New Mexico religious scholars reflect on the late Pope Francis

Pope Francis, leader of the Catholic faithful, died Monday at his residence in the Vatican, just one day after appearing at St. Peter’s Square to offer a public Easter blessing. He was 88.

Francis, sometimes dubbed the world’s parish priest, or the people’s pope, was known for his humility and charm — and was beloved by Catholics in New Mexico for his lifelong championing of immigrants and the impoverished. He was unafraid to kiss and wash the feet of the poor and downtrodden, as a symbol of humility and to bring peace to warring nations, like in Sudan five years ago, and was known for eschewing some of the richer trappings of the Vatican.

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio to Italian immigrants in Argentina, he made history as the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope — also known as the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic order of priests and brothers.

“I feel with the issues that New Mexico is wrestling now — poverty and addiction and the border — I think he represented messages to bring hope and purpose for people, particularly people of New Mexico,” said John Sitler, a religious studies teacher at Albuquerque’s Menaul School.

Introduced as the 266th pope on March 13, 2013, he led the Catholic Church in a new direction, ushering in an age of immigrant rights and expanding acceptance of LGBTQ+ communities. Francis named himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century friar known for personal simplicity and care for society’s outcasts.

Reactions worldwide were mixed, with some groups praising the pope for embracing progressive ideals that led to the church changing its stance on the death penalty, to priests being able to bless same-sex marriages, to rebuking nations for stances that harmed immigrants. Other groups admonished the pope for leaving tradition behind.

Francis died of a stroke that put him into a coma and led to heart failure, the Vatican said. He died at 7:35 a.m., a day after leading the Vatican’s Easter Sunday services — but following a tough year marked by an extended hospitalization for pneumonia.

‘A huge impact in New Mexico’

In New Mexico, where 63% of the population identifies as Christian and 27% identify as Catholic, according to the Pew Research Center — making Catholicism the second-largest religious belief in the state — the pope’s influence brought change and attention to certain issues.

In the traditionally Hispanic, liberal and poor state of New Mexico, Francis’ ideals at times matched up with those in the state.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the pope established emergency funds that would be issued to “aid of those people and communities who are being tragically impacted by the spread of COVID-19,” the pope once wrote in a statement issued from the Vatican.

Albuquerque and Las Cruces branches were among the several Catholic Charities that received financial support during the pandemic.

“Francis’ pontificate has had a huge impact in New Mexico,” said Kathleen Holscher, associate professor of religious studies and American Studies and endowed chair in Roman Catholic studies at the University of New Mexico.

While Francis never made a trip to New Mexico, local bishops referenced the pope’s mission to reach people outside of the church, like immigrant and queer communities.

The pope’s presence is also felt in Archbishop John Wester, who Holscher described as being “very much a Pope Francis-style archbishop.” She described Wester’s priorities, such as abolishing nuclear weapons and the ideology of “synodality,” or people walking together, as ideas influenced by Francis.

Wester, appointed by Francis in 2015, met with him many times.

“He was very warm, very affable. He put you at ease, and was very easy to talk to, very kind,” Wester told the Journal, “very concerned about you, and in this case, the people of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. And he was known for that. Just a gentle, very kind person, and it came out quite clearly.”

The archbishop said Francis exemplified the teachings of Jesus, making the pastoral outreach of the Catholic Church a priority.

“Pope Francis’s legacy will be that he really cared so much for the poor, the immigrant, those on the periphery, the downtrodden. That was part of his ministry in Buenos Aires as archbishop there, and he certainly brought that with him as pope.

History of Pope Francis

Francis, born on Dec. 17, 1936, was the eldest son of Regina María Sívori and Italian immigrant Mario José Bergoglio, who fled from the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini to Flores, a neighborhood within Buenos Aires. As a child, he loved to Tango, but was also deeply religious from an early age.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, later Pope Francis, joined the path to priesthood at 17 years old, crediting his grandmother for teaching him how to pray.

At the age of 21, Francis had a portion of his lung removed after suffering from life-threatening pneumonia and three cysts. He would again suffer from lung-related health issues in 2025, spending 38 days in a Gemelli hospital trying to recover from chronic lung disease.

After becoming an ordained priest in 1969, Francis became the head of the Jesuits in Argentina at the age of 36 during a time when Latin America was experiencing a military coup.

Among the many mixed reactions to the pope was his handling of the accusations of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. In 2018, Francis would discredit Chilean victims of abuse, but later summoned and accepted the resignations of several bishops.

Holscher pointed to the inordinate power priests have and the secrecy in the church’s operations, but said Francis “was very committed to building a church that was structured rather differently than that.”

“His papacy was a papacy of listening and responding to people,” she said.

Francis came close to becoming pope in 2005 when Pope Benedict XVI was elected, gaining the second-most votes in several rounds before bowing out. Eight years later, when Benedict resigned, Francis would take control of the church, shocking many in the community after other cardinals were considered stronger contenders.

Reforming the Vatican

Francis was elected on a mandate to reform the Vatican bureaucracy and finances, but went further in shaking up the church without changing its core doctrine. “Who am I to judge?” he replied when asked about a purportedly gay priest.

