The papacy of Francis I has frequently been framed as a departure from his predecessors. Francis is notable for being not only the first Jesuit pope but also the first South American pontiff and the first to take office in the context of a pope emeritus, the late Benedict XVI. As many have noted, no previous pontiff has shone such a strong theological spotlight onto socioeconomic or environmental issues that disproportionately affect those living within the developing world or displaced from it.

At the level of Catholic doctrine, Francis deserves to be remembered for changing the Church’s Catechism in 2018 to reflect an unequivocal opposition to capital punishment. It is perhaps on his further proposed change to the Catechism that Pope Francis’s hopeful legacy is most clearly in focus. In the context of supporting the recognition of “ecocide” within international criminal law, Francis stated in a 2019 address,“We must introduce—we are thinking about it—in the Catechism of the Catholic Church the sin against ecology, the ecological sin against the common home.” In this, Francis makes a theological claim that is often unsaid or denied by others: our interaction with the “natural” world implicates our relationship to God.