World Pays Tribute to Pope Francis (2025)

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Here’s more on the pope’s legacy and what comes next.

Francis’ death, a day after he appeared in his wheelchair to bless the faithful in St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday, leaves the church’s leadership with a critical decision: Choose a new pope who will follow his welcoming and global approach, or restore the more doctrinaire path of his predecessors.

The Vatican announced Francis’ death in a somber early morning statement. “At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father,” read a statement from Cardinal Kevin Farrell. An American of Irish origin, Cardinal Farrell will serve as the Vatican’s de facto administrator during the period, possibly weeks, until a new pope is chosen.

Mourners, some in tears, quickly gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, where the death of Francis at age 88 caught many by surprise.

“We saw him yesterday,” Marco Volpi, 69, said. “We did not expect such a tragic ending.”

The Vatican said a public viewing for Francis could take place as early as Wednesday. It released a report that listed the causes of death as a cerebral stroke, which led to a coma and “irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse.”

The Vatican also released Francis’ will: True to his roots as a humble champion of the poor, he asked that his tomb be “simple, without particular decoration and with the only inscription: Franciscus.”

As tributes poured in from global leaders offering condolences to the world’s Catholics and praising the pontiff’s commitment to the poor and marginalized, his death created a vacuum in the leadership of church. It also set in motion deliberations and machinations to choose a successor — driving speculation about possible contenders.

After rising from modest means in Argentina to lead the world’s more than a billion Catholics, Francis used his 12-year pontificate to try to reshape the church into a more inclusive institution.

After early missteps, Francis made considerable strides in addressing the church’s sexual abuse crisis, and he tackled its murky financial culture. His remarkable global stature early in his pontificate — when liberal leaders around the world likewise emphasized climate change, migrants’ rights and income equality — gave way to a populist period when he sometimes seemed a solitary voice.

But he never changed his approach, even focusing on migrants in his final remarks the day before he died.

Here’s what else to know:

• Francis’ life: Read the full obituary for Pope Francis here.

• Health struggles: Just a day before his death, Pope Francis met with Vice President JD Vance and blessed the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for Easter Mass — one of several public appearances over the past week that came despite strict orders from his doctors to steer clear of crowds after a lengthy hospital stay for pneumonia.

• Choosing a new pope: The death of a pope sets in motion a chain of rituals and procedures to choose his successor. After Francis’ funeral, and within 15 to 20 days, the dean of the College of Cardinals will summon the cardinals to Rome for what is known as a conclave to elect a new pope. A recent film, “Conclave,” offers some clues about the process.

• Pope and president: Francis and Mr. Trump rose to global prominence during the same decade of rapid political and societal change. Both leveraged their personal charisma to flex their power in transformative ways. But the pontiff and the president had little in common.

• Papal legacy: Francis created thousands of bishops and appointed more than half of the College of Cardinals, at times transforming the inner workings of the church, and spotlighted issues like climate change and the plight of migrants worldwide. He also opened space for debate.

Looking back at Pope Francis’ 2015 visit to the U.S.

Latin Americans remember a pontiff who was one of their own.

Martha Patricia Molina, a Catholic human rights activist from Nicaragua who follows repression of the church closely, said Francis spoke out about the crackdown there on at least 16 occasions, including when he referred to the Nicaraguan leaders as a “crude dictatorship.”

“He was always aware of all the barbarity the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship was carrying out in Nicaragua,” Ms. Molina said.

Others recalled Francis as a force for change who emphasized compassion for immigrants, even in the face of United States policies aimed at curbing migration from Latin America, while reaching out to gay Catholics and victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.

“He always stood with those who need it most: the poor, refugees, the youth, the elderly and the victims of wars and all forms of prejudice,” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist president of Brazil, the country with the world’s largest Catholic population, said on social media.

On his trips to Latin America, Francis also showed how a pope can steer the church in new directions, staking out positions on polarizing issues, like focusing often on compassion for immigrants, to the chagrin of his conservative critics in the United States.

