On April 21, 2025, Easter Monday, Jorge Mario Bergoglio died in Santa Marta. A year has passed and the mourning is no longer news: what remains is the balance.
Bergoglio arrived at the balcony on March 13, 2013, with a « buona sera » that was, at once, a greeting and a program. He came from Buenos Aires with the reputation of an austere archbishop—subway, small apartment, peripheries—carefully built by his friendly biographers. The reality of the porteño government was more complex: an iron hand with collaborators, a long memory for offenses, a marked preference for suspicion over priests of traditional sensitivity, and a network of personal loyalties that he would later replicate in Rome.
He was a Jesuit from the generation that followed the expulsion of the traditionalists from the Company, formed in the atmosphere of the theology of the people—younger sister but unmistakable of the theology of liberation—that read the Gospel in a key of sociological protagonism of the poor rather than in a key of the Kingdom. Pious in Latin American popular devotion; intellectually impatient with anything that smelled of doctrinal rigor. That combination explains almost everything: the kisses to prisoners on Holy Thursday and the devastating letters to communities that only asked to be able to pray with the 1962 Missal are not a paradox, they are a method.
He died weakened after the long stay at the Gemelli in February-March 2025. He wanted to be buried in Santa Maria Maggiore, outside the Vatican. Even in the sepulcher, the calculated gesture of distance from a Tradition that he had decided to use as a backdrop and not as a home.
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