Pope Francis attends the weekly general audience on Feb. 12, 2025 in the Vatican. Photo by Getty Images

By Andrew Silow-Carroll April 21, 2025

(JTA) — Pope Francis, who significantly advanced the Catholic Church’s relationship with Jews and Israel by actively promoting dialogue, reconciliation and a strong stance against antisemitism, died Monday, one day after marking Easter with a public appearance in the Vatican. He was 88.

The Vatican did not give a cause of death. Francis suffered multiple health conditions in recent years and had been hospitalized for several weeks in February with what the Vatican called a “complex clinical picture.”

But Francis had rebounded to make public appearances and, on Sunday, meet privately with U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism whom he had indirectly rebuked before his hospitalization for citing Catholic doctrine in defending the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

The first Jesuit and first Latin American to serve as pope, Francis assumed the leadership of the Catholic Church in 2013 after years of building and sustaining Jewish relationships in his native Argentina. In 2010, he co-wrote, with Rabbi Abraham Skorka, “On Heaven and Earth,” a book based on their public conversations on differences and similarities between Judaism and Catholicism.

Francis met frequently with Jewish leaders and paid a state visit to Israel in 2014. He often invoked the spirit of Nostra Aetate, promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965, which repudiated centuries of anti-Jewish theology and inaugurated a new era in Catholic-Jewish relations. 

Francis reiterated the spirit of Nostra Aetate in 2013, speaking to the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations. “Due to our common roots, a Christian cannot be anti-Semitic!” the pope declared, before going on to describe his warm relations with Jewish clergy in his native Argentina. 

“I had the joy of maintaining relations of sincere friendship with leaders of the Jewish world,” said Francis. “We talked often of our respective religious identities, the image of man found in the Scriptures, and how to keep an awareness of God alive in a world now secularized in many ways. … But above all, as friends, we enjoyed each other’s company, we were all enriched through encounter and dialogue, and we welcomed each other, and this helped all of us grow as people and as believers.”

He also constrained efforts by conservatives within the church to promote the Latin Mass, a liturgy that calls for the conversion of Jews that his predecessor had made it easier to use.

Such statements sustained a relationship sometimes strained when Francis adopted positions at odds with the core concerns of many Jews. In May 2015, an expansion of Vatican relations with Palestinian leadership following the Palestinians’ unilateral pursuit of statehood drew criticism from Israeli and Jewish leaders, who at the time viewed direct negotiations with Israel as the only credible path to peace.

Francis also strongly defended the record of Pope Pius XII, who served as pope during the Holocaust. Critics accuse Pius of having turned a blind eye to Jewish suffering in the Shoah, while the Vatican has long maintained he worked behind the scenes to save Jews. In 2019, Jewish groups welcomed Francis’s announcement that the Vatican Archives covering the Pius papacy would open to researchers beginning in March 2020.

For scholars such as David Kertzer, who has written books about the Vatican during World War II, the newly available material only confirmed the impression that Pius, despite his personal objections to Hitler and Nazism and occasionally valiant attempts to protect Italy’s Jews, was more concerned with protecting the church and its future under fascism.

The Israel-Hamas war, which followed the deadly Hamas attacks in Israel in Oct. 7, 2023, further strained relations between Francis, the Jews and Israelis. In November 2024, citing experts saying “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” Francis called for the charge — which Israel strenuously rejects — to be “carefully investigated.”

In December, Francis attended the inauguration of a nativity scene at the Vatican that positioned baby Jesus on a keffiyeh, or Palestinian scarf — a nod to activists who have identified Jesus, a Jew born in Roman times, as a Palestinian. Both incidents drew outcry from Jewish groups, and the nativity scene was removed.

Defenders of the pope said his statements about the Israel-Hamas war were in keeping with Catholic doctrine on the value of peace and human life, and did not reflect on Francis’s commitment to fighting antisemitism. 

Indeed, a document issued last December by the American Jewish Committee, “Translate Hate,” included Catholic commentaries written, with the pope’s blessing, by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. The commentaries endorsed key post-Vatican II doctrine on teaching about Judaism and respecting the Jews’ deep religious connection towards Israel.

Despite the disagreements, Francis maintained warm relations with Jewish leaders involved in interfaith dialogue.

