As white smoke rose from the Sistine Chapel chimney, Sister Nathalie Becquart’s phone rang. It was her brother, calling to announce the birth of his fourth child, Céleste. At the same time, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., was being announced as Pope Francis.
He bowed his head and asked the people to pray for him. While his simple greeting—Buona sera—is what has been most recalled, what struck Sister Becquart most deeply was what he said next: “And now, we take up this journey: Bishop and People.”
“I have linked these two events,” she writes, “the arrival of this pope as a new birth for the church.”
Twelve years later, on Easter Sunday 2025, visibly diminished but determined, Pope Francis appeared one final time at the window of St. Peter’s, gave his blessing and made a last circuit of the square in the popemobile. The following morning, he died.
To mark the first anniversary of his death, the Jesuit Curia in Rome has published “Pope Francis: in memoriam”—personal testimonies from those who worked closely with him, across different forms of collaboration and encounter. All five are formed in the Ignatian tradition: four Jesuits and one member of a women’s Ignatian congregation. What follows draws from their written accounts. Taken together, they offer not a verdict on his papacy, but a recognition of the man they knew.
Michael Czerny, S.J. cardinal; prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development (2022– ); undersecretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section (2017–2022)
From the beginning of his pontificate, Cardinal Czerny writes, Francis longed for an “outgoing” church—“not waiting to be approached, but ever striving to be welcoming, like a parent and a friend, with a special eye for the least, the vulnerable and the forgotten.” In 2016, Francis appointed him to help establish the Vatican’s new Migrants and Refugees Section. For Cardinal Czerny, one of the clearest expressions of Francis’s priorities as pope comes into view through a single object.
During one of his weekly public audiences in St. Peter’s Square, a Spanish rescuer placed an orange life jacket in the pope’s hands. He had tried to save a baby girl drowning in the Mediterranean and had not succeeded. Francis later gave the jacket to the very new Migrants and Refugees Section and set it before those entrusted with that work. “This is your mission,” he said.
“With Francis,” Cardinal Czerny writes, “one did not speak of migration but of migrants: real men, women and children, each with their own stories, wounds and hopes.” It is a pattern he traces back to Francis’s visit to Lampedusa in July 2013, where he stood with survivors of the crossing and mourned those who had died at sea—and where, Cardinal Czerny writes, “he suffered greatly.”
That closeness, in his account, never wavered. Francis’ heart, he writes, “always turned toward the human in need. He never took his distance.”
Nathalie Becquart, X.M.C.J. undersecretary of the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops (2021– )
During a first brief personal encounter with Francis at the Vatican, Sister Becquart was struck by something she would observe again and again in the years that followed: “the way he was fully present to the person before him, attentive to each one.” It was, she writes, the “culture of encounter” he championed, embodied.
In 2021, Francis appointed her undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, making her the first woman with voting rights in the Synod of Bishops. The synodal gatherings of October 2023 and October 2024 gave her the opportunity to sit regularly at the same round table as the pope—close enough to observe a style marked by “welcome and attentive listening to all participants.” His final address of thanks contained a line she returns to: “I too, as pope, need to listen to you.” It was, she writes, “prophetic humility” that “redefined primacy within a synodal perspective.”
It was the 2018 Youth Synod that had first “transformed me deeply”—a month in the Synod Hall that shaped a way of listening and discerning she would come to recognise as Francis’ own. She also remembers a lighter moment from that same assembly. Stepping into an elevator one day with other religious sisters, she found the doors opening to reveal the pope. “We were so surprised to find ourselves with him like this that we spontaneously said, ‘Come stai?’ [How are you?]” He replied with humour: “‘Ancora vivo!’ [Still alive!]”
Arturo Sosa, S.J. superior general of the Society of Jesus (2016– )
“Before the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio,” Father Sosa writes, “the idea of a Jesuit pope was considered improbable.” At his final vows, a Jesuit promises not to seek any office or dignity—including the episcopate—unless the Holy Father requires it for the needs of the church’s mission. The Jesuit bishops and cardinals who have existed have always been understood in that light—relatively few, appointed at the pleasure of the Holy Father, personal ambition ruled out by the vows to which each is bound. “From the perspective of the Jesuit vocation,” Father Sosa writes, “the possibility of being elected to the papacy lies outside consideration.”
And yet, in March 2013, it happened. Father Sosa writes that in accepting, Bergoglio “made himself available to receive as mission what he had not sought, to carry a responsibility he had not chosen—and to do so by putting in place the means to ensure that the office would not become a form of personal prestige.” His papacy bore that out: “choosing what serves the mission rather than what secures the institution; remaining close to those who are on the margins; and resisting the attraction of prestige, even within the Church.”
“On the one hand,” Father Sosa writes, “sharing in the experience of the Society’s charism fostered between us a sense of being in tune with one another as brothers who felt ourselves profoundly united. On the other hand, we always met as the Holy Father, responsible for the mission entrusted to the Church, and the Superior General of a Society of Jesus eager to place itself at her service.”
