On the morning of Monday, April 21, 2025, Cardinal Kevin Farrell announced from the Vatican that Pope Francis had died. “At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father,” Cardinal Farrell said. Francis, who was 88 and had recently suffered a flurry of health issues, including a bout of bronchitis, made his final public appearance in St. Peter’s Square only a day earlier, on Easter Sunday.

A groundbreaking and agenda-setting pontiff by any measure, Francis was not only the first Jesuit and Latin American pope—he was born in Buenos Aires in 1936—but also one who advocated for migrants’ rights, diversity within the church, and actions against climate change and overconsumerism.

In 2018, five years into Francis’s papacy, Jason Horowitz traveled to the Vatican to see his work—and its impact—firsthand. Revisit that story, titled “The Children’s Hour,” from Vogue’s August 2018 issue, here:

It’s a June morning at the Vatican, and Pope Francis is wearing a hangdog expression—all watchful eyes and soft apostolic chins. It’s how he looks opposite strongmen in Myanmar or posing with Donald Trump or preparing to berate the Vatican hierarchy for being out of touch and insular. Today, though, we’re in the marble lobby of the Paul VI audience hall, and schoolchildren are preparing to sing songs. I’m a little worried what they might think.

But when the kids ask him questions, Francis brightens dramatically. He suddenly radiates ebullience and avuncular warmth. As a journalist who has covered Francis for years, I’ve seen this shift before—when he’s broken from sermons to share homespun wisdom or embraced a Muslim asylum seeker in a refugee camp or drifted back to the press section of the papal plane to amiably sign books, bless family photos, and accept gifts. I’ve met my share of presidents and prime ministers, and have seen some of the greats at working the press. The time Francis laughed convincingly at my lame joke, I knew I was in the presence of a natural.

He is perched on the edge of his armchair fielding questions: about his first teacher (“Estela; I had her in first and third grade”), where he is from (“the most beautiful city in the world, Buenos Aires”), and what his favorite game was as a child (“We played a lot with kites”). Then one boy stands up and asks him what it felt like when he was elected pope.

“But that question isn’t original!” Francis says with a chuckle. He turns pensive. “I felt peace. That’s the word. That’s not a lie. I’ve felt peace from that day to today.”

Francis may be at peace, but in the five years since the 81-year-old pontiff became history’s first Jesuit pope, the world has slipped off its axis. The populist strain of nationalism that Francis has prophetically warned against is seemingly everywhere. He has watched a migrant crisis roil Europe and criticized the Trump administration’s policy of separating undocumented children from their parents. Meanwhile, environmental protections and economic equality have weakened across the globe. All of which leaves Francis, the spiritual leader of more than a billion Catholics, insisting on a welcoming and internationalist worldview that has gone out of style.

“If he doesn’t do it, who will? No one else will,” Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, one of the Vatican’s leading diplomats, tells me. “Will they hear him? Maybe not. But he cannot say anything different.”

The 81-year-old pontiff arrives to bless the assembled children.Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, August 2018