Why Pope Francis’s papacy mattered for Africa:
The death of Pope Francis in an Italian hospital on 21 April 2025 marks the end of a significant era for the Vatican and the global Catholic following of 1.3 billion faithful.
The first pope from the Americas and also the first to come from outside the west in the modern era, Pope Francis was elected leader of the Catholic church on 13 March 2013.
By the time the Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013 there was a general feeling that the Catholic church was reaching the end of an era. At the time, the church was beset by crises, from corruption to clerical sexual abuse.
Some of the challenges facing the church which the ageing Pope Benedict XVI could no longer handle included:
- the readmission of a Holocaust denying bishop into the church
- mounting evidence of corruption in the Vatican Bank
- multiple cases of clerical sexual abuse in many parts of the world
- the confusion created in the English-speaking world with the translation of the New Roman missal into English.
Moreover, the church was reeling from the revelation of papal secrets of his predecessor Pope Benedict by the papal butler. A book detailing these secrets portrayed the Vatican as a corrupt hotbed of jealousy, intrigue and underhanded factional fighting.
The revelations caused the church a great deal of embarrassment.
It meant therefore that Cardinal Bergoglio was elected by the Catholic cardinals with a mandate to clean up the church and reform the Vatican and its bureaucracy. He was to institute processes and procedures for transparency, accountability and renewal of the church and its structures, and address the lingering scandals of clerical abuse.
The Pope’s global legacy
Three key things defined his papal role and legacy.
First is concentrating on the core competence of the church: serving the poor and the marginalised. This is what the founder of the Christian religion, Jesus Christ, did.
Francis focused the Catholic church and the entire world on one mission: helping the poor, addressing global inequalities, speaking for the voiceless, and placing the attention of the world on those on the periphery.
He also chose to live simply, forsaking the pomp and pageantry of the papacy.
Secondly, he changed the way the Catholic church’s message is communicated. In his programmatic document, Evangelii Gaudium, he called the church to what he calls “missionary conversion”. His thinking was that everything that is done in the church must be about proclaiming the good news to a wounded and broken world.
His central message was that of mercy towards all, an end to wars, our common humanity and the closeness of God to those who suffer. The suffering in the world continues to grow because of injustice, greed, selfishness and pride. He also focused on symbols and simple style to press home his message, like celebrating mass at a wall that divides the United States and Mexico.
In 2015 he made a risky trip to Bangui, the capital of Central African Republic, during a time of war and tension between the fighting factions of the Muslim Seleka and the Christian anti-balaka.
He drove on the Popemobile with both the highest ranking Muslim cleric in the country and his Christian counterpart and visited both a Christian church and a mosque to press home the message of peace.
The third strategy was restructuring the church and reforming the Vatican bank.
He created the G8 (a representative council of cardinals from every part of the world) to advise him, calling the Catholic church to a synod for dialogue on every aspect of the life of the church. This effort was unprecedented.
He also overhauled the procedures for the synod of bishops, making it more participatory, and gave women and the non-ordained voting rights. He shook up the membership of the Vatican department that picks bishops to include women.
He appointed the first woman (Sr Simone Brambilla) to lead a major Vatican department and to have a cardinal as her deputy. Another woman (Sr Raffaella Petrini) was named the first woman governor of the Vatican City State.
Pope Francis and Africa
The pontiff’s legacy will be keenly felt in Africa. Three things stand out.
First, he reflected the concerns of people on the continent with his message against imperialism, colonialism, exploitation of the poor by the rich, global inequality, neo-liberal capitalism and ecological injustice. Pope Francis became a voice for Africa.
When he visited Kenya in 2015, he chose to visit the slums of Nairobi to proclaim the gospel of liberation to the forsaken of society. He called on African governments to guarantee for the poor and all citizens access to land, lodging and labour.
In a sense, Pope Francis embodied the message of decolonisation and was driven in part by the liberation theology that developed in Latin America. This theology tied religious faith with liberation of the people from structures of injustice and structural violence.
Secondly, he encouraged African Catholics to develop Africa’s own unique approach to pastoral life and addressing social issues in Africa. Particularly, Pope Francis believed in decentralisation and local processes in meeting local challenges. He said many times that it is not necessary that all problems in the church be solved by the pope at the Roman centre of the church.
In this way, he encouraged the growth and development of African priorities and cultural adaptation to the Catholic faith. He also encouraged greater transparency and accountability among African bishops and gave African Catholic universities and seminaries greater autonomy to develop their own educational priorities and programmes.
Thirdly, Pope Francis had a very deep connection to Africa’s young people. He encouraged and supported initiatives and programmes to strengthen the agency of young people, to give them hope and support their personal, spiritual and professional development.
