At 88 years of age and in failing and fragile health, on March 13, 2025, Pope Francis reaches the twelfth anniversary of his Petrine ministry. This is a propitious occasion to reflect, analyze, and take stock of what this pontificate, the 266th in the history of Catholicism, has meant for the Catholic Church and the world.

Power that does not serve, especially, the weakest, but rather tramples and crushes (Mt 20:25-29). The Church has also been contaminated by the greed for material goods, which often turns the leaders, leaders, and hierarchs of the Church into merchants of faith (“Do not make my Father’s house a den of thieves” Mt 21:12-16; “You cannot serve God and money” Mt 6:24). Greed prevents the Church from being “poor and of the poor.” Two thousand years of history, in which the hedonism offered by the world has also infiltrated the lives of church leaders.

Church history, moreover, has an overload of the Old Testament, whereby, for example, we pray more with the Old Testament than with the New Testament, or we preach the Old Testament Ten Commandments more than the new and only commandment of Jesus of Nazareth: the fraternal commandment of love. Likewise, the Church’s preaching has been contaminated by greater use of philosophical categories than with the criteria of the gospel, and with more insistence on rubrics, precepts, mandates, and laws of ecclesiastical law than on a life of love. (They leave aside and forget traditions)

All of this has distanced or impeded and hindered the faithful’s approach to the Gospel, which is Christ himself, the primary source of faith. We have forgotten that the disciples “are in the world, but we are not of the world” (Jn 15:18), because we must live in the world, but according to the logic of the Gospel, in order to be, in the world, light and salt. “But if the salt loses its saltiness, how will you make it salty?” (Mt 5:13-16)

In the face of these historical contaminants in the Church, in attachment to and authentic following of Christ and the Truth and logic of the Gospel, the figure of Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerged as the first Jesuit and Latin American Pope. For the reasons stated above, his universal pastoral ministry has been stubbornly focused on bringing us back—with gestures, deeds, and words, with proclamations and denunciations—to Jesus of Nazareth and to the criteria and principles of his good news, of his gospel, which, although foolishness and madness to the world, are the power, strength, and wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:18-24).

This urgency, this vehemence, this emphasis on Francis’s part to guide us to the Gospel, throughout his frenetic, abundant, and magnificent ministry, and expressed especially in his encyclical letters (Lumen Fidei, Laudato Si, Fratelli Tutti, and Dilexit Nos) and on his apostolic journeys, has been insistently manifested in:

• His constant defense of the “discarded” of the earth, as Francis calls them; the least, the impoverished, and the most vulnerable in society.
• Hence, his concern, for example, for migrants and his calls for fraternal coexistence, mercy, social justice, the “best politics” of fraternity and solidarity, and peace.
• His urgency for the Church and its leaders to uproot themselves and go out, with their evangelizing work, to the social peripheries, so that shepherds may have the “scent of sheep.”
• His defense of the environment.
• His call and actions for a life and preaching of the Church, without hypocrisy, without asking for renewal outside, “ad extra” of the Church, if there is no renewal within the Church itself. Hence, his urgent need for the renewal of the Roman Curia and his measures to combat the scandals and sexual crimes of pedophilia involving the clergy.
• His ongoing fraternal and ecumenical concern for interreligious dialogue.
• His closeness and concern for youth causes, demonstrated, especially, in the successive World Youth Days.
• And a long list of the many benefits and “fresh breaths” that Pope Francis’s teaching has brought to all humanity.

And yet, to our pain and shame, neither the Catholic Church in general nor the Latin American Church in particular have resonated with Francis’s pontificate. Furthermore, within the Church itself, like Jesus, among his close friends, those who ate with him (Mt 26:23), Pope Francis has encountered misunderstandings, detractors, and traitors to his pastoral work and his message.

The explanation for these betrayals must be sought in the aforementioned contaminants of the Church, because—as Jesus himself forcefully said, referring to the Pharisees of his time and people: “You cling to traditions (to power, wealth, pleasures, and the comforts of the world) but you disregard the commandment of God.” (Mark 7:8)

But the Gospel itself teaches that authenticity in following Christ is marked by suffering and the cross. Suffering, persecution, and the cross that arise from the clash of criteria between the logic of the world and the logic of the Gospel. Therefore, today, within the Church, Jesus’s rebuke can be applied to some: “Depart from me, for you think as men do, not as God does” (Matthew 16:23); and to Francis the Beatitude: “Blessed are those who suffer for the sake of the Gospel…” (Matthew 5:10-12).

There are those who strive and are interested in pigeonholing Francis’s teachings into ideologies or partisanships of the right or the left, but the only label that fits Francis is that of an authentic disciple of Christ.

Pope Francis, faithful to the Gospel and with a clarity and strength that impress at his 88 years of age, remains active and unwavering in his evangelical convictions, like “a voice crying in the wilderness” (Is 40:3; Lk 3:4) of postmodernism, of light culture, and of death; in an arrogant society that, while boasting about material, scientific, and technological advances, seems to be slipping away from the best values ​​of the human spirit; a world that is being built from afar, behind the backs of, or definitively against God and his Gospel.

The Pope continues his evangelizing work of proclamation and denunciation. As a pastor of the Catholic Church, a universal Church, and a prophet of our time, he cares deeply about and embraces all the problems of humankind and of all humanity, in order to illuminate everything with the light and criteria of the Gospel. He recently demonstrated this, for example, in a letter to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, concerned about the new immigration policies proposed by President Trump.

I write these lines of recognition of Pope Francis’s immense contribution and good legacy for all humanity as a most affectionate testimony, based on my personal Christian experience as a committed layperson, for the honor and privilege I have had throughout my life of closely following the person and message of Pope Francis: from my youth as a philosophy student in literature classes at the Jesuit University of El Salvador in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to recent years, in the periodic meetings I have had with Pope Francis in Rome.

As I finish writing this article, it is world news that Pope Francis is being admitted to the Gemelli Hospital in Rome due to respiratory distress. I invite you to pray for his recovery and to give thanks to the Pope and to God for all the good that his pontificate and teaching have meant for the Church throughout the world during these twelve years.

Pope Francis will be remembered for having placed the Gospel first in the being and work of the life and history of the Church; for insistently inviting us once again to return to the Gospel, to live according to the logic of Jesus of Nazareth, which is the wisdom of God and is lived through fraternal love, in order to build a more human world and, therefore, more in accord with God’s will.

Mario J. Paredes is a member of the General Governing Council of the Latin American Academy of Catholic Leaders