In Mexico, in 2016, he expressed shame over the exploitation of Indigenous peoples and prayed at the tomb of a bishop who adhered to liberation theology, a movement in which priests actively engaged in improving the lives of the poor — sometimes to the point of taking up arms as guerrillas.

Speaking to a profoundly Catholic country, Claudia Sheinbaum, the first Jewish president of Mexico, chose on Monday to remember Francis as “a humanist, a man who was always close to the most humble, to the poor” and who was able to strike a chord with Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

In Venezuela, a crowd gathered for a mass on Monday to honor Francis in Valencia, about two hours west of Caracas, called by the area’s archbishop, Monsignor Jesús González de Zárate, who is also the president of the Episcopal Conference of Venezuela, which unites the country’s bishops and archbishops.

María Luna, 76, who attended the mass, thanked Francis for clearing the way for two Venezuelans to reach sainthood: Carmen Rendíles Martínez, who dedicated her life to education and the poor, and Dr. José Gregorio Hernández, who is thought by believers to help cure those who pray to him.

“I felt a sense of pride when I thought that the pope was similar to our culture,” said Ms. Luna. “He was Argentine, spoke our language, and shared our concerns. He always promoted dialogue and respect for the Earth.”

Others in the region sought to bury the hatchet over ideological differences with Francis, who was viewed as a progressive.

“Despite differences that now seem minor, having had the chance to know him in his kindness and wisdom was a true honor for me,” said Javier Milei, the far-right libertarian who is Argentina’s president.

In Cuba, Ariel Suárez Jáuregui, deputy secretary of the country’s Conference of Catholic Bishops, said Francis was particularly adored in the country for his simple and direct style of communicating.

On a visit to Cuba in 2015, Francis met with leaders Fidel and Raúl Castro, and went to Holguín, the first time a pope had visited the city. And in 2016, on a brief stopover in Cuba on his way to Mexico, Francis met in Havana with the Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, the first encounter in history between a Roman Catholic pope and a Russian Orthodox patriarch.

Still, others in Cuba wanted more from Francis.

Mario Félix Lleonart Barroso, a Baptist pastor from Cuba who went into exile in the United States, noted how in 2022 a Catholic priest in Cuba sent the pope an open letter, saying Cubans were ashamed of the pontiff after he failed to speak out against the government’s crackdown against protesters a year earlier.

“We expected stronger words from Pope Francis, and this did not happen,” Mr. Lleonart Barroso said.

Others in Nicaragua echoed the same sentiment.

Kevin Solis, a student activist from Nicaragua who spent three years in prison after the president, Mr. Ortega, began a brutal crackdown on the mass protests that erupted in 2018, said he felt “disappointed” by the pope’s “weak and timid stance” regarding the systematic human rights violations in Nicaragua.

“He never adopted a solid stance. I never heard him publicly demand the Ortega regime to stop imprisoning and torturing political dissidents, or Catholic priests. Instead there was just silence,” said Mr. Solis, who is a Catholic churchgoer. “Every day we spent in prison without hearing his support we felt abandoned by our own church and by a man who came from this very region.”

Francis had health issues that can increase the risk of a stroke.

When an infection occurs in a patient with bronchiectasis, “what can sometimes happen is things go from bad to worse,” said Dr. Burton Dickey, a pulmonary and critical care physician at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. What might start out as a minor airway infection can extend into the tiny air sacs where the lungs and blood exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, causing pneumonia. The pope was recently hospitalized for five weeks with pneumonia.

That, in turn, can increase the tendency for blood clots to form — and, therefore, increase the likelihood of stroke, Dr. Dickey said. A large stroke can lead to a coma, as occurred with Francis.

In a statement announcing the cause of death, the Vatican said that the stroke had led to “cardiocirculatory collapse,” which occurs when the heart and lungs can no longer function.

This is the final event in any death, explained Dr. Michelle Kittleson, a professor of cardiology at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.