For the first time in history, on 1 November 2022, Pope Francis met virtually with more than 1,000 young Africans for an hour. I helped organise this meeting. He answered their questions and encouraged them to fight for what they believe.
A reformist agenda
The reforms of Pope Francis could be termed a movement – from a church of a few where priests and bishops and the pope call the shots to a church of the people of God where everyone’s voice matters and where everyone’s concerns and needs are catered to.
He quietly changed the tone of the message and the style of the leadership at the Vatican.
Granted, he did not substantially alter the content of that message, which is often seen as conservative, Eurocentric, and resistant to cultural pluralism and social change.
But he constantly chipped away at its foundations through inclusion and an openness to hearing the voices of everyone, including those who do not agree with the church’s position. In doing this, he shifted the priorities and practices of the Catholic church regarding such core issues as power and authority.
Pope Francis opened the doors to the voices of the marginalised in the church — women, the poor, the LGBTQI+ community, and those who have disaffiliated from the church.
Many African Catholics would love to see more African representation at the Vatican, and many of them also worry about the widening division in the church, particularly driven by cultural and ideological battles in the west that have nothing to do with the social and ecclesial context of Africa.
Why his papacy mattered
Pope Francis was the first pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit pope, the first to choose the name Francis and the first to come from outside the west in the modern era. He chose the name Francis because he wanted to focus his papacy on the poor, emulating St Francis of Assisi.
In a sense, Pope Francis redefined what religion and spirituality mean for Catholicism. It’s not laying down and enforcing the law without mercy, it is caring for our neighbours and the Earth. This is the kind of religion the world needs today.
Stan Chu Ilo is Research Professor, World Christianity and African Studies, DePaul University.
This article was first published by The Conversation.
Pope Francis: The end of a radical papacy born in the south:
Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 1936, died on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025, aged 88.
The symbolism was impossible to ignore: the head of the Catholic Church died at the heart of its most sacred weekend—Easter, the ancient commemoration of suffering, death, and resurrection.
In a faith built on ritual and meaning, this death echoed with a deeper clarity. His papacy, too, had been a resurrection of sorts—of justice, humility, and the throne of Peter held by a man who began his work as a priest in the shanty towns, the villas miserias, of Buenos Aires.
Francis was not perfect. He led an institution that has committed and concealed horrors across centuries.
The Church under his watch still denied the ordination of women, still faltered in dealing with abuse, still allowed its conservative flank to rail against queerness, migrants, and liberation theology.
But what Francis did do, more than any pope in living memory, was to refuse the version of Catholicism that ingratiates itself with the powerful while abandoning the poor.
To understand his significance, one must understand the institution he inherited. The papacy is not just a spiritual role. It is one of the longest-standing political offices in the world.
For over a millennium, the Catholic Church has held land, crowned emperors, bankrolled crusades, and blessed colonial conquest. It helped codify European empire and white supremacy under the cross. Even in the 20th century, parts of the Church hierarchy sided with fascism.
The Vatican signed a concordat with Nazi Germany in 1933, and senior clerics remained complicit in Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy. Pope Pius XII, Francis’s wartime predecessor was widely criticised for his silence during the Holocaust.
It’s in this context that Francis’s background matters. He was the first pope from outside Europe since Pope Gelasius I, the third African pope, in the late 5th century, and the first Jesuit to hold the office. The Jesuits—intellectual, often radical, and historically expelled from multiple countries for their political commitments—stood apart in a Church dominated for centuries by a conservative European aristocracy.
His Italian parents had fled fascism, and he came of age during Argentina’s Dirty War, a period of state terrorism marked by forced disappearances and torture. His role during that time was complex—he has been accused of both complicity via silence and quiet resistance—but it undeniably shaped his understanding of political power and institutional failure.
As pope, Francis made it clear that Catholicism could no longer serve empire. He spoke not in the language of doctrine but of solidarity.
“The poor,” he said, “are at the centre of the Gospel.” As a young Jesuit in Argentina during the 1970s he was wary of liberation theology in its most radical, Marxist forms. Yet despite this early caution, Bergoglio lived an austere life and his pastoral practice gradually converged with the “preferential option for the poor,” the moral heart of liberation theology.
In 2013, he quietly welcomed Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian founder of liberation theology, to the Vatican—an act that would have been unthinkable under previous pontificates. Most significantly, he canonised Archbishop Óscar Romero in 2018, honouring the Salvadoran martyr who had long been a symbol of liberation theology and whose sainthood had been stalled by conservative resistance.
His support for the poor was in support for the spirit of what liberation theology calls the ‘protagonism’ of the poor. He was close to the movement of the landless in Brazil, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). He invited S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo to the Vatican for a personal audience.
