Indeed, it seems the pontiff’s last diplomatic function was a lightning visit by Vance, whose motorcade remained in the Vatican for 17 minutes on Easter Sunday, according to media reports.
As a social reformer, Francis will be remembered for taking a gentler view of homosexuality. He insisted being gay is “not a crime” and approved blessings for same-sex couples, while apologizing in 2024 for using a slur to refer to gay men. But he also reiterated that homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of the Church.
On gender, the pontiff hewed closer to tradition in repeatedly ruling out ordaining female priests or deacons — though he named numerous women to roles in the Vatican, including appointing the first woman to head a major department.
He said women who had undergone an abortion should be “forgiven” — yet called a Belgian abortion law “homicidal” and initiated beatification for Belgian King Baudouin, who abdicated his throne for a day rather than sign the law that decriminalized abortion in 1990.
Fittingly for the first non-European pope in 1,300 years since the Syrian Gregory III, Pope Francis crisscrossed the globe ministering to followers along the edges of the Catholic world — from Asia and the Middle East, to the Arctic and the Peruvian Amazon — though his travel plans were often disrupted by bouts of illness.
Sermons during his travels often drew upon themes of environmentalism, for which he was a champion. He took his name from St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and ecology, and his encyclical or papal doctrine called on people to take action for the environment. In 2015, he said: “Clearly, the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures.”
