The Impact of Pope Francis: The Pope as a Moral Leader on the Global Stage

The late Pope Francis was widely seen as a significant and influential figure during his time in office (2013–2025). Similar to Pope John Paul II (in office 1978–2005), he had global prominence in ways that no other religious leader has or comes near to having. In modern times, the Dalai Lama is the only other religious leader to have significant recognition outside his own Buddhist religious community. Yet he is a rather distant second to the recent Catholic popes.

As with the impact of any would-be influencer or cultural leader, it is not easy to explain the pope’s influence and impact. It is not as if popes have any hard political power. Around the year 1500, popes had small armies to defend their territory around Rome, but that was only for a brief period. They were powerful in medieval times only if it suited a particular king to back them, typically against another ruler. Popes learned soon enough that such arrangements usually ended up with them becoming the political subordinates of the rulers who had helped them. Given how desirous governments are to control religions in their territories, it has been important for popes to maintain their political independence. The 1929 treaty that recognized the independence of the tiny Vatican State has worked surprisingly well. Even popes themselves have been surprised at how well it has worked to free them to offer their moral leadership.

Today, it is curious that the figure of the pope, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, should be of so much interest to people around the world, including far more than just Catholics. The phenomenon was most striking with Pope John Paul II, coming from Communist Poland, who used modern media and global transport to project the Christian message—and himself—to the world. A significant part of his influence in the early years of his pontificate came from his helping to promote democracy in what were then Communist-ruled one-party states, and to some extent helping to end the domination of the Soviet Union (USSR) over them.

Pope Francis from Argentina was quite different from his Polish predecessor, being neither an academic nor a trained actor as John Paul II had been. Yet he was prominent and had significant global impact. Both John Paul and Francis were good at projecting themselves through the media. Serving between them from 2005 to 2013 was the outstanding German theologian, Pope Benedict XVI. He was an academic like his predecessor but was not comfortable projecting himself to a global public. Yet all of them focused on the value of the human person, human dignity and rights, and social solidarity. They were each concerned to highlight the threats to the dignity and value of the human person from (1) an unrestrained capitalist mentality and culture that reduced value to price, (2) a worship of new technology that was indifferent to the impact of its introduction on people’s lives and jobs, and (3) a technology supported individualism that minimized the needs and rights of others.

Socio-Political Challenges

Pronouncements by popes and other Catholic Church leaders on socio-political issues are based on what is known as Catholic Social Teaching (CST). CST is essentially a number of general principles, including on human dignity and the value of human life; peace and peace-building; stewardship of natural resources; the common good; natural rights including religious freedom, free speech, free association, and freedom to migrate; a right to private property limited by the social responsibility of property and wealth; government accountable to the citizens, with subsidiarity, and individual participation; the rule of law; and the protection for the vulnerable from arbitrary power.

Catholic anthropology (in common with the vast range of modern dystopian science fiction) rejects the claim that a perfect society could be conceived, planned and established. Consequently, CST provides principles that give few specifics on how they are to be implemented. That is a matter for local Christian communities. Their applicability varies according to context and the judgment of local Christian communities. Depending on context, popes highlight particular principles at different points in time to respond to issues they have identified as most pressing.

This might give the impression that the Catholic Church’s impact on matters of public policy is negligible: some vague and woolly principles, irrelevant to a technological secular world. That would be mistaken. The Catholic Church has significant presence on the ground in all continents, with much social engagement in developing countries and consequently valuable feedback that they receive on issues and workable solutions, which goes back to the pope’s office. It is also by far the leading global religious organization with systematic ethical contributions to public policy, on issues ranging from bioethics to AI ethics to the burden of debt in developing countries. Its contribution is taken seriously, even when relevant governments disagree with it.

For instance, in the early 1980s, the U.S. Secretary of Defense defended its policy on nuclear weapons in public debate with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. In 2018 the chair of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission responded to a Vatican document criticizing derivatives and credit-default swaps. With 2025 being a “Jubilee Year,” a year every twenty-five or fifty years in which monetary debts are forgiven or reduced, Pope Francis set up a commission of academics—and not just Catholic academics—to review the plight of developing countries where repayments are crushing those countries’ ability to escape from poverty. Its report will be published this summer.¹

Thus, one type of influence wielded by popes is their asking power to initiate dialogue on such issues and mobilize on a global level significant numbers of Catholic and other experts to produce thoughtful recommendations with a moral focus. As the first pope from the global south, Francis was particularly concerned to speak for the poorest people of the world.

Francis's World

The time of Francis’s papacy, 2013 to 2025, was a period of a darkening, less hopeful world. Russia and China modernized their armies, aiming at imperialist domination of Ukraine and Taiwan respectively, and of other states and seas, risking provocation and global war. The period was immediately preceded by the failure of the “Arab Spring” in 2010–2012 and witnessed the continuation of a devastating civil war in Syria. Since 2023 there has been a drastic upsurge of war between Israel, Gaza, and Iran’s client militias, Hamas and Hezbollah. The threat of climate change became more alarming, even existentially threatening for human life. The rise of political populism in Europe and North America aroused fears of serious disruption of the existing global order, some breakdown in cooperation between states and loss of faith in liberal democracy. It was also the time of the emergence of possibly semi-autonomous AI, arousing a confused mix of wild hopes and wilder fears.

In such a context, the pope has the potential to serve as a non-threatening moral leader of transnational orientation. He can be someone who conveys a message of hope, speaks for refugees and migrants, and defends basic humanity against ultra-nationalist, military, economic and technological domination. That he might have no quick fixes does not matter. What matters is that those at the bottom or on the wrong side of whatever political or literal barrier feel he speaks for them.

