A son of Argentina, cradle of populism—a rhetoric that slices facts and ideas in two, goes straight for the emotions, and makes no concessions, because right and wrong must fall clearly on one side or the other. Argentine populism was socially nationalist in politics and conservative in values. Likewise, Pope Francis was a progressive populist on social issues and conservative on moral ones—after all, a position consistent with the principles of the Roman Catholic Church. It all fits together.
With this political culture and practice, Jorge Mario Bergoglio became pope in 2013, choosing a name that surprised many and came to define his papacy: Francis. It was a return to the roots of pastoral Christianity—a vision of God and humanity close to each other, of nature as a mother who loves us like her children and speaks to us in the language of life, the one we carry deep in our gut. If we’ve forgotten that language, it’s because we’ve been corrupted by consumerism, by the false promises of civilization that society wraps up and sells us. If we scrape away that second nature to reach the first, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, we rediscover a human being full of nature—and we begin to understand its language.
Pope Francis brought the poetic ecology of the Canticle of the Creatures into the mainstream culture of the planet’s inhabitants. And his Laudato si’ (2015) soon found its secular echo in a young Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, who in 2018 shook the world with her determined protest—sitting every Friday in front of her country’s parliament (School Strike for Climate/Fridays for Future) to challenge the indifference toward the climate crisis. She confronted world leaders for their shameful cowardice and warned the globe from the podium of the United Nations that there was no more time left if we still wanted a future.
With Laudato si’, Pope Francis offered the world a manifesto for Catholics and Christians—a return to the roots of thought traced back to the first naturalist humanist, the first to use the word (human reason) to establish a dialogical relationship with creation. He brought this style and philosophy into a Church steeped in rationalism, a Church that has long given birth only to metaphysics. In Pope Francis, we see the shepherd more than the thinker; he has the gift of conveying complex ideas in a way that is simple, direct, and full of insight—sometimes poetic, often open to layered and non-linear interpretations.
Laudato Si’ firmly placed Pope Francis within the heart of worldly affairs—aligned with both environmentalism and pacifism. It established him as a leader not just of the Catholic Church, but of humanity and the planet: a voice for peace and for nature. Time magazine featured him twice as Person of the Year, recognizing him as a leader who represents all peoples, and all of creation. He has the power to stir consciences, to inspire and to admonish—like a true shepherd.
During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he criticized NATO for “barking” at Russia’s borders and made a failed attempt at diplomatic mediation to reach a ceasefire. In today’s world, peace and nature remain the great casualties of our time.
Pope Francis’s words carry the tone of a pure Christian witness, one that halts at the gates of the castle of the god Mammon. It’s in this spirit that he issues his appeal to governments—Italy’s, no less than those of Europe or the United States—not to treat national borders as if they were natural ones. The Earth has no borders; they are the outcomes of wars, justified by force and history—not by moral law, and only later endorsed or patched up by legal norms.
The borders of countries rich in natural resources were easily crossed by the powerful of the West, the first migrants, the ones who built colonialism. And now, as migration flows in the opposite direction—because those once-plundered lands are now impoverished for their people, the West builds prisons at the edges of what it calls civilization. It invents a crime that strikes at the gut of every Christian: illegal immigration.
Against the abuse of nature, of humanity, and of coexistence, Pope Francis has given the world the voice of the Church.
This article was originally published on the Italian newspaper Domani on April 21st, 2025.
Cover photo: Pope Francis waves to pilgrims after attending the weekly general audience at St. Peter’s square in The Vatican on November 6, 2024. (Photo by Filippo Monteforte / AFP)
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