Pope Francis and His Legacy in Theology, Canon Law, Interreligious Dialogue, and Religious Leadership

Pope Francis greets believers in Vatican City / Shutterstock

The series brings together a group of Catholic thinkers to reflect on Pope Francis’s pontificate and legacy. The authors discuss the late Pope’s contribution to peacebuilding, human dignity, social justice, and environmentalism in addition to his reforms, often revolutionary, of Catholic theology, canon law, and the Church’s internal life. Pointing to peaks and valleys of the first Jesuit pope’s rule, they depict him as an extraordinary religious leader, tireless promoter of peace across the globe, and persistent defender of the vulnerable.

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Francis’s Legal Revolution: A Reforming Impulse with Many Lights and Some Shadows

Montserrat Gas-Aixendri is a full professor of law and religion at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain).

From his election in 2013, Pope Francis ushered in one of the most transformative periods in the Catholic Church’s recent history. His pontificate, characterized by prophetic gestures and bold decisions, was accompanied by an intense wave of legislative activity. Deep reforms—both structural and pastoral—shaped these years, projecting an image of a Church that was more proximate, synodal, and committed to transparency and justice.

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Francis I: Public Theologian

Greg Marcar is a senior researcher at the Nathaniel Bioethics Centre for Bioethics, Te Kupenga, and a research affiliate at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI), University of Otago (New Zealand). His research interests include religious freedom, theological anthropology, and animal rights. He is a coeditor of Søren Kierkegaard: Theologian of the Gospel (Wipf & Stock 2021) and Security, Religion, and the Rule of Law: International Perspectives (Routledge 2023). A version of this post is scheduled to appear as a contribution to The Nathaniel Report 75 (2025).

Editors’ Note: This post was written and published prior to Pope Francis’s death.

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.

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