Pope Francis shook up Church with simplicity, raising conservative ire

The biblical cardinal: “The challenge is to save plurality without it becoming division. He said little about transcendence. But his word has taken to the streets, to the suburbs, in harmony and sympathy with the world.”

Pope Francis’s Aesthetics of Humility

The most representative photograph of Pope Francis — then just Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina — captures him sitting on a simple, slatted wooden bench on the subway in his native city. An oblivious crowd of commuters and students stands and shifts around the future pontiff, who wears the simple black shirt and Roman collar of the Society of Jesus in which he was ordained, staring at the photographer with piercing br…

MAINTENANCE - Church historian and former collaborator of Pope Francis, this Italian editorialist takes a very critical look at the mode of governance of the late pontiff, whom she describes as "very authoritarian".

Right from the start, he desacralized the role. From visits to the shoemaker to Fabio Fazio as an inspiration: that passion for the media. The informal Pope. The Holy Father of normality. The ordinary head of the Church. In terms of signs, Jorge Mario Bergoglio's pontificate can be defined as...

The Pope who defied the extreme right worldwide

Francis, whose papacy began in 2013 and ended on Monday with his death, witnessed from the highest seat in the Church the rise of nationalist and xenophobic far-right movements across the West. In the face of this defining phenomenon of our time, his stance was clear and unequivocal: firmly against it. His opposition extended not only to discrimination against immigrants, but also to the excesses of neoliberalism — prompting many conservatives t…

There is an old saying in Rome that “a fat pope is succeeded by a thin one”. That is, someone very different from his predecessor. If it is fulfilled, the Church may be on its way to opting for a conservative bishop. The content The Pope who modernized and thus also divided the church appears first in Jornal i.