"He is a silent chess player, who moves the pieces and sees many moves ahead. He knows when to stop and when to make his move. His rules will never be known. Because he doesn't tell them to anyone." This is how one of his collaborators in Argentina, Father Guillermo Marco, described Pope Francis. Words taken up by journalist Marco Damilano in his article on the legacy of this man who came "from the end of the world" and published in the newspaper Domani on 22 April.

An attitude, that of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, shared by anyone who has had to write about him and his papacy in these days. Pope Francis was a person who had to break with tradition by taking the faithful by the hand – regardless of age or background – and truly leading them into the new millennium.

But Bergoglio did much more than that. He also took by the hand people of other religious denominations and even (and sometimes especially) those who did not believe. And like every leader of our times he was loved, opposed, and questioned even by "his own". And perhaps it is precisely for this reason that one can say with certainty that he completed his work: he brought the ship into port. Or at least into the first port of this new and long journey, which the Catholic Church will need to undertake in stages throughout this millennium.

Not an innovator, but a revolutionary nonetheless

Some have written – such as Ezio Mauro in Repubblica, among others – that Francesco has left us with a sense of incompleteness, "of half-finished reform, as if the Pope, having left the safe shore on which the Church rested, had failed to reach the other side". Mauro describes this feeling as "the fate of many reformers", attacked by both progressives and conservatives alike. And for this reason, he concludes, Jorge Mario Bergoglio recalls the figure of Mikhail Gorbachev (and God only knows how much that man suffered and how much criticism he received, burdened as he was with leading the Soviet Union out of the Cold War).

So too wrote Aldo Cazzullo in the pages of Corriere della Sera, recalling how the Church's thousand-year history accelerated "dizzily in five minutes: those between 8:22 and 8:27 pm on 13 March 2013". According to Cazzullo, "Bergoglio did not innovate doctrine; but he revolutionised the language, the themes, the style of the papacy". A style born of the times we live in – a frenetic age that needs people capable of understanding what is happening without becoming its victim.

And Pope Francis was damnably aware of what was happening or of what would come to pass. He was when he called for disarmament, when he stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin had heard "the barking of NATO" at its borders. He was when he set the agenda for all analysts and geopolitical experts with the phrase "third world war in pieces". Yet still, according to Cazzullo, "the reforms, those he did not carry out".

So too wrote Antonio Socci in the newspaper Libero, lamenting – as a journalist critical of the contemporary Church – the lack of clarity in his leadership on almost everything. Except for two things: divine mercy and the climate crisis. And if written this way it seems little, in reality it is an enormous achievement when we consider that he managed it in just twelve years.

Laudato si' and Pope Francis's commitment to the environment

On the subject of climate and the encyclical Laudato si', the entire Italian and international press is in agreement. That document has been "one of the most important and most accomplished texts of the pontificate. A fine social encyclical, in line with the Holy See, on which many should reflect" – to use the most measured words I found in yesterday's papers (22 April). They are those used by Giovanni Maria Vian, interviewed by Lucia Esposito, also in Libero. Vian is a historian and journalist known above all for having served as director from 2007 to 2018 of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's daily newspaper.

On 11 October 2023, journalist Lorenzo Rosoli interviewed Brazilian theologian Adelson Araújo dos Santos for Avvenire — a professor at the Institute of Spirituality of the Pontifical Gregorian University. One of the foremost scholars of eco-theology, he even participated as an expert at the Synod for the Amazon. When asked how the encyclical and the apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum (published in 2023, on the eve of the Dubai climate conference) relate to the previous Magisterium, dos Santos had no doubts: "They stand in a relationship of continuity." A continuity that evokes "the journey of the Church's social doctrine" because "the reflection and the call to act on the care of creation did not begin with Francis." Laudato si', in fact, is the encyclical whose roots lie in the very name chosen by Bergoglio: The Canticle of the Creatures by Saint Francis of Assisi.

Bergoglio spoke of integral ecology, not merely environmental protection

This is why this pope was a ferryman who, from my perspective, left nothing unfinished. He did what he had to do in the years he had available. In the millennial saga of the Church, he wrote the first chapter of a new book, a new canticle whose purpose is to place humanity no longer at the summit, but rather at the centre of the "common home". A home where no one can do without the contribution of others and, at the same time, no one can take the liberty of doing whatever they please, as though there were no shared limits with other animal and plant species, or responsibilities towards the generations to come (as I wrote here ten years ago).

This is the concept of integral ecology, according to which protecting the environment is not enough. A holistic vision is needed, one that also encompasses economic, social and cultural concerns. And to think that Bergoglio did not start out as someone attuned to sustainable development. "His is a story of conversion," writes Luca Martinelli in il Manifesto, who traces back to 2014 — on the occasion of the World Meeting of Popular Movements held at the Vatican — the moment when Pope Francis began to think about the connection between land, home and work.

An analysis shared also by Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food association, in the pages of Repubblica: "In his younger years he was very sceptical about environmental issues, because he did not recognise the urgency and complexity" of the matter, before going on to bring "the entire Catholic world not only into environmental debates, but positioned it on the front line in denouncing that from the deafening, yet unheard, cry of the Earth there arises an ever-growing level of suffering" among human beings.

Today we cannot fail to acknowledge that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in discussions on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor

Laudato si', Pope Francis

And it is no coincidence that Laudato si' is also the text that managed to stir consciences on the eve of the 2015 climate conference and persuade the entire international community — 195 countries — to sign the Paris Agreement. Ten world leaders cited the encyclical in their official speeches at Cop21, as Jason Horowitz and Elisabetta Povoledo recalled in the New York Times.

"Perhaps the world's greatest environmentalist"

How can all of this be described as unfinished work? Bergoglio did far more than anyone could have imagined. To expect him to complete the work of reforms, or even to do more than he did in "just" twelve years — half the time life granted John Paul II — means failing to take one's own responsibilities seriously. The responsibilities of leaders, communities, and witnesses who have the task of playing their part, of acting, of changing. In his newsletter The crucial years, environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben wrote that the world had lost "perhaps the greatest environmentalist in the world", a person who had made it — the world — "infinitely richer for the mere fact of having lived in it".