The comment sent a message of welcome to the LGBTQ+ community and those who felt shunned by a church that had stressed sexual propriety over unconditional love. “Being homosexual is not a crime,” he told The Associated Press in 2023, urging an end to civil laws that criminalize it.

Stressing mercy, Francis changed the church’s position on the death penalty, calling it inadmissible in all circumstances. He also declared the possession of nuclear weapons, not just their use, was “immoral.”

In other firsts, he approved an agreement with China over bishop nominations that had vexed the Vatican for decades, met the Russian patriarch and charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.

His tenure, though, was not totally progressive. Francis reaffirmed the all-male, celibate priesthood and upheld the church’s opposition to abortion, equating it to “hiring a hit man to solve a problem.”

But he added women to important decision-making roles and allowed them to serve as lectors and acolytes in parishes. He let women vote alongside bishops in periodic Vatican meetings, following long-standing complaints that women do much of the church’s work but are barred from power.

Sister Nathalie Becquart, whom Francis named to one of the highest Vatican jobs, said his legacy was a vision of a church where men and women existed in a relationship of reciprocity and respect.

“It was about shifting a pattern of domination — from human being to the creation, from men to women — to a pattern of cooperation,” said Becquart, the first woman to hold a voting position in a Vatican synod.

Still, a note of criticism came Monday from the Women’s Ordination Conference, which had been frustrated by Francis’ unwillingness to push for the ordination of women.

“This made him a complicated, frustrating, and sometimes heartbreaking figure for many women,” the statement said.

A change from Benedict

The road to Francis’ 2013 election was paved by Benedict’s decision to resign and retire — the first in 600 years.

Francis didn’t shy from Benedict’s potentially uncomfortable shadow. Francis embraced him as an elder statesman and adviser, coaxing him out of his cloistered retirement to participate in the public life of the church until Benedict’s death in 2022.

“It’s like having your grandfather in the house, a wise grandfather,” Francis said.

Francis’ looser liturgical style and pastoral priorities made clear he and the German-born theologian came from very different religious traditions, and Francis directly overturned several decisions of his predecessor.

He made sure Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, a hero to the liberation theology movement in Latin America, was canonized after his case languished under Benedict over concerns about the credo’s Marxist bent.

Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed, arguing it was divisive. The move riled Francis’ traditionalist critics and opened sustained conflict with right-wing Catholics, particularly in the U.S.

Conservatives oppose Francis

By then, conservatives had already turned away from Francis, betrayed after he opened debate on allowing remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments if they didn’t get an annulment — a church ruling that their first marriage was invalid.

“We don’t like this pope,” headlined Italy’s conservative daily Il Foglio a few months into the papacy, reflecting the unease of the small but vocal traditionalist Catholic movement.

Those same critics amplified their complaints after Francis approved church blessings for same-sex couples, and a controversial accord with China over nominating bishops.

Its details were never released, but conservative critics bashed it as a sellout to communist China, while the Vatican defended it as the best deal it could get.

U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a figurehead in the anti-Francis opposition, said the church had become “like a ship without a rudder.”

Some U.S. conservatives branded Francis a Marxist. He jabbed back by saying he had many friends who were Marxists.

In February 2016, Francis made a point of holding mass in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso. Just as the U.S. presidential election was heating up and then candidate Donald Trump was making his anti-immigration stance a hallmark of his campaign, Francis was preaching to advocates of migrants in the most violent city on the U.S.-Mexico border. “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said at the time of Trump.

Searching for a ‘moral truth’

Catholicism often brings with it a sense of right and wrong, and Francis wasn’t afraid to voice that, even if the “moral truth” had political implications, Holscher said.

That drew Catholics and non-Catholics alike to recognize Francis’ name and legacy.

“Lots of people all over the world saw that and saw truth in it, (regardless) of whether they shared the sort of Catholic foundations for where that truth was coming from,” Holscher said.

She added that Catholics themselves were very fond of Francis, especially in New Mexico.

In a class she’s teaching about clerical sexual abuse, where students are critical of the Catholic Church, Holscher said “there’s a kind of softening that you see in a lot of the students” when it comes to Francis.

“Catholics always care about their pope, right? But there’s a particular kind of love for Francis,” she said.

Sitler referenced a Jewish expression, tikkun olam, which means creation is broken and humans should work together to heal the world. That’s what Pope Francis tried to live out, he said.

“And I think that’s something that all the great religious traditions teach. If you actually read their scriptures and listen to the teachings of the founders, they all teach compassion,” he said.

“We’re in a time of mourning, but I think he leaves us with a wonderful legacy of hope,” Sitler added.

Final respects

Francis’ death sets off a weekslong process of allowing the faithful to pay their final respects, first for Vatican officials in the Santa Marta chapel and then in St. Peter’s for the general public, followed by a funeral and a conclave to elect a new pope.

As the sun was setting on Monday evening, the Vatican held a Rosary prayer in St. Peter’s Square in its first public commemoration.

In his final will, Francis confirmed he would be buried in St. Mary Major Basilica in a simple underground tomb with only “Franciscus” written on it. The basilica, which sits outside the Vatican, is home to Francis’ favorite icon of the Virgin Mary, to whom Francis was particularly devoted.