Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) April 21, 2025: Jorge Mario Bergoglio (born on December 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Argentina; died as Pope Francis on April 21, 2025, in Rome, Italy). Cardinal Bergoglio was elected pope in March 2013. He was the first pope from South America, the first Jesuit pope, and the first pope to take the name Francis in honor of the medieval Italian Saint Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan religious order. Pope Francis himself is of Italian descent.
In 2015, Pope Francis issued his eco-encyclical, Laudato Si' - by far the most widely read encyclical ever written by a pope. Indeed, it was so widely read that it may have been read by more people than the total number of people who read all other papal encyclicals combined. (Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical is available in English and other languages at the Vatican's website.)
Now, the British journalist Dr. Austen Ivereigh has published two biographies of Pope Francis: (1) The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (Henry Holt and Company, 2014; in which Ivereigh-the-fan sees Pope Francis through rose-tinted glasses); and (2) Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (Henry Holt and Company, 2019; in which Ivereigh-the-fan comes back down to earth as he portrays Pope Francis as struggling to convert the Catholic Church).
The Italian philosophy professor Massimo Borghesi has published a fine intellectual biography of Pope Francis: The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio's Intellectual Journey, translated from the Italian by Barry Hudock (Liturgical Press Academic, 2018; orig. Italian ed., 2017).
Subsequently, Massimo Borghesi published Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis, translated from the Italian by Barry Hudock (Liturgical Press Academic, 2021; orig. Italian ed., 2021).
What Professor Borghesi refers to in his 2021 as "Catholic Discordance" is fundamentally what Dr. Ivereigh refers to in his 2019 book as Pope Francis "Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church."
Now, I profiled the doctrinally conservative, but golden-tongued Pope Francis in my widely read OEN article "Pope Francis on Evil and Satan" (dated March 24, 2019):
"Pope Francis on Evil and Satan" was viewed 2,778 times at the OEN website. (OEN = OpEdNews. Rob Kall is the founder of OpEdNews.)
Disclosure
I was born on March 17, 1944, in Ossining, New York, my father's hometown. However, at the time of my birth, my father was in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Dover, England, as part of the buildup of troops there for the D-Day landing in Normandy, France. My father entered my young life when I was eighteen months old. My sister Margaret Jean Farrell was also born in Ossining, New York - on May 14, 1947. When I was four years old, my father and mother moved our family to Kansas City, Kansas, my mother's hometown. My sister Kathlee Farrell was born in Kansas City, Kansas, on May 20, 1953.
I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas. In the fall semester of 1964, I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to attend Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university there. In the fall semester of 1964, I took my first course in English from the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Over the years, I took five courses from Father Ong at SLU.
Over ten years (1969-1979), I taught about one thousand black inner-city youth, and about one thousand white youth, in the context of open admissions in the City of St. Louis (1969-1975 and 1976-1979) and in New York City (in 1975-1976).
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