There are several ways that a stroke might lead to cardiocirculatory collapse, she said. A stroke can affect the parts of the brain that control heart function or it could cause brain swelling that creates pressure and moves brain tissue, leading the body to shut down.

In some patients, Dr. Kittleson said, a stroke could occur alongside or precipitate a heart attack, which itself can lead to the collapse of the cardiocirculatory system.

Argentines mourn a ‘humble’ pope and a native son.

Instead, grief-stricken Argentines noted what many considered a deeply personal loss before altars, with flowers, hand-scrawled messages and eclectic tokens of affection.

“I remember he was a good person, very humble. He always thought of the poor, always,” said Susana Perez, 67, at the Basílica de San José de Flores, a church just blocks away from Francis’s childhood home in Buenos Aires, the capital.

Condolences poured in from all political and religious corners, and reflections dominated local radio stations and television. Even as they paid tribute, some Argentines said they had hoped Francis would have returned to Argentina after he was elected pope.

Still, President Javier Milei declared seven days of mourning and midafternoon masses of remembrance were quickly scheduled. At the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, schoolchildren talked about the pope’s death during a tour.

Before becoming pope, Francis’ pastoral work in Buenos Aires was defined by his commitment and involvement with the city’s poorer neighborhoods. As a result, many felt a personal connection to Francis and shared stories of their encounters with him.

Ms. Perez said she knew the pope before he became pontiff because he offered Mass on the street near her Buenos Aires home once a month. “He helped a lot in the soup kitchens, often donating money from his own pocket,” she said.

Francis also left a mark on Matilde Dolores’ life. “I knew him. He gave me my Confirmation,” said Ms Dolores, 82, and a retired nurse. She was at the Basilica de San Jose de Flores wearing dark sunglasses, on a mission to pray for him.

“He was such a kind priest,” she said as she broke down in tears. “When he led the Mass, he always spoke up for the needy.”

At the cathedral mourners lined up to take photos of a framed photograph of the pope before a gilded altar. It was flanked by a papal tiara and a giant staff, meant to symbolize his pastoral work. In a notebook, they scrawled messages of condolences.

“He was just different,” said Diana Pallais, 56, a Nicaraguan who works for a software company, and was visiting Buenos Aires this week. “He believed we needed to understand each other and build bridges with gay people, with poor people, with immigrants. People who are being attacked by world leaders today.”

Norberto Rodríguez, 59, gripped a photo of Pope Francis that he had found on Facebook, printed and brought to the cathedral. He walked along the pews, extending the framed photograph so others could kiss it.

Mr. Rodríguez, 59, said he met the pope many years ago, before he became pontiff, after he delivered an outdoor Mass in a gritty part of Buenos Aires. He was living on the street at the time, lost and seeking direction.

“I gave him my hand,” he said. “He told me to follow God. That there may be bad times, but that you’re never alone.”

Camila de la Cruz, a 26-year-old studying to become a kindergarten teacher, brought two offerings for Francis to the cathedral: a rosary and stamps from San Lorenzo soccer club.

“He was a fan of San Lorenzo — the club was his home,” she said.

Even after becoming pope, Ms. De la Cruz said, he remained humble — always caring for the less privileged and preaching empathy. “He kept all of us in mind,” she said. “He never forgot Argentina. He never stopped praying for his country and his beloved San Lorenzo.”

Among Argentines, there were also those who criticized the pope for expressing views about Argentine society, including a rise in poverty, that many regarded as showing sympathy for left-leaning administrations.

“I think that because of his position he should have been more neutral,” said German Zabala, 42, an Uber driver. Still, “it’s a great loss,” he said, lamenting, like many other Argentines, that the pope never made it back to his native soil.

“It would have been a revolution for us," Mr. Zabala said, “because we were waiting for him.”

Francis opened the door to the L.G.B.T.Q. community, but only so much.

“What he did for the L.G.B.T.Q. community is more than all of his predecessors combined,” said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit writer and high-profile proponent of a more inclusive church.

