This interview was first published by Indian Catholic Matters on April 19, 2026. We are republishing it here as we mark the first anniversary of Pope Francis’ death.
It has been a year since the death of Pope Francis, a pope who, through his compassion, humility, and vision, left a lasting mark on the Church and the world. Known for his emphasis on mercy, pastoral care, and a Church that listens, he inspired Catholics to live their faith with courage, justice, and solidarity. His influence went beyond reforms or documents — it was evident in the way he lived and throughout his pontificate, which was attentive to the poor, the marginalized, and the challenges of our time.
In an interview, I spoke with Austen Ivereigh, a UK-based Catholic journalist, author, commentator, and biographer of Pope Francis who is widely regarded as the leading English-language voice on his pontificate and enduring legacy.
The author of The Great Reformer and Wounded Shepherd, and co-author (with Pope Francis) of Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, Ivereigh brings personal insight to this interview, offering a thoughtful reflection on a papacy that continues to shape the Church today. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
As Pope Francis’ biographer, you’ve followed his life and papacy closely and met him on several occasions. One year after his death, how would you sum up his legacy?
It is a vast legacy that we will be unpacking for generations, but I think what historians will say is that Pope Francis was the architect of a historic transition in Catholicism from a Europe-centred Church to a world Church. At the heart of the shift was a change in “style,” captured in the key words of the Francis era: humble, merciful, joyful, synodal, pastoral, missionary, fraternal, and so on.
Francis didn’t just oversee a conversion in the Church’s culture. He embodied it and performed it. And that is why, at his funeral, the dean of the college of cardinals in effect said: “this is how you evangelize the world of today.”
During his pontificate, Pope Francis faced moments of polarization within the Church. In your view, which aspects of his leadership or teaching were most misunderstood and what can the Church learn from this?
The opposition that Francis faced was unprecedented in its ferocity and disrespect. It came, above all, from those who felt deeply threatened by the shift he enabled. The opposition was similar to that which Jesus faced in his attempt to refocus on the heart of God’s law, which was interpreted by the religious elites of his day as undermining the law. The opposition to Francis had many faces, but at its root was a modern-day Pharisaism rooted in a kind of self-sufficiency in relation to doctrine and law. Those who were most attached to “truth” or “orthodoxy” clung to it as a possession rather than a gift and, so, feared to lose it.
This was also true of some liberal opponents who were disappointed in Francis for failing to enact their pre-cooked list of progressive reforms. Both of these forms of opposition had to come to terms with a pope who governed out of the Church’s tradition, rooted in the ordinary faithful, but always being renewed by the action of the Holy Spirit. That meant he disappointed the ideologues.
But the Church was never polarized under Francis. The resistance came from noisy and well-funded pockets of intellectuals and commentators. The main body of ordinary faithful were with him, understood him, and loved him.
Pope Francis often spoke of mercy as the fullest expression of doctrine. In practice, did this change how doctrine is taught and lived, or mainly the tone in which it is presented?
Francis saw truth and mercy as complementary poles in tension. God’s mercy never undermined the truth, and the truth of who God is was also his mercy. We humans place truth and mercy in contradiction. We think more of one means less of the other.
I think Francis’s great teaching on marriage, Amoris Laetitia, holds the two in perfect, fruitful tension. That is why it caused such great discomfort and was never properly received. I am delighted Pope Leo is calling the bishops to Rome in October in the hope of enabling its proper reception. There is no contradiction between calling people to lifelong, faithful marriage and supporting and helping those whose marriages fail.
I’d say one of the great achievements of Francis was to help us to live the tensions implicit in Catholicism — truth/mercy, local/universal, authority/service, clergy/laity — more fruitfully, so that the tension produces fruitfulness rather than conflict.
Pope Francis described synodality as a way of being Church rather than simply a structure. In your view, has the Church embraced that vision, or is it still at risk of becoming just a process?
Synodality was rightly understood by the cardinals at last year’s conclave as Francis’ greatest legacy. At its heart is an attempt to take seriously what Jesus promised his disciples: that the Holy Spirit would guide the Church.
Synodality is opening ourselves to the guidance of the Spirit through ways of prayerful listening, dialogue, and discernment. In prayerfully listening to each other, and entering into the tension I’ve just described, we hear better what the Spirit is saying to the Church. It is a process that does not weaken but strengthens the authority of the bishops — and finally the bishop of Rome — because they take important decisions following on from these processes of consultation and discernment involving the People of God.