“We are clearly living in a renewed era of Catholic-Jewish relations, “Rabbi Noam Marans, the AJC’s director of interreligious and intergroup relations, wrote in September 2017, on the eve of the pope’s second visit to the United States. “ When there are disagreements, they are discussed and often resolved among friends, but even when unresolved, the conversation rarely devolves into a contretemps.”

During that visit, Jewish leaders took part in “Witness for Peace: A Multireligious Gathering with Pope Francis” at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. 

Jewish groups also appreciated Francis’s frequent pleas to his followers to heed the lessons of the Holocaust. “The memory of the Shoah and its atrocious violence must never be forgotten,” the pope said in 2018 in a message through the Vatican’s secretary of state in Berlin. “It should be a constant warning for all of us of an obligation to reconciliation, of reciprocal comprehension and love toward our ‘elder brothers,’ the Jews.”

In 2017, Pope Francis and Rabbi Skorka co-authored an introduction for a book by three Argentine doctors about the Nazi medical experiments. The essay calls the Holocaust a “hell.” 

“The human arrogance exposed during the Shoah was the action of people who felt like gods, and shows the aberrant dimension in which we can fall if we forget where we came from and where we are going,” they wrote.

The pope’s friendship with Skorka, rector of the Latin American Rabbinic Seminary, dated to 1997, when the pope, then known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, became coadjutor bishop of the Buenos Aires archdiocese. In addition to collaborating in 2010 on their book “On Heaven and Earth,” the bishop and the rabbi appeared frequently together on Argentinian television.

In a 2013 interview with the New York Jewish Week, Skorka said Francis had a “special relationship towards Jews and Jewishness” and a commitment to Nostra Aetate.

“From a theological point of view, according to what I spoke with him about, he and other important Catholic thinkers believe in cooperation between Jews and Christians in order to get a better world — respecting one another and sharing the challenge to bring more spirituality and justice to the world,” Skorka said. 

Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, on Dec. 17, 1936 in Buenos Aires. He served as archbishop of the Argentinian capital beginning in 1998 and as cardinal after 2001. In contrast to the often forbidding Benedict XVI, his immediate predecessor as pope, Bergoglio was said to be warm and modest, cooking his own meals and personally answering his phone.

Friendly relations with Jewish clergy was a hallmark of his priesthood. In 2005, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio attended Rosh Hashanah services at the Benei Tikva Slijot synagogue in September 2007. Bergoglio was the first public personality to sign a petition for justice in the 1994 AMIA bombing case, in which 85 people were killed in a terrorist attack at a Buenos Aires Jewish center. In June 2010, he visited the rebuilt AMIA building to talk with Jewish leaders. In 2024, after years of stalled investigations and charges of a cover-up, an Argentinian court ruled that Iran directed the attack, and that it was carried by Hezbollah. 

While he took traditional views on issues like same-sex marriage, Beroglio also had a reputation as a social reformer. Israel Singer, the former head of the World Jewish Congress, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency soon after Francis’s election as pope that he spent time working with Bergoglio when the two were distributing aid to the poor in Buenos Aires in the early 2000s, part of a joint Jewish-Catholic program called Tzedaka.

Bergoglio wrote the foreword to a book by Rabbi Sergio Bergman, a Buenos Aires legislator, and in 2012 hosted a Kristallnacht memorial event at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral with Rabbi Alejandro Avruj from the NCI-Emanuel World Masorti congregation.

During that visit, Bergoglio told the congregation that he was there to examine his heart “like a pilgrim, together with you, my elder brothers.”

He was 76 when he was elected to the papacy following the resignation of the German-born Benedict. Francis was the first pope to come from outside Europe in more than a millennium.

He inherited a church wrestling with an array of challenges, including a shortage of priests, a sexual abuse crisis and difficulties governing the Vatican itself.

In 2018, Francis renewed his commitment to fostering relations between Catholics and Jews and condemning anti-Semitism.

“Dialogue and friendship with the children of Israel are part of the life of Jesus’ disciples,” Francis wrote in “Evangelii Gaudium” (The Joy of the Gospel), described as the flagship document of his papacy. “The friendship which has grown between us makes us bitterly and sincerely regret the terrible persecutions which they have endured, and continue to endure, especially those that have involved Christians.”

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re near the end of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Make a Passover Gift Today!

$90 $180

$360

Other amount