“Just acknowledging them, recognizing them, accompanying them, advocating for them, listening to them,” he said. “He was the first pope to ever use the word gay publicly, and he met regularly with transgender Catholics, even toward the end of his life. No pope has ever done that.”

Sexuality was one of many issues in which Catholic conservatives disagreed with Pope Francis, and it contributed to the emergence of an influential and well-organized conservative opposition to his papacy in the United States. But in other countries, especially those where homosexuality is more widely stigmatized, some saw Francis’ accepting attitude as a breath of fresh air.

Brain Mboh, 28, said he appreciated that Pope Francis had “consistently stated” that homosexuality was not a crime, which was a powerful message in Mr. Mboh’s native Cameroon, where homosexuality is illegal.

But Francis’ change in tone did not reflect a deeper reconsideration of church doctrine, and his record on L.G.B.T.Q. issues included perhaps as many traditional retrenchments as it did pastoral leaps forward.

He allowed priests to bless gay couples, but he also reaffirmed church teaching that marriage could only be between a man and a woman. He used a slur for gay men when he complained about the number of gay seminarians to a group of 250 bishops in Rome, then apologized when the incident was reported in the news media. He then repeated the church’s instruction that men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should not enter the priesthood.

Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, which presses for greater inclusion of L.G.B.T.Q. people in the church, said he thought Francis “knew that the whole church was not ready yet for full acceptance of L.G.B.T.Q. people.”

“The Catholic Church is a big ship to turn — it takes a long, long time,” he said. “He was very concerned with keeping the church together, and that is why he sort of stopped at that first step of dialogue and learning and being welcoming, before making any substantial doctrinal changes.”

Mr. DeBernardo said he also thought it was important to remember that Pope Francis, who was born in 1936, “was also a man of his time.”

“For someone who is 88 years old, and who grew up in an institution that was as homophobic as the Catholic Church was in those times, that he was able to make the changes he did is really remarkable,” Mr. DeBernardo said.

Father Martin, whose support for L.G.B.T.Q. ministry has made him a lightning rod for conservative criticism in the United States, met with the pope after he publicly apologized for the episode involving the gay slur.

He said they had “a challenging conversation,” but he thought the outcome illustrated the pope’s openness and humility.

“A couple of days later I met him again at a public event, and he said, ‘Thank you for that conversation. I really needed that,’” Father Martin said. “And I thought, ‘What kind of a person thanks someone for a challenging conversation?’ This was a person who was open to meeting with people, engaging with them and changing his mind.”

Eugene Ndi Ndi contributed reporting from Cameroon.

Pope’s will says he wants to be buried in a simple tomb in Rome.

Francis also visited St. Mary Major every time he returned to the Vatican after a hospital stay, including on March 23, when he left Gemelli Hospital after a 38-day stay. On that occasion, he did not get out of the car.

In his will, Francis specified that “the tomb must be in the earth; simple, without particular decoration.” He asked that the tomb be placed in the aisle next to the Pauline Chapel, where an important Marian icon, the Salus Populi Romani, is located.

Francis said that in being buried there, he wanted to thank the Virgin “for her docile and maternal care.”

Tradition holds that the icon was made by Saint Luke the Evangelist, the patron saint of painters. It is an image Francis was particularly devoted to, continuing a Jesuit tradition. According to the basilica’s website, since the Jesuit order was founded, Jesuits have “fostered devotion to the icon” by distributing copies of the icon throughout the world.”

Francis first revealed in 2023 during an interview for a Mexican TV program that he wanted to be buried at St. Mary Major. In the program, he said he wanted to be laid to rest there “because of my great devotion.”

On Monday, the Vatican also released Francis’ death certificate, which said he died at 7:35 a.m. Monday local time of a cerebral stroke that caused a coma and “irreversible” cardiac arrest.

Prof. Andrea Arcangeli, the director of the Vatican’s health offices, wrote that the pope had arterial hypertension, multiple bronchiectasis and Type II diabetes, and that he had been affected by episodes of acute respiratory failure. These took place when he was in the hospital with pneumonia in both lungs.

