The pope, who pushed for a less opaque Vatican and connected to common and marginalised people’s concerns, died aged 88. Pope Francis, the Argentinian pontiff who brought the plight of the world’s most marginalised back to the centre of the Roman Catholic Church’s attention, has died aged 88, the Vatican announced on Monday. A charismatic communicator with a friendly demeanour, Francis succeeded in broadening Catholicism’s appeal at a time of growing disenchantment towards the Church, an institution embroiled in financial and sexual scandals. Throughout his papacy from 2013 to 2025, the pope stripped the Vatican of some layers of opacity and connected with the concerns of common people. He highlighted the plight of the poor and that of prisoners. Francis condemned the Church’s abuse of power while engaging with other faiths. Francis’s tone marked a radical departure from his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who believed that nurturing the Church’s most ardent believers was the way to strengthen the institution. But Francis’s shift never translated into fundamental changes to the Church’s doctrine on contentious issues. In most instances, he remained in line with previous papacies, staunchly opposing gay marriage, women becoming priests and priests marrying. Still, his steps to open up the Church drew the ire of traditionalists, while the lack of radical change under his watch drew criticism from progressives. Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936 in the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires, to immigrant parents who fled Italy’s fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. He trained as a chemical technician, worked in the food processing industry, and, for a brief time, was a bouncer in a nightclub in Cordoba before becoming a priest in 1969. He liked to dance tango, although he preferred milonga, Francis said in a 2010 interview, referring to the faster-paced music that preceded tango. His upbringing in Buenos Aires exposed him to religious pluralism and socioeconomic inequalities – two factors that experts believe explain his commitment to interfaith dialogue and pointed criticism of capitalism and consumerism. At just 36 years of age, he became the head of Argentina’s Jesuits, a Roman Catholic order of priests. Back then, he was a stern disciplinarian, experts and biographers say. At the time, liberation theology, a left-wing interpretation of the Gospel that centred on concern for the poor and oppressed groups, was popular among Jesuits in Latin America, but Francis did not subscribe to the ideology. Francis’s tenure then coincided with the years of Argentina’s Dirty War, which lasted from 1976 to 1983 – seven years of brutal military dictatorship. Tens of thousands of people were tortured, killed and disappeared. The role of Argentina’s Church in those years remains contentious, with Francis never openly denouncing the regime. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, a position he assumed in 1998, he said he was not aware of the scale of what was happening in the late 1970s – a position refuted by critics and associates who argue that there was no way he could not have known at the time. “Let us pray … for the complicit silence of most of society and of the Church,” he said during a ceremony in 1999, a quote some read as an admission of complacency. During his time as archbishop, he would become an outspoken critic of social injustice and economic inequality. “The Church can’t just sit sucking its finger when faced with a frivolous, cold and calculating market economy,” he once said during a sermon. In 2013, the Catholic world was shocked when the then-Pope Benedict XVI resigned, breaking a centuries-old tradition of holding papal duties until death. Francis, who by then had been elected cardinal, rushed to the Vatican to vote for a new pope. In what was a tight race, Francis, who had already been a runner-up in the previous papal conclave in 2005, was elected. With him, the Church chose its first non-European pontiff in 1,282 years – the last one was Gregory III, elected in 731 from Syria – and also its first leader since then from the Global South, which today is home to the majority of Christians worldwide. Francis set the tone of his papacy immediately. When he stood on the large balcony and faced the huge crowd in Saint Peter’s Square after being elected, he broke with the tradition of blessing the crowd, asking people instead to pray for him. He refused to move to the grand papal apartment on the top floor of the Vatican