When Pope Francis visited the United States in 2015, crowds lined the streets to greet him in Washington, New York and Philadelphia. He prayed with bishops, visited prisoners and spoke to a joint meeting of Congress. But the day he departed, one story dominated the headlines: a meeting with a controversial former county clerk who had denied wedding licenses to same-sex couples.
While Francis had planned his first and only visit to the United States to call attention to issues like migration, climate change and interfaith dialogue, individuals involved in the seemingly never-ending U.S. culture wars sought to co-opt the pope’s popularity for their battles. The Vatican scrambled to explain that Francis was unaware of the full biographies of the individuals he had briefly greeted and then tried to move the focus back to the marginalized.
Pope Francis, who died on April 21 at age 88, was overwhelmingly popular with ordinary Catholics in the United States. But Francis’ priorities often failed to take root here, and he was unable to move the U.S. church away from culture wars and toward what the late pope called the “field hospital” for the most vulnerable. Still, the pope’s supporters say Francis will be remembered for his efforts to reorient the church away from historic seats of power and out toward the peripheries, as well as to make room for difficult conversations about the contemporary church.
[Pope Francis, trailblazing Jesuit with a heart for the poor, dies at 88]
“Francis had an uphill battle almost from the very start,” said David Gibson, the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. “At a certain point, he didn’t quite give up but just sort of shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘The church will be what it will be; it’s up to the Holy Spirit.’”
Mr. Gibson, a longtime Vatican commentator and journalist, noted that the challenges Francis encountered in trying to make his mark on the U.S. church included decades of episcopal appointments by his two predecessors, a numerically shrinking priesthood and “a culture of culture war that has shaped and framed everything in the U.S. church.”
“So when Pope Francis came along, it was as though he was literally speaking a different language, a language of mercy, and outreach and evangelization that they couldn’t understand,” Mr. Gibson said.
Difficulties aside, enthusiasm for Francis among U.S. Catholics remained high throughout his pontificate.
According to opinion polls at the time, the percentage of U.S. Catholics who said they held a favorable opinion of Pope Francis regularly hovered around 80 percent. According to the Pew Research Center, his popularity peaked at 90 percent just ahead of his 2015 visit to the United States and dipped to 72 percent in 2018, following the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report highlighting historical cases of sexual abuse by priests. By 2024 that rating had climbed to about 75 percent.
Though admired by large swaths of U.S. Catholics, the pope’s relationship with church leaders here was sometimes more frosty.
Francis himself seemed to acknowledge this dynamic, saying in 2023, that “a very strong reactionary attitude” existed in the United States, which he described as “organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally.” He called this posture “backward-looking” and warned that when this takes hold, “ideologies replace faith.”
Bishops and other leaders sometimes criticized the pope publicly, especially those who took offense at the pope’s stinging remarks about the rigidity of young priests or his denunciation of runaway capitalism. Other critics lamented that Francis was not clear in upholding church teaching strongly enough on issues like homosexuality or abortion.
But Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of American studies and history at the University of Notre Dame, said Pope Francis simply tried to bring attention to issues that sometimes failed to attract the same kind of passion among some Catholics.
In 2024, President Donald Trump, campaigning partly on a pledge to undertake the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, won 54 percent of Catholic voters. Later, Francis admonished Vice President JD Vance, a convert to Catholicism, over comments he made supporting the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Still, Professor Sprows Cummings noted that Francis did not waver when it came to speaking out in defense of migrants.
“What John Paul II tried to do for the unborn, Pope Francis has tried to do for migrants,” she said.
The pope’s focus on migrants was often centered on Europe, where record levels of migrants sought refuge over the past several years. But Francis occasionally entered the fraught debate in the United States as well, including during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border amid the highly contentious 2016 presidential election. Standing on a platform in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Francis faced El Paso, Tex., and silently prayed for those who had lost their lives trying to make their way north. The visit, and subsequent comments from the pope, led to a spat with then-candidate Donald J. Trump, who called the pope “disgraceful.” The two would eventually meet in Rome at St. Peter’s the following year.
Elected pope in 2013, Francis served longer than his immediate predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, but only half as long as Pope John Paul II, who reigned for almost 27 years. That offered Francis more than a decade to shape the U.S. episcopacy; by one analysis, completed in 2024, he gave just over half of U.S. bishops their first appointment as leader of a diocese or archdiocese, said Catherine H. Hoegeman, an associate professor of sociology at Missouri State University, who tracks the appointments of bishops. Professor Hoegeman said that Francis placed a greater emphasis on diversity than his predecessors, and by her analysis, he also appointed men who often refrained from engaging in conservative political conversations.
“Compared to Pope John Paull II and Pope Benedict XVI, bishops appointed by Pope Francis are more likely to be persons of color and less likely to have education past the seminary,”
Disconnect between Francis, future of the U.S. church
Even though Francis was able to appoint many bishops, his vision for the church did not take hold among church leaders.
