Twelve years ago on March 13 the fumata bianca rose from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, and the world held its breath. Who would be the new pope?
When the announcement came Gerardo Duré of Moreno, a poor barrio on the edge of Argentina’s capital city, was stunned by the cardinals’ selection. The Most Rev. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was the first Latin American raised up from the conclave of cardinals.
Duré is a Roman Catholic dedicated to the theology of liberation—powerful in the 1970s in Latin America—and founder of the National Seminary of Theological Formation. He knew that Cardinal Bergoglio was a modest man, but he wasn’t sure if he would have the stamina to take a powerful stand for the poor or the oppressed.
Under the previous two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, support for liberation theology had been diminished. But when Bergoglio took Francis as his papal name, the first pope to do so, Duré knew that the Catholic Church was turning in a new direction.
Francis initiated immediate change. He refused the princely finery of the papacy—from clothing and footwear to his choice of residency and means of transportation. Fresh air was circling into the Vatican. Francis began a ministry of reformation, quietly sometimes, and other times directly.
In 2014, a year into his papacy, he had a private meeting with Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian Dominican priest. This was seen by Duré and others up and down the Americas as an unmistakable sign of thaw for liberation theology. Gutierrez had worked to systematize this new theology emerging out of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and a meeting of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia, in 1968. In 1971 he published his seminal book A Theology of Liberation.
Dismissed by Vatican authorities for almost 30 years, Gutierrez emerged from his meeting to say: “Pope Francis is doing what we have been hoping for a long time … placing the poor at the center of the Church’s mission.”
“Rome doesn’t change in a day,” Duré said. “But overall, Francis’ papacy was marked by a significant shift in its pastoral attention. Francis prioritized the peripheries, not just geographical, but the margins marked by poverty, social exclusion, marginalization, and human frailty in all its forms. He insisted on a preferential option for the poor, and he directly critiqued neo-liberalism and unchecked capitalism. He also aimed the church fully into a reimagining of our relationship with the natural world around us.”
In 2015 Pope Francis issued his foundational encyclical, Laudato Si’. Laudato Si’ marked a profound reorienting of the Roman Catholic vision of the created world, echoing age-old Indigenous communities’ knowledge that the Earth is not a resource to be exploited, or a thing to be used or discarded, but the holy and precious center of creation.
Francis called the Earth “our common home” and invited all people—Catholics and others—to participate in a global redirecting of human life toward the full flourishing of the world around us.
Laudato Si’ had a profound influence as churches around the globe created study and action groups, and mobilized for real change on issues related to the growing climate crisis. The church in Latin America would find particular resonance with Francis’ encyclical and his calls for a renewed relationship between humans and the planet.
In October 2019, Francis launched his Synod on the Amazon. Gathering bishops, priests, religious sisters and brothers, lay people, and dozens of Indigenous leaders from across the Pan-Amazonic region, the synod discussed the recentering of voices from the margins, and the renewed role of the church dedicated to communities along the tangled waterways of the world’s most voluminous river.
Francis’ document from this foundational gathering, Beloved Amazon, affirmed his commitment to a deeply reimagined church, acknowledging, for example, that in many remote regions, like the Amazon, leadership was already defined in profoundly different ways.
Some Catholics were disappointed that the synod did not take controversial actions, like advocating the ordination of women or married men. Others understood the complex theological positions that Francis was juggling, and were grateful for the pontiff’s attention to the precarious situation of the region’s Indigenous people, and the fragility of the river ecosystem.
Maria del Carmen Montes, a Mexican Roman Catholic feminist and founder of Mujeres para el dialogo (Women for Dialogue), said that Francis came to understand that he had to make room for women to gradually break the overwhelming presence of men in the Roman Catholic Church.
“It wasn’t easy. Not at all,” she said. “Many women were raised up within the Roman Curia, serving important positions, including a renowned Argentine theologian, Emilce Cuda, who became the secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.
“The church hierarchy has been deeply changed,” del Montes said. “Inside the Vatican, some will be fighting to erase the path that has been walked, while others will continue that momentum. We will have to wait and see.”
“This was more than the death of a pope,” said a Colombian community leader, Abilio Peña. “He was our grandfather. And our friend. But he laid the groundwork. Now we must carry it forward. Now it is our job.”
Armando Marquez, coordinator of FUNDAHMER, the Christian Base Community network in El Salvador, and a renowned scholar of St. Oscar Romero, said Francis’ greatest work was to initiate change in the church.
“What really mattered to him was the cracking open of the ancient structures. His push was to turn a huge hierarchy upside down. He did this by creating the consultative, synodal process. He fought against clericalism, and he fought to make a church that belonged to us all, where those from the edges of power would find a place at the table,” he told TLC.
“The Latin American church is the gathered community of the people of God,” Duré said. “We have known great suffering, and great hope for liberation, through our saints and martyrs.”
Francis took seriously the history of martyrdom in the Latin American church, especially those Christians who were murdered in recent decades by repressive, often state-related, authorities. He raised and named dozens of beatos and 942 saints, including many prominent figures whose causes had long been stalled.
First among these was Archbishop Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador, murdered by a sniper in March 1980.
In 2019 Bishop Enrique Angelelli, along with three others from Francis’ home country of Argentina, were beatified. Angelelli and the others, two priests and a layman, were deeply critical of local corrupt authorities, and they were murdered by state authorities in 1976.
In 2021 ten martyrs from the Guatemalan highlands were beatified, three Sacred Heart priests and seven lay people, including a 12-year-old boy, killed by state authorities during that country’s 36-year civil war. In 2022 Francis gave his blessing for the beatification of his fellow Jesuit, Fr. Rutilio Grande, and his two companions, also murdered by government forces in 1977.
“My heart aches,” said Maria del Carmen Montes of Mexico. “I feel a sense of emptiness, unease, helplessness—and at the same time, I am filled with gratitude for his life, for the effort he made to try to change the closed-mindedness of a church centered on itself. He was making things happen, together with those who trusted in his liberating project. Care for our common home, justice, migrants, ecumenism, synodality, peace—these things were at the heart of Francis’ faith, his understanding of what the church was, and what it is for. Now this is all on hold.
“More than ever, I—we—have to have faith. We have to trust that the risen Jesus will fill us with his Spirit to continue walking in Francis’s footsteps, who leaves us the task of filling this world with love,” she said.
It is clear that Francis’ papacy fell short of reaching a total reform that some hoped for. His tenure was bound to suffer from contradictions and complexities. Some situations of horrendous sexual abuse in the church—like the case within the Chilean Catholic church — were initially dealt with in troublesome ways. The role of women in ordained leadership remained a stagnant question.
Gerardo Duré, Maria del Carmen Montes, Abilio Peña and Armando Marquez, are all Latin American Catholics and, with me, members of the board of directors of the Oscar Romero Christian Network in Solidarity with the Peoples of Latin America. They all agree: In Latin America, Francis was our pope.
The Rev. Emilie Smith is Guest Writer on Covenant. She is parish priest of St. Barnabas Anglican Church, New Westminster, Canada, and TLC’s Latin America correspondent.
