From the desk of the pastor for July 19, 2026

The Lord be with you! We are nearing the end of our series about Church history. Today we look at Pope Francis and his pontificate and how he endeavored to reach out to the marginalized.

When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in March 2013, taking the name Francis, he became the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, and the first to choose that name. From his very first appearance on the loggia, simply asking the crowd to pray for him before he blessed them, he signaled a papacy that would emphasize humility and closeness over pomp and hierarchy.

Francis often described the Church as a "field hospital after battle," a place meant to treat wounds and warm hearts rather than to stand in judgment from a safe distance. That image shaped much of his ministry. He chose to live in the simpler Domus Sanctae Marthae rather than the Apostolic Palace, made a point of washing the feet of prisoners and refugees on Holy Thursday, and repeatedly urged priests to smell like their sheep.

His encyclical Laudato Si' placed care for creation at the center of Catholic social teaching, framing environmental degradation and poverty as deeply connected crises that call for an integral ecology. Fratelli Tutti followed with a call to human fraternity across national and religious lines. Both documents reflected his conviction that the Gospel has something urgent to say about the wounds of the modern world.

Francis convened the Synod on Synodality, a multi-year, worldwide process inviting bishops, clergy, religious, and laypeople into sustained conversation about how the Church listens and makes decisions together. Supporters saw it as a long-overdue widening of consultation; critics worried that the process would achieve little at the cost of much effort. Either way, it became one of the defining projects of his pontificate.

He also reached out consistently to those on the margins, from migrants at Lampedusa to the poor of Latin America to those who felt estranged from the Church for various reasons. His famous line, "Who am I to judge," spoken in an offhand remark to reporters, became widely quoted, and widely debated, as a shorthand for his broader pastoral instinct to lead with mercy.

Not every observer agreed with every emphasis of his papacy, and Francis himself acknowledged that reform within a two-thousand-year-old institution is slow, uneven work. He leaves behind a Church that has been pushed to ask afresh who sits at the margins and how the Gospel calls us to meet them there. We will see in the years ahead what parts of his pontificate bear lasting fruit and which came only from his unique style.

In His Sacred Heart,

Fr. John