Research conducted in 2023 by The Catholic Project, a national study of Catholic priests, showed that young priests in the United States identified as “very conservative” or “conservative” at much higher rates than older priests. The same survey found that at the same time, U.S. Catholics overall were becoming more politically liberal.
Francis used harsh language when talking about young priests and seminarians who favored more traditional styles of worship and spirituality, frequently calling them “rigid.” That kind of characterization led the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2023, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, to give a strong defense of young priests during his address to bishops, calling young seminarians “a sign of hope for the future.”
In an interview with America that year, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the papal nuncio to the United States, noted, “There are some priests and religious and bishops who are terribly against Francis as if he was the scapegoat [for] all the failures of the church or of society.”
Cardinal Blase Cupich, previously the bishop of Spokane, Wash., was the first major bishop appointment in the United States by Pope Francis. Upon his surprise appointment as archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Cupich immediately became a leader in the U.S. church.
Cardinal Cupich said Francis will be remembered “as someone who has helped us reconnect with each other in terms of our common destiny,” highlighting the pope’s commitment to the spiritual life, his advocacy for environmental protections and his “care for people who live at the margins.”
“If there’s a word that he has helped us recover, it’s ‘together,’ that we are all in this together,” Cardinal Cupich said.
As younger people drift from religion more broadly, it is possible that those who might agree with the pope’s moral stances on questions like immigration, economic justice and the climate may not be active in church. But Cardinal Cupich said he is confident that in the long run, Francis will be shown to have been an influential pope.
“I think that because what he has said is true, and the truth will always win out,” he said.
While Francis won accolades in some quarters for his focus on migration, outreach to the L.G.B.T. Catholic community and his diversification of the College of Cardinals, even his supporters say he had blind spots, especially when it came to his handling of sexual abuse by priests and the cover-up of it by bishops.
While Pope Francis created a Vatican office to deal with abusive priests and implemented a process to hold bishops accountable, critics said the reforms lacked institutional support to carry out their objectives.
Professor Sprows Cummings said that Francis tended to look at individuals who committed abuse as isolated cases instead of exploring how the church needed to reform a culture that had made secrecy and abuse possible. “I don’t think history is going to judge him very kindly for that,” she said.
A focus on encountering the poor, marginalized
Yunuen Trujillo grew up in the church and said that she felt that parishes routinely embraced her and other members of the L.G.B.T. Catholic community. But Pope Francis, she said, gave ordinary Catholics “permission” to accompany groups who had struggled to find a place in the church.
“For individuals who already felt in their hearts that they wanted to be welcoming, but who also felt that the church required them to be the opposite, Pope Francis made them feel that they had permission to be welcoming,” said Ms. Trujillo, a lay minister and author of L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics: A Guide to Inclusive Ministry.
Pope Francis made outreach to the L.G.B.T. Catholic community a priority of his papacy, regularly meeting with members of the community and even going so far as to allow priests to bless Catholics in same-sex relationships and declare that transgender people had a right to serve as godparents. There were occasional moments when L.G.B.T. Catholics felt let down by the pope, including when the Vatican released a document on human dignity in 2024 that listed “gender theory” among other threats to human dignity, like war and poverty.
But Ms. Trujillo said that overall, she viewed the pope’s legacy as positive for L.G.B.T. Catholics in the United States. “Everything that Pope Francis has tried to do, it’s been a breath of fresh air; it has opened doors to allow many of us to talk about these issues more publicly,” she said.
If there was one lesson Pope Francis tried to teach the church, it was to remember the poor, urging Catholics to strive to be “a church that is poor and for the poor.” Catholic leaders in the United States said that the pope’s vision regarding the poor took root here, though it will take generations to manifest itself.
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the former archbishop of Washington who became the first African-American to be made a cardinal, called the pope’s legacy to the U.S. church as a whole “very positive,” saying he thinks Francis “rekindled some of our historic hierarchical commitment to the poor.”
Kerry Robinson, the president and chief executive officer of Catholic Charities USA, pointed to the pope’s 2015 address to Congress as an example of how committed Francis was to highlighting the plight of the poor, even when addressing the powerful.
“But beyond merely pointing out the growing inequity in our midst, he repeatedly and beautifully articulated a strategy for addressing it: embrace a culture of accompaniment,” Ms. Robinson said. “In his words and his actions, Pope Francis taught us to encounter and accompany those who are suffering in our midst in meaningful, purposeful and sustained ways.”
Ms. Robinson continued, “In the consistency of his injunction for us to seek out, know and love those who are materially poor, vulnerable and suffering, he will be remembered as a pope for whom mercy is integral to Christian integrity.”
As for whether the pope succeeded in creating a more welcoming church that embraces the poor, Cardinal Gregory said, “It’s a work in progress.”
“I have felt that this is a man who was chosen by the Holy Spirit at the right time to address the issues that need to be addressed in our world,” Cardinal Gregory said.
On the whole, Cardinal Gregory said the notion that Francis did not like the United States was a “misperception.”
“The Holy Father had great affection for the church in the United States,” he said. “He sees it with a much broader lens than a lot of people might attribute to him because he sees both our potential and those areas that we need to work on.”
