When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected in March 2013 following Benedict XVI's unusual resignation, he became the first Jesuit ever to hold the office and the first pope born in the Americas, a continent home to roughly forty percent of the world's Catholics but never before represented in the papacy itself. His choice of name broke with tradition in a different way: no previous pope had ever taken the name Francis, and he explained the choice within days, saying it came to him at the moment of election as a call to remember the poor, naming Francis of Assisi directly as the reference, a poor man who loved and cared for creation.
The choice set the tone for a pontificate that consistently emphasized simplicity and closeness to the marginalized over ceremony. Francis chose to live in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, a Vatican guesthouse, rather than the formal papal apartments his predecessors had occupied, continued wearing simpler vestments than some of his predecessors favored, and made visits to prisons, migrant camps, and the peripheries of major cities a recurring feature of his travel, presenting these choices as a deliberate echo of the saint whose name he had taken rather than as incidental personal preference.
Francis also pursued a distinctive process he called synodality, gathering bishops, clergy, and laypeople in extended rounds of consultation on the church's pastoral direction, most prominently in a multi-year Synod on Synodality convened in 2021, intended to make listening across the whole church, not only its hierarchy, a more permanent feature of how it discerns direction.