by WALTER BAIER
IMAGE/Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images/CNN
Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio SJ (17 Dec 1936 – 21 Apr 2025)
“Against an Economy That Kills”
Just a few months after his election, Pope Francis startled the world with the words: “We are in a third world war fought piecemeal.” The last public message he shared with the city and the world on Easter Sunday echoed that same concern: “Peace for Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, and the whole world.” Indeed, concern for peace, the preservation of Mother Earth and care for the poor form the bracket that encloses Francis’ pontificate.
Equally characteristic was his first pilgrimage as pope, to the refugee camp on the island of Lampedusa. There, he condemned the transformation of the Mediterranean into a cemetery without gravestones, calling out the shame of the European Union.
On 13 March 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the first Latin American pope. By choosing the name Francis, he signalled his commitment to the poor. In his first apostolic exhortation, he wrote:
“Just as the commandment ‘You shall not kill’ sets a clear limit to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘no’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.”
The milestones of Francis’ social teaching are his encyclicals Laudato si’ (2015) and Fratelli tutti (2020), where he called for integral ecology, global social justice, and the preservation of nature.
“If nature is seen solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society. The logic that allows the strongest to prevail has led to immense inequality, injustice, and violence affecting the majority of humanity, because resources then become the property of those who arrive first or who are most powerful—the winner takes all.”
To those who accused him of communism for such words, the pope replied that they failed to understand that the poor are at the very heart of the Gospel.
Francis was not a communist, but a man of dialogue. Twice, he welcomed representatives of the European left to the Vatican: Alexis Tsipras and myself in 2014, and a delegation from the Christian-Marxist dialogue initiative DIALOP in 2024—meetings that went far beyond formal protocol.
The Church is a human institution. Pope Francis was not infallible, nor did he wish to be seen as such. Even under his leadership, the progress of women’s emancipation fell short of what was needed, and his stance on homosexual love remained ambivalent. Yet much of what he said and did pointed beyond these limitations—toward the utopia of a Church that stands with the poor and works alongside all people of goodwill to safeguard our common world.
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