The date that Francis signed his will is the feast day of Sts. Peter and Paul and a holiday in Rome. He says in the document that he had written it “sensing that the sunset of my earthly life is approaching with lively hope in eternal life.” He made reference to “the suffering that has been present in the last part of my life.” A year earlier, he had undergone colon surgery, the first time he was admitted to Gemelli Hospital.

In closing his will, Francis asked God to “give the deserved reward to those who loved me and will continue to pray for me,” echoing a refrain that closed many of his addresses.

For a Times reporter who covered him, Pope Francis was always a surprise.

When, eight years later, I reported on another conclave and again stood in St. Peter’s Square scrutinizing the color of smoke leaking out the Sistine Chapel (which signals that a new pope has been chosen), I thought the Argentine cardinal had become too old to be a top candidate.

I was wrong again.

Cardinal Bergoglio, who took the name Pope Francis, the first to do so in the history of the Catholic Church, was a pope of surprises. Over the dozen years that I covered him, from the day of his election to the day of his death at 88, he kept the church he led, the world he cared about and the reporters who followed him on their toes. I covered him in unexpected destinations — Mongolia, Iraq, Myanmar — where he drew attention to humanitarian plights that were off the global radar.

One indelible image I recall was seeing him visibly moved, his voice tight, as he came face to face in Bangladesh with members of the Rohingya ethnic minority who had suffered enormous persecution. For me, that hammered home how much Francis cared about migrants, the displaced victims of war and the most forgotten and marginalized among us, no matter their religion. For him, their suffering was real.

But I also came to appreciate Francis as a savvy political operator not to be trifled with.

When conservative cardinals eager to erode the pope’s authority wrote Francis an official letter of “dubia,” Latin for doubt, asking him to clear up the “grave disorientation and great confusion” they said a document written by him had caused, prompting a question of church law, he simply refused to respond.

That infuriated them, and over the years the pressure, and noise, the conservative opposition produced on affiliated news outlets led some of them to suggest that the time of a schism, or formal break, with the church, was nigh.

On one papal flight, I asked Francis about the unanswered dubia questions and whether he worried if his opponents in the American church might break off from Rome.

“I pray there are no schisms,” Francis told me. “But I’m not scared.”

It was the papal equivalent of dusting off his shoulders with disdain.

On the papal plane, he was an easygoing guy with a good sense of humor, better at glad-handing the news media than all of the presidential candidates and presidents I had covered. He willingly compared notes with me on getting stuck in elevators after a week in which we had both gotten stuck in elevators. I saw him accept enough sweets to feed an army.

In the Vatican, he surprised me with a governing style that his critics considered authoritarian (“Frankie, Where’s Your Mercy,” posters in Rome read) and an ability to get around the traps of an institution built to slow things down. At other times, he stunned me with his apparent indecision, punting important decisions, like allowing some older, married men to serve as priests in remote locations.

I remember being astonished when he wrapped up a monthlong meeting of bishops in 2018 by going off-topic with a rant about the church being “persecuted” and “dirtied” by accusations from the devil.

But I heard stories from his friends that he learned from his mistakes and showed a capacity to change, perhaps the most surprising of all human traits. When he believed his bishops over sexual abuse victims, he admitted the error of his ways and promised it wouldn’t happen again. He took important measures to improve safety in the church.

Most surprising, perhaps, was how large a figure Francis became in my own life. He was a constant, looming presence. My children grew up with my listening to papal speeches in the car. I gave the rosary beads the pope had handed me to relatives and friends who needed them more than I did.

When he first became pope, at age 76, he said he thought he might last a few years in the job. Instead, he lived a dozen more, and his reforms and setbacks, his false starts and unexpected leaps forward demanded my undivided attention and time.

I traveled with Francis to dozens of countries — forgotten corners of the globe full of the downtrodden — and saw the world the way he saw it.

In a way, I think that was the surprise he most wanted to give.