He held no illusions about the society. He warned Jesuits, Father Sosa writes, against “rigidity, self-referentiality and ideological bias” as interior temptations—speaking, Father Sosa adds, “not as an external observer, but as one who knew these dynamics from experience.”
Federico Lombardi, S.J. director of the Holy See Press Office (2006–2016); president of the Ratzinger Foundation (2013–2023)
Father Lombardi first encountered Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1983, at the 33rd General Congregation—the same gathering that included a young Arturo Sosa. Thirty years later, in the corridors before the 2013 conclave, he was approached warmly: “Good morning, Father, I am Cardinal Bergoglio.” A Jesuit pope was not something he had expected. “It took me several minutes to recover,” he writes—but the journalists were already buzzing in the press office next door. It would not be the last time Francis tested his readiness.
When false reports circulated during the Syrian crisis that Francis had spoken on the phone with President Assad, Father Lombardi remembers rushing breathlessly to the pope’s private library to find him. Francis looked up anxiously: “What have I done?” Lombardi explained. Francis was dumbfounded: “Me? Assad?” Lombardi ran to deny it. “It had taken just two or three minutes,” he writes. “With him, you could do that. He grasped situations immediately and was not caught off guard.” He was, Father Lombardi writes, “a free man” who wanted to be “a ‘free’ pope in his relationships and in the way he communicated.”
As director of the Holy See Press Office under both Benedict and Francis, Lombardi was in a rare position to observe how each approached such encounters, and certain differences were hard to miss. After meetings with heads of state, Benedict would give “a perfectly ordered and crystal-clear summary: first, second, third,” he writes. Francis, by contrast, would remain standing, speaking of the person: “You know, this man is very honest, he cares about migrants, he loves his family, you’ll be able to talk to him”—or simply, “He doesn’t strike me as very trustworthy.” The difference, Lombardi concludes, was one of instinct: “Benedict, the contents; Francis, the approach to the person—to begin a journey, to seek an encounter.”
After three years as press director, Father Lombardi stepped aside—but Francis was not done with him. He asked him to remain in the Vatican, taking on the presidency of the Ratzinger Foundation, established to promote Benedict XVI’s theological legacy. Then, in February 2019, he entrusted him with the role of moderator of a Vatican summit on the protection of minors—a watershed moment in the church’s reckoning with clerical abuse, attended by the presidents of every episcopal conference worldwide. Of all his years in service to both Benedict and Francis, Father Lombardi writes, this was the most demanding—requiring Francis himself to “come to terms with this, becoming deeply and personally involved.” It remains his “most profound experience of participating in the pope’s service on the church’s journey along the path of the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus.”
Antonio Spadaro, S.J. undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education (2023– ); editor of La Civiltà Cattolica (2011–2023)
“His gaze was always personal,” Father Spadaro writes. “He did not look upward, as one does when trying to embrace a crowd. He looked horizontally, because he wanted to see individuals—the faces, even if only a few, but never the mass.” As editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, Father Spadaro had conducted the first major interview with Francis on behalf of Jesuit journal editors worldwide, including America. The decade that followed took him across five continents, recording conversations that became the book Be Tender, Be Brave—a man speaking with “nothing solemn, nothing prepared,” his words moving “by images, by stories, by sudden leaps from the particular to the universal.” It was not, he adds, “a studied gesture. It was the reflex of a man for whom closeness was not a theological principle but an instinct.”
One moment has stayed with Father Spadaro above all others. In Manila, a 12-year-old girl named Glyzelle Iris Palomar, rescued from the streets, began to tell her story and broke down in tears, unable to go on. Francis set aside his prepared remarks. “She has said the one thing that has no answer,” he told the crowd, “and that cannot even be expressed in words, only in tears. Let us learn to weep.” He was not looking at the crowd. He was looking at her—only her, eye to eye.
“He never refused to be touched by reality,” Father Spadaro writes. Now that Francis is gone, those notes “weigh differently in my hands. They trace the path of a man who crossed the world in order to encounter it, to let himself be wounded by it—and to heal its wounds.”
“First of all a shepherd”
Sister Becquart was among those who walked behind his coffin from Casa Santa Marta to St. Peter’s, alongside a crowd that “spontaneously applauded in an atmosphere of peace.” At his funeral, “all humanity in its diversity was gathered in that square, silently manifesting the Church’s profound vocation.” Francis had given “far more than documents or reforms. He had made us live synodality—in our flesh, in our relationships, in our way of being Church.” Recalling that first evening on the loggia, she writes: “He had kept his promise.”
The day before, Cardinal Czerny recalls, Francis—frail after months of declining health—came out nearly inaudibly from the balcony of St. Peter’s to impart the Easter blessing, then made one last circuit of the square in the popemobile to bless the faithful. “‘With the smell of the sheep!’” Cardinal Czerny writes, “he was gone. A farewell in ‘Bergoglian’ style, for he was first of all a shepherd.”
“Pope Francis: in memoriam” is a living collection of remembrances. These five testimonies are its first contributions. New voices will be added in the weeks and months ahead.
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