Francis condemned capitalism as the “dung of the devil,” warned that neoliberalism was “an economy that kills”. He insisted that environmental destruction was a spiritual and political crime. His encyclical Laudato Si’ placed climate justice at the centre of Catholic teaching, linking ecological collapse with inequality, imperialism, and greed.
Francis openly supported same-sex civil unions, challenged patriarchal theology, and reformed Church governance to give lay people—especially women—greater roles, even if full equality remained far off. He washed the feet of Muslim refugees and embraced undocumented migrants in Lampedusa while European leaders debated how best to drown them in the Mediterranean.
That said, his position on LGBTQ+ inclusion requires nuance. While Francis’s outreach was historic in tone and emphasis, he did not alter Church doctrine.
His significance lies not in what he changed theologically—but in how he shifted the Church’s posture. In 2013, he famously said “Who am I to judge?” when asked about gay priests, signalling a departure from the harsh rhetoric of the past. In 2020, he publicly endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples, saying they deserved legal protection.
However, he did not endorse same-sex marriage, and the Catechism continued to describe homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered.”
The Vatican’s doctrinal office even rebuked efforts to bless same-sex unions in 2021. Yet under Francis, the conversation moved from moral condemnation to one centred on dignity, protection, and inclusion—a shift of real consequence in a Church that spans progressive orders and parishes on one hand, and violently homophobic states on the other.
Francis stood unequivocally for Palestinians. He repeatedly condemned the occupation, called for a Palestinian state, and referred to Israeli actions in Gaza as violations of international law and human dignity. In 2023, he decried the bombing of hospitals and refugee camps in Rafah and reminded the world that peace without justice is not peace, it’s domination.
His voice on Palestine cut through the complicity of most world leaders—including many Church officials who still carry the colonial DNA of missionisation and settler theology.
As his health deteriorated in early 2025, Francis remained politically sharp. He did not shy away from criticising those in power. Even in his final months, he warned that “leaders who build walls and lie about compassion” were dragging humanity backwards.
It was an obvious rebuke to Donald Trump—whose second presidency has been marked by an escalation of the racism and fascist inflections as his first. Francis had long criticised Trump’s nationalism, climate denial, and treatment of migrants, once suggesting that a man who builds walls “is not Christian.”
In his final days, with pneumonia sapping his breath, the Vatican became a theatre for vultures. Perhaps the most grotesque moment was the intrusion by U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who forced himself into a photo-op with the dying pontiff.
Francis, barely able to sit up, was clearly exhausted and ill. Vance knelt beside him for the cameras. It was a calculated political move—part of the American right’s ongoing effort to claim moral legitimacy while gutting it from the inside. In that moment, the world saw clearly what Francis had always warned against: that power without empathy is desecration.
None of this is to canonise the man. Francis did not overturn centuries of patriarchy. He did not end the institutional protection of abusers. He left too much in the hands of bishops who despise his vision.
The Church remains, in many ways, conservative, hierarchical, and slow to transform. His predecessor, Benedict XVI—formerly Joseph Ratzinger—was in the Hitler Youth as a teenager and later served as the Vatican’s doctrinal enforcer. The shadows of that history remain.
But Francis changed the Church’s posture. He forced it to look outward. He reminded millions that Christianity is not a fortress, but a call—to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and confront the Pharaohs of our time. It is, as anyone who has read the gospel of Luke knows, a call to solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. Francis positioned the Vatican, for a moment, not above the world, but among the dispossessed.
He was not a saint. He was something harder, and more necessary: a contradiction willing to be questioned. A man of power who attained great power but often sided with those who have none.
The question that now confronts the Church is what, and who, comes next. If anything rises from his passing, let it be the politics of the excluded. Not another saviour, but a renewed commitment to justice, carried by those he believed in most—ordinary people.
South Africa needs innovation by design to fix fragile, failing systems:
South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. The statistics as reported by the World Bank are sobering — a Gini coefficient of 0.67 (2018), placing us among the most unequal globally; 63% of the population living below the upper-middle-income poverty line; youth unemployment at a staggering 45.5% (15 to 34-year-olds) and a general unemployment rate of 31.9% by the end of 2024.
Economic growth is stagnant, averaging just 0.7%, weighed down by persistent load-shedding, weak productivity and deteriorating public infrastructure, especially in transport and logistics.
Even with modest improvements in electricity supply and the formation of a Government of National Unity in 2024, the economy is projected to grow by only 0.6%. In addition, structural challenges remain deeply embedded.
But these indicators are not just numbers — they point to systemic failures that shape everyday life. One in four children is growth-stunted.
Four out of five grade four learners cannot read with comprehension. South Africa’s most disadvantaged rely on free healthcare at 3 800 public clinics and hospitals — but these are often plagued by broken equipment and medicine shortages. Only five out of nearly 700 facilities met 80% of the required performance standards.
