By Geraldina Colotti on April 21, 2025
Pope Francis
“No one can serve two masters; for he will hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.” You cannot follow both the God of heaven and the god of money (Mammon, according to Canaanite religious tradition), that is, profit, gain, and wealth. This is what the New Testament prescribes (Mt 6:24-34). And this is what Jorge María Bergoglio preached, who had chosen, not by chance, the name Francis for his pontificate, for the first time in the history of the papacy: the name of St. Francis of Assisi, the friar who in the 13th century preached poverty, peace, and care for creation.
His voice, already weakened by the lung disease that afflicted him, was silenced on April 21, after a final message to the world, delivered at Easter in St. Peter’s Square. He was 88 years old. The Conclave elected him as the 266th Pope on March 13, 2013, reaching the expected two-thirds majority on the fifth ballot: the first Latin American pontiff, born in Buenos Aires on December 17, 1936, the son of Piedmontese immigrants and a member of the Society of Jesus.
His thinking was not similar to that of Liberation Theology, which placed the values of social and political emancipation of the poor at the center of its reflections, based on a Marxist analysis. Although he recognized its “significant contributions,” Bergoglio criticized its ideological “deviations” and its inability to reformulate, after the collapse of “real socialism,” a new radical creativity. He found more inspiration in the “theology of the people” of the Argentine Rafael Tello, who saw the people as the subject of history, whose cultural legacy should be reflected in the Church’s pastoral ministry.
For this reason, his pontificate did not produce structural reforms in the Church, such as those of the Second Vatican Council, initiated by Pope John XXIII on October 11, 1962, and concluded, in a more measured manner, by Paul VI on December 8, 1965. With his characteristic irony, which allowed him to face the numerous attacks from the most reactionary sectors, Bergoglio joked: “Some people made various jokes: ‘You should call yourself Adrian, because Adrian VI was the reformer, we must reform…’ And another said to me: ‘No, no: your name should be Clement. But why? That way you can take revenge on Clement XIV, who suppressed the Society of Jesus!” He confessed that for forty years he had recited a prayer that ended: ”Give me, Lord, a sense of humor. Grant me the grace to understand jokes, so that I may have a little joy in life and be able to share it with others. So be it.”
Bergoglio was not, therefore, a radical in his consistency of faith, like many religious in Argentina who sacrificed their lives by siding with the “least” and against the civil-military dictatorship of the 1970s. At that time, he decided to bury his head in the sand: like a man of the Institution. An institution capable of producing and managing the temporary oscillations necessary over the centuries according to its general needs. The Church, and even a pope who decides to call himself Francis after the little friar of Assisi, will therefore not be able to follow to the end the Gospel message of Christ, who invites the rich to divest themselves of all their possessions in order to aspire to the kingdom of heaven and justice.
However, after two reactionary pontificates—that of the “Polish Pope” (Karol Wojtyla) and the German (Joseph Ratzinger)—the Argentine Pope left an unprecedented cultural mark on the Vatican and marked a sharp break with the past. He came from Latin America, the most unequal continent, but where community still counts, where solidarity and origins matter, and where poverty cries out in scandal, even in the Vatican.
A change of style immediately announced with the renunciation of many papal privileges: by preferring a wooden cross to precious metals for the first day of his pontificate, by defining himself as “Bishop of Rome” and not Pope, and by choosing not to reside in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican, but in an apartment in the House of Santa Marta. And, subsequently, in the acts that have characterized his pontificate: criticism of the “globalization of indifference,” in defense of migrants and the excluded, world congresses for a new globalization of peoples, the construction of peace through dialogue, the denunciation of the arms industry, and the defense of the planet. It was Bergoglio who favored Obama’s trip to Cuba, in contrast to the anti-communism of his predecessor.
Immediately after the Palestinian resistance on October 7, the Pope condemned the Zionist offensive, calling it “the arrogance of the invader who imposes himself on dialogue in Palestine,” and provoked Netanyahu’s anger. In some interviews, he will admit to being a “Peronist” and to having at heart the construction of the Patria Grande (Great Homeland) dreamed of by Bolívar: although for the drafting of the encyclical Laudato si’, he will have at his side Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, accused of supporting the coup against Manuel Zelaya in 2009.
Bergoglio assumed the papacy eight days after the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Nicolás Maduro, elected to lead the country after the Comandante, visited Francis at the Vatican and brought him a statue of Gregorio Hernández, the doctor of the poor whose sainthood was being sought: one of the Pope’s last gestures before his death.
Today, on behalf of the government and people of Venezuela, Maduro remembered Francis as “a sincere friend, as the Pope who resolutely promoted the canonization of Dr. José Gregorio Hernández, a symbol of the faith of the Venezuelan people and a spiritual bridge between our struggles and our hope.” For Maduro, Pope Francis was “a transformative spiritual leader whose clear and courageous voice denounced the inequalities of the dominant system and advocated for a more humane, just, and deeply supportive world. Drawing on his Latin American identity, he promoted a Church committed to the causes of the poor, the protection of Mother Earth, and dialogue between cultures and religions.” A man of God “who did not hesitate to disturb the powerful with the truth of the Gospel.”
It is difficult to say now whether Francis’ legacy will endure in the figure who will take his place, prevailing in the intense battle underway for succession between progressives and conservatives. For now, in the chaotic, rapacious, and mercantile Rome of this jubilee year, amid the arrogant ostentation of the super-rich, the neo-fascists, and the international traffickers of death, the excessive power of Mammon seems to hold an appeal even in the world of the excluded.