We have only just begun this journey, which is one of the key breakthroughs of this new era of the Church we are in. It is a gift, especially of the Latin-American Church, the most synodal of the world’s Catholic regions. It involves a conversion in our way of operating, which is particularly challenging for the corporate, clerical culture that often prevails in the west. But it is key to the Church’s future. Synodality is the vehicle of our necessary transformation.
He often used the image of the Church as a “field hospital.” Has this pastoral vision taken root in the life of the Church, or was it more closely tied to his personal style?
Field-hospital Church was one of his great metaphors for what the Latin-American Church calls “pastoral conversion.” Rather than endlessly clarify doctrine and hand down laws, the Church needs to walk alongside people, especially the poor and the wounded, because in this way we allow Christ to come into our world. Has the Church been pastorally converted? I would say that Francis showed us the way, but we are still adjusting to the need for the journey. This is part of the change of era in the Church I spoke of earlier.
In this era where, in the west culture no longer supports Christianity and in much of the rest of the world the Church is flourishing in missionary contexts shaped by religious plurality, it is not enough to have beliefs. We first need to proclaim the kerygma – the Good News at the heart of our faith – by how we live and act and treat others.
By this means people become curious, or captivated. It is an evangelizing mode for an apostolic age: not just what we believe in, but how we are, as result of our experience of God’s mercy in Jesus Christ. In Francis’s words, the Church is not a police force or a custom’s house, but a loving mother, a field-hospital, a Church that walks with people through their dark nights, opening them to God’s healing power.
By addressing issues such as climate change, migration, inequality, and war head-on, did he strengthen the Church’s moral voice — or risk it being perceived as politically aligned?
Pope Francis placed the Church’s social teaching at the heart of humanity’s great challenges and questions. He did so in a way that was captivating and made Catholicism a major player again in world affairs. Laudato Si’ was the most consequential social teaching since Rerum Novarum, placing care of creation at the heart of the proclamation of God’s kingdom in our day. It was directly influential on the Paris agreement of 2015 and created a whole new body of thinking and acting in the Church.
So too migration, which has become one of the most pressing issues — and the most politicized — of our time. Francis kept coming back to the need to welcome, protect, promote and integrate migrants as the test of our commitment to the Gospel, and he called on us to treat the issue as not a problem to be resolved, but suffering human beings to be valued.
On war, he moved the Church to a place of practical nonviolence, not pacifism, showing that war is essentially evil and cannot ever be used to secure changes. It is really only permissible as a last-resort self-defence when all other means have failed. In respect of the economy, I’d say Francis was the first pope to engage seriously with the digital age, calling out the growing inequality and indifference to the poor that a new market fundamentalism has produced.
I am looking forward to Leo’s social encyclical which will take on these issues systematically, building on Francis’s pioneer teachings.
If future generations remember Pope Francis for one lasting spiritual insight — not a document or reform, but a way of being Church — what do you think it will be?
That the Church is called to reflect, embody and perform God’s way of relating to humanity, which is humble service, steadfast love, and radical solidarity. And that God never leaves us alone in a crisis, but always offers a path ahead, a grace of conversion, that allows us to build a better future even out of disaster and failure. Francis was humanity’s storm pilot in an age of populism, Covid, and war.
Above all in the little book I did with him, Let Us Dream, he showed us that God’s grace and mercy are always available to us, but to receive them we must “come out of ourselves” — one of his great expressions — to receive it, in humility and poverty, because God’s love is a gift that can never be imposed.
His great spiritual documents — Evangelii Gaudium, Gaudete et Exsultate, Dilexit Nos — bring us into the very heart of God and will be seen as classics in the future.
Beyond your role as his biographer, in what ways were you personally touched or changed by Pope Francis? Is there a particular moment or gesture that remains especially close to your heart?
I came to see that the Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Pope Francis was the way of living faith in our time, our change of era. So, for me, he was a great teacher and model. I was blessed to know him and to work with him, and I treasure our times together as well as the many letters I have from him. He taught me that Christian joy is real, that it comes from seeing and enabling God’s action in human history. He changed my horizon and that of so many others.
He will not soon be forgotten and, whenever he is talked about and remembered, people smile. He shone God’s light on us and we walk in it still.
Reproduced with permission by Where Peter Is.
