The Life and Legacy of Pope Francis
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You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. It's Monday, April 21st. I'm Greg Dixon. Those are the bells at St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican in Rome tolling for the passing of Pope Francis. He died today in the early hours of Easter Monday. He was 88 years old. According to the Vatican, he suffered a stroke.

Francis was the first non-European pope in more than a millennium. He was one of the most popular pontiffs in decades and a towering figure on the world stage, calling for action on the environment, helping the poor, and welcoming migrants. He also moved the church to become more inclusive. NPR's longtime Rome correspondent, Silvia Paglioli, brings us this remembrance of Francis' life and papacy.

Jorge Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires. The son of Italian immigrants was proud of his Argentine heritage. The tangueros. On his 78th birthday, Francis welcomed hundreds of couples as they danced the tango in St. Peter's Square. He clearly appreciated the gift. After all, before becoming a priest, he'd worked as a nightclub bouncer. Francisco! Francisco! Francisco!

He was beloved for his common touch, wading into crowds, kissing babies, the disabled and the disfigured. Oblivious to his age security fears, he refused to ride in a bulletproof popemobile. Bergoglio set many precedents. The first Jesuit pope, the first pope to take the name of St. Francis of Assisi, and the first pope from the global south.

On his election in 2013, after the surprise resignation of Benedict XVI, he broke with tradition, opting to live in a Vatican hotel rather than the opulent papal quarters.

By rejecting the monarchical trappings of the papacy, says Associated Press reporter Nicole Winfield, Francis made a powerful statement. I'm going to live with regular people. I'm going to get up in the morning and go to the dining hall and have my breakfast. At dinnertime, I'm going to line up with everyone else, cafeteria style, and get my dinner. I'm going to microwave my dinner when it's not warm enough. You

Yes, he nuked his own food. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, a megalopolis with huge gaps between rich and poor, Bergoglio had stayed close to his flock in the shanty towns.

Church historian Massimo Fagioli says that's why the dispossessed on the peripheries of society became the focus of his papacy. Most popes before Francis had no occasions to meet with the outcasts. And that's something that got to real people, even beyond the Catholic Church. The first papal trip was to Lampedusa, the island gateway to Europe for hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing war and poverty.

There he denounced the globalization of indifference toward migrants and the nameless and faceless ones who hold the reins of world power and are responsible for these human dramas. We

Weeks later, in his first airborne news conference, Francis uttered a phrase that would define his papacy as inclusive. If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge? In a long interview with Father Antonio Spadaro, Francis outlined his vision of the Catholic Church as a field hospital after battle, healing the wounds of the faithful and going out to find those who have been hurt, excluded, or fallen away.

Father Spadaro. That was not just a nice image

for talking about the Church. The Church is not sometimes a field hospital, but the Church is a field hospital to save the people, not just to cure some little problems, but the complete openness of the Church toward the world. Francis cleaned up Vatican finances long tainted by corruption. He created a kitchen cabinet of nine cardinals to help reform a dysfunctional bureaucracy.

After exhibiting at first what some Vatican observers deemed a blind spot toward clerical pedophilia, Francis appealed to the faithful to help root out what he called the culture of death and convened an extraordinary sex abuse summit at the Vatican.

And after the two conservative papacies of John Paul and Benedict focused on the primacy of church doctrine, Francis announced a year-long jubilee on the primacy of mercy. No one can be excluded from the mercy of God.

As a young man, he studied chemistry before entering the priesthood as a Jesuit. In the 1970s, Bergoglio lived through the repression of Argentina's military junta. Elisabetta Piqué is an Argentine journalist and biographer of Bergoglio whom she knew well.

He firmly rejected the leftist ideology behind liberation theology, says Piqué, and focused on a Latin American grassroots religiosity. He followed the theology of the people, that was a kind of readaptation of the theology of liberation theology.

But without its Marxist ideology. But Francis was not afraid to criticize Western powers. In a sweeping document on the environment, he blamed humans for having turned the earth into what he called an immense pile of filth.

In one of his most blistering speeches, he said that behind the harm being done to the environment is what he called the dung of the devil, the unfettered pursuit of money. Once capital becomes an idol and guides people's decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it sets people against one another.

It even puts at risk our common home, our sister Mother Earth. Francis Staunch's environmentalism and critique of laissez-faire capitalism met with vehement opposition from conservatives within and outside the Catholic Church. His most vocal antagonists were traditionalist American Catholics who attacked the Pope in tweets, blogs, and conservative media.

Before his election, Bergoglio had traveled very little. As Francis, he became a global player, preferring to visit what he called the peripheries of the world in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He helped restore relations between the U.S. and Cuba.

Interfaith dialogue was one of the pillars of his papacy. He forged ever closer ties with Orthodox Christianity and Protestants and with Muslims. And Francis had no qualms in delivering overtly political messages.

Accepting a prestigious European prize, he sharply scolded the European Union for its treatment of migrants and fraying sense of unity. I dream of a Europe that is still young, that cares for children and offers fraternal help to the poor. I dream of a Europe that promotes and protects the rights of everyone.

And I dream of a Europe where being a migrant is not a crime. Church historian Massimo Fagioli says the world was fascinated by how Francis transformed the epitome of conservatism. The leader of a very conservative institution

who tries to change it radically from the top. That's revolutionary. A master at blending the spiritual and the political, Francis emerged as a daring, independent broker on the global stage. His papacy, inclusive and welcoming, re-energized the Catholic Church and brought it into the 21st century. Silvio Polgioli, NPR News, Rome. That's the state of the world from NPR. Thanks for listening.

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