Trump and Francis had sharply different views, and sharp disagreements.

But Pope Francis and President Trump disagreed over far more than style. By the time they met at the Vatican in 2017, the vast differences in their priorities and worldviews were clear.

Both rose to global prominence during the same decade of rapid political and societal change, as war, poverty and climate change disrupted nations and sent millions of migrants across the globe. And both leveraged their personal charisma to flex their power in transformative ways, remaking the Catholic church and American politics in their own outsider images.

Yet the relationship between the two was defined by the chasm between them, frequently bursting into public view in extraordinary clashes that revealed radically opposing visions of how to lead, and of what kind of world they hoped to create.

Until the pope’s final day, the two leaders had been tangling over immigration, an issue both saw as crucial to their mission and legacy.

Mr. Trump twice won the White House on promises to halt illegal border crossings, blaming undocumented immigrants for crime, economic malaise and terrorism.

Pope Francis believed that Christian love required compassionate care for migrants, and that Mr. Trump’s agenda of mass deportation violated the “dignity of many men and women, and of entire families.”

His first papal trip, in 2013, had been to the island of Lampedusa, a Mediterranean gateway to Europe for asylum seekers, to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis he felt the world was ignoring.

During the 2016 election, the pope criticized Mr. Trump’s pledge to build a wall on the United States’ border with Mexico, saying it suggested that the Republican candidate was “not Christian.”

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis said as he flew back to Rome from Mexico hours after celebrating a 200,000-person Mass in Ciudad Juárez.

Mr. Trump shot back, calling the Pope’s comments “disgraceful” and saying, through a campaign statement, that if the Vatican were ever “attacked by ISIS,” the pope “would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President.”

Representative Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat and observant Catholic, said the Pope’s early criticism of Mr. Trump had created the “completely unprecedented circumstance” of a pontiff who had openly excoriated an American president and a president who had been eager to return the fire.

“The fact that Trump, unlike previous presidents — Democrats and Republicans — was so vitriolically against immigration, and would use, and continues to use, really insulting rhetoric about immigrants, prompted this pope to speak out in a way that you didn’t see earlier,” said Mr. Boyle, who attended Pope Francis’s address to Congress in 2015.

On Monday, unlike other world leaders, who offered grateful and glowing testimonials to the pope, Mr. Trump offered a terse tribute on social media. “Rest in Peace Pope Francis!” he wrote on Truth Social. “May God Bless him and all who loved him!”

Mr. Trump also addressed the pope’s death in brief remarks later on Monday morning before the White House Easter Egg Roll.

“He loved the world, and he especially loved people that were having a hard time — and that’s good with me,” Mr. Trump said, announcing that he was ordering flags at the White House and federal and military facilities to be flown at half-staff.

Asked if he agreed with the pope’s tolerance toward migrants, Mr. Trump said, “Yeah, I do.” But moments later, in response to a question about a legal case over his administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants, Trump railed against the “millions and millions” of migrants who have entered the United States.

After Mr. Trump’s first election, the two met — for the only time — at the Vatican in 2017. The photos quickly went viral. Standing side by side, the president smiled broadly as the pope appeared stern.

The Pope gave the president, a known skeptic of climate change, a set of English-language translations of his papal writings, including a 2015 encyclical on climate change.

Mr. Trump, seemingly star-struck, told reporters: “He is something. We had a fantastic meeting.”

But in 2018, Pope Francis condemned Mr. Trump’s separation of migrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico, calling the policy “immoral” and “contrary to our Catholic values.”

And in 2019, in another criticism of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, the pope warned that those who close borders “will become prisoners of the walls that they build.”

The pope’s tone with Mr. Trump was markedly different from the one he had struck with former President Barack Obama, whose White House he visited and with whose goals he was often aligned, on issues including an easing of tensions with Cuba and the Iran nuclear deal.

The Obama-Francis relationship had symbolized what many liberals believed was the coming of a progressive era on the world stage.