The Human Touch

Francis wanted to be that leader, and, in this way, he exemplified another type of power and influence. He was personally warm, liked being with ordinary people, and (despite being a Jesuit) was not an academic. Declining to live in the remote and opulent papal apartments, he remained in the Vatican guesthouse from which he could sometimes sneak out at night to visit hospitals and prisons, something he enjoyed. He sought to be non-judgmental and forgiving toward people’s personal weaknesses. He admitted mistakes. After he was gone, people I asked for one-word reactions to him used words like “genuine,” “humble,” and “the freest person I ever met,” exemplifying a stark contrast to many global leaders.

As the leader of the Catholic Church, the pope is responsible for defending orthodox doctrine. Doctrines matter: a fluid doctrineless religion has nothing to set it off against the dominant culture of the age, which would mean it had nothing to offer. Popes make rules about religious observances for Catholics. They reiterate, reinterpret, and refine doctrine for their adherents. But neither would make a pope into a significant global figure. Even for Catholics, on an issue such as homosexual orientation and same sex marriage, a pope’s enforcing power is limited. African Catholic communities and leaders take a traditional hardline attitude on those issues; whereas Latin America, with a very deep Catholic culture, has been the region most accepting of same sex marriage.

Like other popes, Francis defended orthodox doctrine. However, that said, his style was not so much pedagogical as expressive of the ordinary person’s intuitive feelings. He wanted no more war with its slaughter, terror, and refugee camps. When asked about somebody’s homosexuality, his non-judgmental response was “who am I to judge.”² He encouraged a tolerant, accepting attitude. Even though he could not compel the Church in Africa to think as he did, that sympathetic non-judgmental attitude meant a lot to many people, gay and straight, Catholic and other.

Francis felt the compassion for the refugee and immigrant that the Torah urged, that “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19: 34), and echoed in the Statue of Liberty’s words to the world: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” His words were welcome because of their contrast with a perceived hardening of government attitudes around the world: clamping down on refugees and undocumented migrants, and rearming for war.

He imaged the Church, the Christian community, as a “field hospital” for refugees, victims of war, and the homeless—those outcast for any reason, whether because of skin color, or sexual identity, or physical handicap. The hospital image resonated powerfully. Disapproving of careerism and socially disconnected traditionalism, he emphasized that he wanted priests and pastors to “have the smell of the sheep about them.”³

He wrote a significant letter on the environment, “Laudato Si.” For a papal encyclical (letter), it was extremely long and probably few read it in its entirety. That did not matter. It was enough that the pope had spoken authoritatively to remind everybody that God had made us stewards, not owners, of the resources of the Earth. The details were secondary. It challenged Catholics and any religious-inclined people, from Buddhists to Wiccans, to conversion of heart about caring for all life. The challenge was welcomed.

Affirming the Human

Perhaps that illustrates the only kind of widespread influence Pope Francis (or another like him) could have.

Francis encouraged a tolerant and accepting attitude. Even though he could not compel the Church in Africa to think as he did, that personal sympathetic, non-judgmental attitude means a lot to many people, gay and straight, Catholic and other.

Pope Francis had no easy solutions to offer: no political theory, no blueprint for a just society. As noted above, Catholic Social Teaching’s principles are general and flexible, requiring adaptation by local Catholic communities to current issues, and to defend and affirm the human, in the many ways that are needed.

Doctrines matter. The interesting thing about any religion is not so much what it has to say about a god (not all religions have one), but what it says about what the human person is. (The early nineteenth century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach noted as much, though he thought that showed that no god existed.) A key Christian doctrine is the incarnation: God becoming human, so that human beings might become divine.

Christian theology adds that God is particularly present in the underdog, the excluded, the disabled, the brutalized, the lost; an insight that has echoes in other faiths. The Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitānjāli, Stanza 10, movingly expresses the idea.

All the great religions and great philosophies warn against the temptation to worship wealth, power, long life, popularity, and any material wellbeing that the pagan god Fortuna sends our way. This is not because any of those things are inherently evil. It is because they are accessory and accidental, not essential to one’s humanity, yet at the same time have a powerful draw on people’s desires, risking the greed that brings exploitation and dehumanization. A modern variant involves taking group identity (such as racial identity) as morally outweighing common humanity.

It is perhaps in this area that the contribution of modern popes is most sought by ordinary people, at some deep or even subconscious level. Even with hundreds of millions still living in dire poverty, it is still true that humanity has never before created such wealth and life-enhancing technology benefiting enormous numbers of people. Yet human beings also wonder uneasily if the wealth and technology will seduce us, and something of our humanity will be lost. Here it could be that popes are listened to as people seek the transcendent: not the transcendent of another world or after-life, but the material- and technological-transcendent so that they can find their true selves.

This human concern is reflected also in the rising awe, tinged with a combination of admiration and fear, of the emerging AI. AI offers both benefits and threats, and—as Pope Francis’s successor, Leo XIV, has indicated—a weakened sense of our humanity is a key factor in leading people to worship it as savior or abominate it as demonic.⁴

Pope Francis’s simple and slightly disorganized humanity may well have been a sign of hope, if not comfort, in relation to that. As one commentator put it, “his gift … is his profound witness against throwaway culture, which comes out in his personal presence with people, people with disabilities, with prisoners, with babies, with the elderly.”⁵

That is a doctrine that matters. Francis was faithful to it, and he lived it in word and deed. The world is the better for him.

—James G. Murphy

James G. Murphy is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He has published articles on the metaphysics of action, the science-religion relation, virtue ethics, causation, and epistemology. He has also written philosophy articles on a range of public policy issues.