(RNS) — Drawing on Latin American theology that emphasizes collaboration, developed in response to continued struggles with colonialism, Francis pushed for a Catholic Church with broader inclusion of people on the margins.
Nuns hold flowers and look at a memorial to the late Pope Francis outside the Metropolitan Cathedral in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tuesday, April 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
Aleja Hertzler-McCain
April 22, 2025
(RNS) — When Pope Francis stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica for the first time back in 2013, he told the crowds below him that the College of Cardinals had gone “almost to the ends of the earth” to find the new bishop of Rome.
Over 500 years after papal bulls authorized the violent, colonial conquest of non-Christian peoples, paving the way for Catholicism to take root in the Americas, Francis was the first pope to emerge from those lands. Drawing on the region’s theology that emphasizes collaboration and developed in response to continued struggles with colonialism, Francis pushed for a Catholic Church with broader participation and inclusion of people on the margins, scholars told RNS before and after his death on Monday (April 21).
“We were, for several centuries, a church that reflected what they do in Europe — we repeated, copied Europe,” said Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer, a theology professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in Spanish.
Latin American bishops began to implement the teachings of the modernizing Second Vatican Council right after the council in the early 1960s. And as a result, “we try to be a church that is a source, a church that generates its own content, that generates the way we celebrate our rituals, that generates our priorities,” Bingemer said. Francis made sure those efforts grew “in a strong and exponential way.”
As archbishop of Argentina, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who would take the name Francis when he became pope in 2013, came up within the Latin American bishops’ conference, known as CELAM. That school of thought would become prominent during his papacy.
In 2007, he chaired the committee that drafted the final document for CELAM’s general conference in Aparecida, Brazil, which encouraged Catholics to be “missionary disciples” and described the church as the “home of the poor.” Both became key concepts six years later in Francis’ first apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii Gaudium,” in which the new pope encouraged the church to “go forth,” share “the joy of the Gospel” and understand “God’s heart has a special place for the poor.”