“There was a meeting of minds,” said John Kerry, Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, who met repeatedly with Pope Francis. “The pope had enormous admiration for President Obama’s journey and what he represented and his efforts as a peacemaker.”

That sense of overlapping missions allowed Democrats to claim the pope as one of their own — even if they didn’t agree on every issue, including abortion rights and same-sex marriage. But it also set the stage for Republican backlash and for the conflict with Mr. Trump, who aggressively courted disgruntled conservative Catholics.

“For Donald Trump, Pope Francis looked like an enemy because he’s been friendly with Obama and with Biden,” said Steven P. Millies, the director of the Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and an expert on the Catholic church’s relationship to politics. “There was not going to be much chance of a personal relationship between Pope Francis and Donald Trump. What we can call personal tensions have been visible very publicly.”

Indeed, after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the White House, becoming America’s second Catholic president, the Pope called him “to tell me how much he appreciated the fact that I would focus on the poor and focus on the needs of people who are in trouble,” Mr. Biden later recounted.

And in a visit to the Vatican in 2021, after U.S. bishops had advanced a proposal that would deny Mr. Biden communion for his support of abortion rights, Mr. Biden said the pope had told him that he was happy that Mr. Biden was a “good Catholic.”

By contrast, when Mr. Biden decided to not seek re-election in 2024 and Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the pope advised Catholic voters to choose the “lesser of two evils” because “both are against life” — Ms. Harris for her support for abortion rights, and Mr. Trump for closing the door to immigrants.

“Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong; it is cruelty,” Francis said. “Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things.”

Mr. Trump’s re-election in November again put the two leaders’ starkly contrasting values in opposition. As Mr. Trump promised to elevate conservative Christian values in America, Pope Francis, whom Catholics view as God’s representative on earth, escalated his criticism.

In January, the pope said in an interview on Italian television that it would be a “disgrace” if Mr. Trump went forward with plans to intensify immigration enforcement. In February, the pope issued an unusual open letter to America’s Catholic bishops denouncing mass deportations and predicting that the policy would “end badly.”

“I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church,” he wrote, “not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”

The letter, written just days before the pope was hospitalized, also offered an apparent rebuttal to Vice President JD Vance’s interpretation of a Catholic teaching that he had used to defend the administration’s deportation policies.

Still, in the final hours of his life, the pope briefly welcomed Mr. Vance, a Catholic convert, into his residence for an Easter greeting. Soon after, he went to the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, where an aide read aloud what would be the pontiff’s final public message.

“How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!” he said.

Romans mourn Francis, their bishop and their ‘man of peace.’

“After we heard the brutal news, we thought, ‘We have to come here,’” said Mauro Cappelli, standing with family in the shadow of the basilica, a short distance from their home.

The massive church stands on the outskirts of one of Rome’s most populous neighborhoods and halfway across the city from St. Peter’s Square.

Under bright blue skies, pilgrims — including large tour groups led by flag-holding guides — streamed into the basilica. Some visitors posed for pictures upon crossing the threshold of the basilica’s holy door, newly opened for the Roman Catholic Church Jubilee.

Inside, a trio of older Italians reflected on Francis’ passing. Like all those interviewed, they spoke in Italian.

“Even if it was foreseeable, it was still a shock,” said Pasquale Di Tardo. He had traveled to Rome from Bari, in Italy’s southern Puglia region, for the Easter weekend accompanied by his wife, Rosa Rita Porro. Mr. Di Tardo said he had watched Francis grow increasingly frail in recent years, and a kind of bond inside him strengthened.

“It’s a shame,” Mr. Di Tardo said about the pontiff’s death at 88.

Maria Puma of Rome, the couple’s friend, looked down and quietly said she was still processing Francis’ death and his legacy. “He has started his eternal life,” she said. Romans don’t always agree with their bishop, and she added, “Sometimes, I had my criticisms.”

But on this day of mourning, the Romans seemed to draw strength from the memory of Francis’ unyielding commitment to tolerance and equality.

“He was such a strong figure, a man of peace,” said Mr. Cappelli’s wife, Maria Antonini, standing next to her husband.

