Pope Francis battled entrenched interests to lift his church
When Jorge Mario Bergoglio began his journey as Pope Francis just over 12 years ago, he carried the hopes of many of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics that he would bring modernity and redress the ongoing scandal of sexual abuse that had plagued his predecessors and stained his church across the globe.
He was Argentinian, the first pope to be born or raised outside of Europe in 12 centuries. But he was more than an outsider. He was a Jesuit.
Jesuits are quite feared, if not loathed, by many other Catholic clergy because of their independence from the corporate church. Their leader, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, is called the 'Black Pope', and over the centuries the order's priests have carried out the toughest missionary assignments or have been sent in to clean up the mess.
Yet, there were hints of the old church in Pope Francis' history, including his role during the Argentinian dictatorship and his strident opposition to his nation's shift to legalising gay marriage. He was conservative as well on other issues to which progressives in the West give priority, such as abortion and euthanasia, but he showed signs of pragmatism about contraception and he placed the rights of children above the church.
His time coincided with the need to delicately balance the church tradition rigidly respected by African, Latin and Asian nations where Catholicism was alive and well against growing disenchantment with the stringency of Rome occurring in richer countries over female priests, abortion and gay rights.
There were early fails, but Pope Francis made progress addressing the church's sexual abuse crisis. He clashed publicly with the more conservative factions within the church and removed bishops who had not dealt forthrightly with sexual abuse. He also fought hard to reform the Holy See and the Vatican City State, establishing an anti-corruption authority that carried out financial audits of entities belonging to them.
As the champion of the poor, Pope Francis sought to reshape his church into a more inclusive institution and as much of the world let go of past certainties and splintered into populist creditabilities, he used his growing global stature to remind people of the great challenges humans around the world now face: climate change, migrant rights and income equality.
From the start, Pope Francis warned about the spiritual sickness of a self-referential church. 'If the church remains closed in on itself, self-referential, it gets old. Between a church that suffers accidents in the street, and a church that's sick because it's self-referential, I have no doubts about preferring the former,' he warned the old guard in 2013.
If his attempts to reform the church culture were blunted by entrenched interests, Pope Francis created thousands of bishops and appointed more than half of the College of Cardinals, often choosing prelates who shared his priorities of being close to the poor, welcoming the marginalised and pushing the importance of dealing with climate change.
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