Rev. Thomas Massaro, S.J., is Professor of Moral Theology at Fordham University in New York City.
Humankind has yet to invent a reliable crystal ball that would allow us to peer into the future with certainty. But historians do occasionally display a considerable level of confidence when they prognosticate. Specifically, these historians seem to relish the exercise of projecting the eventual legacies of contemporary leaders. Of course, one need not be a historian to engage in the parlor game of predicting how a public figure of our time will be remembered in the decades or centuries ahead.
As a Jesuit and scholar of the works of Pope Francis, I have long pondered how the papacy of the first Jesuit pope will be remembered in the distant future. While it is always hazardous to predict the dominant perceptions within any historical account, certain outstanding accomplishments emerge as the most prominent. Allow me to offer just the top five such achievements of Pope Francis that appear on my list.
First, Pope Francis has emerged as the greatest advocate for environmental sustainability the world has ever known. While he may have a few prominent rivals in this regard (one thinks naturally of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore or the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg), the lasting effects of Francis in raising consciousness of the urgent need for change will surely be enormous. His 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home is the richest and most detailed document from any religious leader addressing the urgency of preserving our natural environment. While Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI greatly advanced the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the environment, it is Francis who placed ecology at the very center of the church’s social concerns. This item belongs at the very top of any such list of lasting papal accomplishments because raising awareness of the dire need for “ecological conversion” (a phrase introduced by Francis himself) is of existential importance for all of humanity.
Second, Francis will surely be remembered as the greatest advocate for the needs of refugees and migrants—marginalized populations highlighted from the start of his papacy. The very first pastoral travel of his papacy was to a forlorn spit of land in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea called Lampedusa, often referred to as “the isle of tears.” On 8 July 2013, just weeks after his election, Francis visited this island to express his solidarity with thousands of migrants who were being warehoused there, most of whom had washed ashore when the rickety watercraft they had boarded failed to deliver them to their intended destinations on mainland Europe. Many others had died on their perilous journeys to escape war, famine, and oppression in parts of Africa and the Middle East, and Francis acknowledged such victims on that occasion and many times since.
That emblematic encounter on Lampedusa was reprised when Francis included in his travel itineraries to many parts of the world visits to refugee camps and borderlands, including the fraught Mexico–U.S. border. In a world that has recently recorded the greatest number of refugees in history, Francis has emerged as the greatest advocate for “people on the move” struggling for a better life, or even for mere survival, in the face of inhumane conditions in their homelands.
Third, Francis deserves to be remembered for his unprecedented efforts to promote interreligious dialogue and broader understanding across all religious lines. Even before his elevation to the papacy, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio reached out in prodigious ways to all the religious communities of his home city, forging a particularly close and public relationship with Rabbi Abraham Skorka, as just one example. Francis consistently prioritized establishing warm relations with all parts of the Islamic world in particular, as Roman Catholicism and Islam are the largest religious communities on earth.
Perhaps the high point of his papal efforts to forge closer ties to the Muslim world was his signing (in tandem with Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque and University in Egypt and the world’s preeminent Sunni Muslim leader) of the Document on Human Fraternity. The text had been cowritten by both men and their advisors and was signed on Francis’s groundbreaking pastoral visit to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates early in 2019. Many further efforts to forge closer ties to leaders of other faiths, as well as to dialogue with other branches of the Christian community such as Protestants and Orthodox Christianity, underline this set of Francis’s achievements and priorities.
Fourth, while the previous items pertain to all people across the globe, many of the accomplishments of Francis consist of promoting internal reforms within the Catholic Church itself. One priority has been to address the horrific crisis of clergy sexual abuse in many lands, and Francis has promulgated numerous reforms to address shortcomings in canon law as well as in prevention, reporting, and disciplinary practices. There is of course much room for further improvement to safeguard children and other vulnerable people, but progress has been considerable. Francis also addressed serious mismanagement of Vatican finances, even putting on trial a Cardinal who was convicted of serious financial malfeasance.
Perhaps surpassing all those items in its long-terms effects is Francis’s initiative that is summed up in the word synodality. In 2021, Francis launched a multi-year process commonly referred to as the “Synod on Synodality,” which culminated in two worldwide gatherings in Rome in October of 2023 and 2024. For the first time, delegates to these high-level meetings were not merely bishops and priests but included laypeople, with significant numbers of women enjoying full voting privileges. The tripartite themes of Francis’s “synodal way,” with its emphasis on shared life and wisdom, are participation, communion, and mission. While this broadening of procedures for discernment and consultation does not transform the Catholic Church into a democracy of any sort, it is certainly true that there will be no going back to the exclusionary processes of the past. Francis’s commitment to the synodal principle has already changed Catholicism to a great degree.
Fifth, future commentators will certainly recall Francis as a peace advocate par excellence. While all recent popes have rejected violence and denounced armed aggression on the international scene, Francis has significantly expanded the papal playbook of diplomacy—leveraging the soft power that prominent religious leaders possess in the interest of peacemaking. Indeed, his approach deserves to be described with the newer terms conflict transformation and peacebuilding, as he has paid close attention to building up the conditions that favor peace, such as advocating for an end to the global arms trade that so often exacerbates conflict and creates civilian victims.
Cultivating many personal relationships with world leaders, Francis has contributed to numerous peace processes and negotiations to resolve simmering conflicts. He has played decisive roles in progress toward peace in various regions of the world—from his native Latin America (especially in promoting the Colombia peace accords) to Africa (particularly with his diplomatic initiatives in South Sudan and the Central African Republic) and elsewhere. The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have clearly caused great anguish for Francis; despite his best efforts to encourage peaceful settlements in each context, deadly conflict continues to exact an unbearable toll in innocent civilian lives.
Many further achievements of Pope Francis, both within the church and beyond its internal life, could be listed: his tireless advocacy for worker justice, his heartfelt efforts to counteract economic inequality, and his emphasis on strengthening family life, among many others. He will surely be remembered even centuries from now as a highly effective church leader with numerous accomplishments to his credit. What binds together all these distinct contributions is the traditional papal title of Pontifex Maximus—the great bridge-builder—for that is precisely the role that Francis has played from the first moments of his papacy in 2013. He has brought people together in so many ways, skillfully and patiently leading them to engage in genuine dialogue, to respect the earth, to promote the well-being of our most marginalized neighbors, and ultimately to grow closer to God.