palace, opting to stay in the more modest Domus Sanctae Marthae residence. He preferred to be driven around in a Fiat rather than a Mercedes-Benz. “Be shepherds with the smell of sheep,” he told a crowd of priests in 2013, urging a departure from the pomp and splendour often associated with the clergy’s top hierarchy. On his first trip outside Rome as pope, he travelled to Lampedusa, an Italian island and key point of entry for migrants and refugees trying to reach Europe. He threw a crown of flowers into the sea to commemorate the people who died in the Mediterranean Sea while risking their lives to come to Europe. Francis criticised then-US President Donald Trump’s plan in 2017 to build a wall along the Mexican border and his speeches targeting Muslims. “In Pope Francis, the message that ‘everybody is brothers and sisters’ is very strong, along with insisting that God pushes for religious pluralism,” said Marco Politi, a Vatican expert and author of the book Pope Francis Among the Wolves: The Inside Story of a Revolution. Such pluralism translated into a more inclusive approach towards other religions, Politi said, putting an end to the “culture war of previous papacies”. Ties between the Church and Muslims around the world had soured when Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, made a speech in September 2006 that was perceived as linking Islam to violence. Francis became the first pontiff ever to travel to the Arabian Peninsula. In February 2019, he landed in the United Arab Emirates, where he met Ahmed el-Tayeb, the grand imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque. Together, they signed a document rejecting religious fundamentalism, exhorting people to see in the other a “brother to support and love”. The pope had also met el-Tayeb previously, in 2016, at the Vatican. In another first, Francis, in 2015, published the encyclical Laudato si’ (Praise be to you), in which he urged the world to address the threat of climate change while also stressing the need to rethink the economic balance between the industrialised and developing worlds. The issue of sexual abuses perpetrated by Church officials dominated the tenure of Benedict XVI, whose papacy saw a wave of scandals. Francis began addressing the issue of abuse in 2019 by abolishing the rule of “pontifical secrecy” on cases related to sexual violence. This meant that testimonies collected in the canonical process were finally made available to legal authorities. That same year, after the pope himself admitted to having dismissed valid claims of sexual abuse in Chile, he introduced a law outlining clear rules for reporting child sexual abuse committed by Church officials and attempts to cover it up. Four years later, that rule was updated and strengthened to widen the category of victims to vulnerable adults, while laypeople working for the Church could also now face punishment. But victims’ advocates and critics say Francis did not go far enough to ensure justice. Francis drastically changed the tone of the Church towards homosexuality, ending the Vatican’s long demonisation of gay people. “Who am I to judge?” he famously said in 2013, his words a stark contrast to those of Pope John Paul II, who more than 10 years earlier called a gay rights march in Rome “an offence to Christian values”. More recently, on his way back from a trip to South Sudan, Francis said being gay was not a crime. He expressed support for same-sex civil unions. In 2023, he hinted that he was open to reviewing the practice of celibacy. In December 2023, the Vatican, in a landmark ruling, decided that Catholic priests would be able to administer blessings to same-sex couples, provided these were not given in the context of civil unions or weddings or Church liturgies. At the same time, the pontiff remained opposed to gay marriage and abortion, and while he included women in the Vatican’s government, he always ruled out their becoming priests. Throughout his papacy, Francis often found himself under attack from both conservative and progressive camps. Those following the traditional doctrine saw him as too much of a reformer and a socialist, while those seeking deeper changes within the Church did not consider him bold enough. Politi, the Vatican expert, argues that Francis’s decision not to make changes that were too radical stemmed from an understanding that this would have torn apart an already much-divided Church. Instead, he says, Francis opted “to trigger processes of transformation in its mentality through gestures and words”. Follow Al Jazeera English:...