These failures are not isolated but drive breakdown across interdependent systems. When a child goes to school hungry, their capacity to learn diminishes. Poor education reduces future employability and earning potential, entrenching poverty.
Weak healthcare systems compromise well-being and productivity. Infrastructure failures disrupt livelihoods and access to essential services.
For years, South Africa’s economic reality has often been described as a “dual economy”: one part formal, productive and globally competitive; the other informal, marginalised and excluded. While this framing has helped draw attention to exclusion, it may also obscure a more complex dynamic.
It suggests we have two separate economies, when in fact, we may be looking at a single, interconnected system — one where pressure and breakdowns in one area ripple across the rest.
What seems to differ most is not whether people experience shocks, but the frequency and nature of these shocks, and how equipped people are to respond.
For those with access to financial, social and institutional resources, it is often possible to “buy” resilience — to find alternatives when state systems fail, to access private healthcare, hire tutors for your child, own your car for transport and pay for security when public options break down. But these systems are often the only lifeline for those who rely entirely on overstretched public services. When they falter, there are no substitutes.
This is why the concept of fragility offers a helpful lens complementing the binary of “first” and “second” economies. Fragility helps us understand why a shock — electricity disruptions or a water outage — can have vastly different consequences for individuals depending on where they sit in the system.
It’s not just inequality in income or access, it’s inequality in adaptive capacity, in the ability to recover, find a substitute or for the system that serves them to learn from failure.
Perhaps this is where we should pay more attention — not just to what’s breaking, but to what’s adapting, and why. Some communities, platforms and institutions are withstanding stress and evolving because of it. These are signs of anti-fragility — the capacity to grow stronger through disruption.
If we can identify the right constellation of interventions — those that build redundancy (not waste but multiple pathways to access goods and services), reduce dependence on single actors (especially the state) and enable decentralised networks with diverse access points, we can begin to design systems that work better for everyone.
The goal isn’t for the excluded to “catch up” to a so-called functioning first economy but to reimagine the system itself: one that is adaptive, inclusive and capable of learning and improving through disruption.
Anti-fragility is more than resilience — resilience is the capacity to recover from adversity and return to a previous state or baseline. Anti-fragility, by contrast, is the ability to endure stress and to grow stronger through redesign. Where resilience is about bouncing back, anti-fragility is about adapting, evolving and thriving in the face of disruption. It’s more than a mindset; it’s a design principle for innovation.
In complex, interconnected systems like those in South Africa, where instability is the rule, not the exception, we can’t afford to stop at resilience. We need to design innovative systems that improve when challenged. We should keep this in mind as we celebrate World Creativity and Innovation Day on 21 April.
Anti-fragile systems build innovation into their DNA. They are structured to experiment, fail safely and use feedback to evolve. They reduce over-reliance on single actors — especially the state — by distributing capacity across networks of local institutions, enterprises and community platforms. They create multiple access points into communities where essential services, resources and opportunities can reliably reach people, even when formal systems falter.
We already see the seeds of anti-fragile design in practice across many platforms and organisations in the country. Only a few of the examples that I have had the pleasure to engage with include:
- Unjani Clinics, with over 250 care sites, decentralise healthcare delivery by empowering black women nurse-entrepreneurs to run locally owned clinics. This reduces pressure on the public health system, creates jobs and embeds access to an alternative healthcare offering within communities.
- FoodForward SA, South Africa’s largest food bank, supports over 920 000 people daily through a network of 2 500 community-based organisations. It turns systemic food waste into nutritional support for beneficiary organisations that provide services such as early childhood development to vulnerable communities, creating a circular, adaptive supply chain that flexes with demand and disruption.
- Ranyaka works in 21 townships across eight provinces, co-creating neighbourhood plans that embed local leadership, develop redundancy and interdependence across domains like land use, early learning, public safety and enterprise development.
These platforms are examples of how South Africans are not just delivering services — they are reconfiguring the architecture of service delivery. By linking private enterprise, civil society, education and government at the local level, they build systems that can absorb shocks, self-correct and grow stronger.
If we are serious about addressing inequality and building a more inclusive future, we must adopt anti-fragility as a core design logic for innovation. Not as a buzzword, but as a practical, scalable way to turn stress into strength.
That means investing in platforms that create options, decentralise capacity and harness local knowledge and intelligence. It means designing for learning, not just control. And it means building innovative systems that don’t just survive disruption but use it to get better.
Sara Grobbelaar is a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and a research fellow at the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and Science, Technology and Innovation at Stellenbosch University.
Submit and get free exposure here: Showcase Your Business | Advertise Your Special Offers.
