News of the death of Pope Francis has seen churches in his native Argentina crowded by people paying their respects to the first Latin American pontiff as President Javier Milei decreed seven days of national mourning.
This outpouring of emotion has been tinged with regret that during his 12-year papacy, Francis never returned home to visit as pope. Seven of his trips to 66 countries around the world were to Latin America, but the closest he came to Argentina were trips to neighbouring Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Chile.
This was in sharp contrast to his two immediate predecessors, Benedict XVI and John Paul II, who returned to their native Germany and Poland respectively early in their pontificates.
For years after his election, Francis spoke of a trip being under consideration. The country’s episcopal synod maintained an open invitation, as did each of the four presidents to hold office during his papacy. But he never got there.
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This glaring absence on his papal résumé speaks to Francis’s complex and ambiguous relationship with the highly fractious politics of his country. It also robbed the Argentine church of a unique opportunity in its struggle for souls with the evangelical Christian movement that is expanding rapidly among the poor communities that Francis had placed at the centre of his pastoral mission.
“That was a major faux pas, especially since [Catholic] Church membership in Argentina dropped significantly during his papacy. He wanted to avoid being used as a political football in his home country, but his refusal to visit certainly didn’t aid in the effort to retain the Catholic flock,” says Dr Andrew Chesnut, chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and an expert on the Latin American church.
The election of a Latin American pope in 2013 was read regionally as the Vatican’s response to the inroads being made by Pentecostal churches into the world’s most Catholic region. But during Francis’s papacy the decline in Catholic Church membership across Latin America continued apace, with Brazil, the world’s most populous Catholic country, losing its Catholic majority in 2018.
“Membership retention and evangelisation figured among Francis’s major weak points. Pentecostals continued to flourish during his papacy to the point that Brazil is now home to the largest Pentecostal population on the planet. One thing is being popular and likable and another is working to retain members and work to reclaim those who have left the church,” says Chesnut.
Francis’s difficult relationship with his country’s political class dated back to when he was still known as Jorge Bergoglio. In 2004, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, he fell out with then-president Néstor Kirchner after criticising his increasingly personalist leadership style. Kirchner responded by labelling Bergoglio “the spiritual leader of the political opposition” and moved the annual Te Deum to celebrate independence from Spain out of the capital so as to avoid further lectures from the austere Jesuit.
Relations with the Kirchner clan worsened after Néstor was succeeded by his wife Cristina, who believed Bergoglio plotted against her during a titanic struggle in 2008 with the country’s powerful agricultural sector over export taxes. When the surprising news that Bergoglio had been elected pope broke on a Wednesday morning in March 2013, Cristina was giving a speech in which she could not even bring herself to mention the prelate’s name. Instead she merely noted the news of a “first Latin American pope”, to whistles from her Peronist party militants.
But Cristina quickly realised it would be political madness to continue a feud with the man who had overnight become the most influential on the planet. After years of antagonism she quickly adopted a policy of rapprochement, assiduously seeking out meetings with Francis in the Vatican and gatecrashing papal visits to Brazil, Cuba and Paraguay. This effort was politically successful, as it neutered the antagonism the pope may have felt for the Kirchner clan. But Bergoglio watchers in Buenos Aires said Cristina’s showy efforts also convinced Francis that any visit home would risk him being dragged into the minefield of Argentina’s increasingly toxic politics.
Relations with the three presidents since Cristina were also tense. Her right-wing successor Mauricio Macri suspected the pope was, despite his antagonistic relations with the Kirchners, a Peronist at heart, and the Casa Rosada and Vatican engaged in a low-key briefing war during his term. Relationship with Macri’s successor – the Peronist Alberto Fernández – started warmly, but turned frosty after Fernández sanctioned the legalisation of abortion in 2020 over fierce opposition from the local church.
The election of far-right libertarian Javier Milei in 2023 all but buried any chance that Francis would return home. Milei had revelled in insulting the pope during his election campaign, calling him a communist, “imbecile” and “a representative of evil on earth”. Despite granting the former sex guru an audience in the Vatican, Francis did not shy away from criticising Milei’s administration, whose economic shock therapy saw poverty rates spike above 50 per cent of the population. After one protest in Buenos Aires, Francis commented: “Instead of spending money on social justice, they use it to buy tear gas.”
Elsewhere in Latin America, Francis was increasingly willing in recent years to weigh in on regional politics. In 2023 he denounced the bloody regime of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua as a “crude dictatorship”, and following last year’s stolen election in Venezuela, warned its strongman Nicolás Maduro that “reading history, dictatorships don’t work and end badly sooner or later”.
Several Latin American presidents will be quietly relieved that none of the region’s 24 eligible cardinals are tipped to succeed Francis.