Several said that they had found inspiration in his messages of social justice, especially as his words stood in sharp contrast to the more hard-nosed rhetoric common with today’s world leaders.

“We can only hope he has opened a door to a better future,” Mr. Cappelli said.

How Pope Francis helped inspire the global movement against climate change.

In 2015, he penned the first-ever papal encyclical focused solely on the environment. In “Laudato Si,” a sprawling call to action, the pope recognized climate change as both a social and environmental crisis, and emphasized that its greatest consequences were shouldered by the poor.

That year, when 195 nations agreed to the landmark Paris Agreement, a global pact against climate change, at least 10 world leaders made specific reference to the pope’s words during their addresses to the United Nations climate conference.

“Before Pope Francis, climate change was seen either as a political issue or a scientific issue. What his encyclical did was frame it as a spiritual issue,” said Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and the editor at large of America Media, a media company with a Catholic perspective.

“He really started from the standpoint that God had created the universe, had created the world and that this was a responsibility of ours — to care for it,” Father Martin said.

With its publication, “Laudato Si” became a permanent part of official church teaching. It was one of four encyclicals penned during Francis’ tenure. In it, he clearly laid out the consequences of climate change, from loss of biodiversity to water scarcity and the breakdown of society.

“He noted in ‘Laudato Si’ that while humans were creating ‘an immense pile of filth,’ we also had the ability to change course and ‘sing as we go,’” meaning that the struggle should not take away the joy of hope, said Dan Misleh, the founder and executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant, a U.S. organization.

“He was wide-eyed about the challenge but also encouraged us to be hopeful for the future,” Mr. Misleh said.

Mauricio López Oropeza, a rector and lay vice president of the Amazon Ecclesial Network, who contributed to “Laudato Si,” said the statement reaffirmed that many Catholics were already committed to environmental issues.

Others were unconvinced. “I have to say that for the general membership of the church, this was not very well received, and was actually contested in many places,” Mr. López Oropeza said.

“Many people resented him framing what they saw as a political issue into a spiritual one,” said Father Martin, who consulted on parts of “Laudato Si.”

In a follow-up to “Laudato Si” published in 2023, Francis again implored the world to take action. “Once and for all, let us put an end to the irresponsible derision that would present this issue as something purely ecological, ‘green,’ romantic, frequently subject to ridicule by economic interest,” he wrote.

In the exhortation, known as “Laudate Deum,” Francis specifically called out the United States, pointing out that its per-person emissions were twice those of China, and seven times those of the average in the world’s poorest countries. He called for a broad change in the “irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model.”

Francis saw cooperation among governments as key to addressing climate change, and during his time as pope, the Vatican hosted conferences with mayors, religious leaders, money managers and oil companies to find solutions.

The teachings of “Laudato Si” have reverberated with Catholics worldwide. Several Catholic institutions divested from fossil fuels in the years after its publication.

One of the most significant expressions of “Laudato Si” has been the church’s work in the Amazon basin, said Mr. López Oropeza, who has worked in the region for 12 years.

But the real-world impact of Francis’ climate leadership was “not enough,” as Mr. Misleh, of Catholic Climate Covenant, put it. Since the publication of “Laudato Si,” global emissions have continued to rise, which Mr. Misleh said he blames in part on general apathy, especially by people in wealthy nations.

Tributes poured in from global climate leaders on Monday morning. “He was deeply involved in trying to figure out how we move on the inequities that come from the climate crisis,” said John Kerry, who served as President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s special envoy for climate, calling Francis “a humanitarian more than anything.”

In a Substack post on Monday, Bill McKibben, a prominent author and climate activist, called Francis “perhaps the world’s greatest environmental champion.”

Mr. López Oropeza said he thought Francis’ climate leadership should be one of the “essential legacies” of his papacy.

“This is one of the most pressing challenges of our time,” he said, adding that it most affected “impoverished communities, and if we don’t respond now, it will be too late.”