, figured prominently among his exhortations, despite being increasingly questioned from a scientific point of view), the important thing to him was that a wealthy “first world” protect the poor nations from its ravages.

He said in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, “Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

In 2020, Pope Francis produced another encyclical, Fratelli Tutti – “All Brothers” – in which he again urged fraternal peace and charity, particularly one “without borders.”

Situating the reflections contained in the encyclical within the spirituality of St. Francis of Assissi, his namesake, he said, “Francis did not wage a war of words aimed at imposing doctrines; he simply spread the love of God. He understood that ‘God is love and those who abide in love abide in God’ (1Jn 4:16). In this way, he became a father to all and inspired the vision of a fraternal society.”

The encyclical was also situated, temporally, amid his ongoing efforts to promote concern for the waves of migrants crossing borders around the world, often in peril of their lives.

In his 2019 Christmas address, he again spoke of the duty Christians have to such migrants: “It is injustice that makes them cross deserts and seas that become cemeteries. It is injustice that turns them away from places where they might have hope for a dignified life, but instead find themselves before walls of indifference.”

Pope Francis hugs a child at his weekly audience August 17, 2022.

“One believes with the heart”

Even going back to Francis’ first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, “The Light of Faith,” which he co-authored with Pope Emeritus Benedict (who had begun writing it before his abdication), Pope Francis displayed his characteristic emphasis on “the heart” when considering the question: “Can Christian faith provide a service to the common good with regard to the right way of understanding truth?”

The encyclical continues, “To answer this question, we need to reflect on the kind of knowledge involved in faith. Here a saying of Saint Paul can help us: ‘One believes with the heart’ (Rom 10:10).

“In the Bible, the heart is the core of the human person, where all his or her different dimensions intersect: body and spirit, interiority and openness to the world and to others, intellect, will and affectivity. If the heart is capable of holding all these dimensions together, it is because it is where we become open to truth and love, where we let them touch us and deeply transform us.”

Living by the heart more than the intellect may have also, for Pope Francis, had its drawbacks, including a pattern of pronounced paradoxes in his papacy.

He uttered his famous line “Who am I to judge” regarding the morality of homosexuality and approved the controversial 2023 document Fiducia Supplicans approving blessing of same-sex couples, yet in a private meeting with fellow Jesuits, he repeatedly used a crude term to refer to homosexuals and had counseled refusal of openly homosexual priesthood applicants.

He told the faithful that they need not “breed like rabbits,” yet reaffirmed Humanae Vitae in 2023 by telling an NFP conference, “There is a need always to keep in mind the inseparable connection between the unitive and procreative meanings of the conjugal act.”

He championed diversity in the Church, saying in 2024, “There is no need to fear the diversity of charisms in the Church…Let us pray that the Spirit helps us recognize the gift of different charisms within the Christian communities, and to discover the richness of different ritual traditions within the Catholic Church.”

And yet, it was this same Pope who released the 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, severely restricting the celebration of the Traditional Latin rite of the Mass which had been approved, and flourished, in the pontificate of Benedict XVI.

Pope Francis vowed at a 2019 Meeting for the Protection of Minors in the Church to conduct “an all-out battle” against sexual abuse by clergy, “abominable crimes that must be erased from the face of the earth.”

Yet during his pontificate, he repeatedly protected, even promoted, a long list of clerics who had been credibly accused (in some cases, convicted) of sexual abuse.

Most recently, the Vatican announced in March that the monumental Synod on Synodality, first announced back in 2020, would continue into a “third phase’ lasting into 2028 – “synodality” being a watchword of the Francis pontificate that meant a “consultative” and “inclusive” style of governing.

Pope Francis himself, however, seemed to rule by fiat and decidedly not in a consultative manner; one need only witness his release of Fiducia Supplicans without any prior consultation with the world’s bishops — and the uproar it caused, particularly in the African church.

The Pope of the Heart has left us a legacy of compassion and mercy and also, perhaps, a bit of confusion; it was, after all, his style to “make a mess” as he once encouraged young people to do at a 2013 World Youth Day gathering.

Pope Francis was nevertheless on firm ground when he said that “The one who practices mercy does not fear death. And why does he not fear it? Because he looks death in the face in the wounds of his brothers and sisters, and he overcomes it with the love of Jesus Christ.”