Noor Abdalla calls Trump administration allegations that Khalil supports Hamas ‘ridiculous’ and ‘disgusting’. Detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s wife has refuted allegations that her husband is a Hamas supporter, calling the accusations by the United States government “ridiculous” and “disgusting”. In an interview with US media outlet CBS published on Sunday, Khalil’s pregnant wife Noor Abdalla denied assertions by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University in New York, was distributing Hamas flyers. No evidence has been presented by the US government to back up this allegation. “I think it’s ridiculous. It’s disgusting … that that’s the tactic that they’re using to make him look like this person that he’s not, literally,” she said. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Khalil on March 8, and is holding him in a detention facility in Louisiana, as part of US President Donald Trump’s pledge to crack down on – and in some cases deport – students who joined protests against Israel’s war on Gaza that swept US university campuses last year. Trump has accused the student protesters of participating in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”, without offering evidence to support these claims. Khalil served as a spokesperson and negotiator last year for the pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the Columbia campus. He has said that his detention is a consequence of exercising his right to free speech and has described himself as a “political prisoner”. On March 10, a US district judge in New York temporarily blocked Khalil’s deportation, and then further extended that prohibition two days later. “It’s so simple: he just doesn’t want his people to be murdered,” Abdalla told CBS. “He doesn’t want to see little kids losing limbs.” The Trump administration is pushing to deport Khalil under a rarely used provision of an immigration law that gives the secretary of state power to remove any non-citizen whose presence in the US is deemed to have “adverse foreign policy consequences”. A graduate student until December, Khalil was previously in the US on a student visa but has since obtained a green card, making him a lawful permanent resident of the country. The number of Palestinians killed since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023 has crossed 50,000, and more than 113,000 have been wounded, Gaza health officials said on Sunday. On Tuesday, Israel broke a nearly two-month-long ceasefire agreement with Hamas, ramping up its attacks on Gaza and killing more than 670 people since then, the Gaza Health Ministry said. Wiping away tears, Abdalla expressed her frustration over the repeated need to defend herself and her husband against the Trump administration’s accusations. She said it reminded her of discrimination she has faced as a Muslim in the US. “In New York the other day, me and my husband were walking and someone called me a ‘terrorist’,” she said. “I think most Muslims in this country can relate to that. It doesn’t matter what I say … that’s what they’re going to think of me.” Follow Al Jazeera English:...

Landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan coincides with US astronaut Donald Pettit’s 70th birthday. Russian astronauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner have returned to Earth along with American Donald Pettit after a seven-month science mission on board the International Space Station (ISS). The Russian Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft carrying the trio touched down southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 6:20am (01:20 GMT) on Sunday, the landing confirmed by the United States’s NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency. The timing of their parachute-assisted return to Earth coincided with the US astronaut’s 70th birthday, NASA said on the social media platform X. Happy birthday, @astro_Pettit! Many happy returns (including this one) 🥳 The MS-26 Soyuz spacecraft touched down in Kazakhstan at 9:20pm ET—or, in local time, 6:20am April 20, Pettit's 70th birthday. pic.twitter.com/qFM5fAxnA0 — NASA (@NASA) April 20, 2025 NASA said the crew was moved to a recovery staging area in the city of Karaganda, adding that Pettit was doing well. The crew arrived on the orbiting ISS laboratory on September 11, 2024, spending 220 days in space during which they orbited the Earth 3,520 times, completing a journey of 93.3 million miles (150.15 million km), NASA said in a statement. Pettit spent his time researching “in-orbit metal 3D printing capabilities” and “water sanitisation technologies” while exploring plant growth and fire behaviour in space. This was Pettit’s fourth spaceflight, with a total of 590 days in orbit logged throughout his career. Ovchinin has notched up 595 days in space over four flights, while Wagner has reached a total of 416 days over two flights. Space exploration has remained a rare avenue of cooperation between the US and Russia since the latter unleashed its war in Ukraine in February 2022. Earlier this month, the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft carried another US-Russia crew – NASA’s Jonathan Kim and Russian crewmates Sergei Ryzhikov and Alexei Zubritsky – to carry out scientific experiments on the ISS. However, the US and other Western countries have ceased other partnerships with Roscosmos as part of a slew of sanctions placed on Russia over the war. Astronauts, who are trained and certified by NASA and others like the European Space Agency, are known as cosmonauts when they represent Roscosmos. Follow Al Jazeera English:...