'I fear a world without him': Pope Francis was a global influencer. Here's how he did it.

He knelt with difficultly as aides helped him get low to the floor to kiss the shoes of South Sudan's warring leaders. On a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the world's first atomic bombs were dropped, killing tens of thousands, his message was unequivocal: Nuclear weapons are immoral. In his final weeks, even during his hospitalization for pneumonia, he held nightly video calls with Gaza's tiny Christian community.

Pope Francis, who died April 21 at age 88, fought for social justice and the marginalized. He pressed for nuclear disarmament and an end to wars in Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine. He decried what he once described as "inhuman" conditions facing migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. His first significant trip outside Rome as pontiff was to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, a key site in Europe's migration crisis.

Pontiffs have been players in global affairs for hundreds of years, mixing their role as the worldwide head of the Catholic Church with informal duties as peace brokers, mediators and influencers who held or shifted the church's teachings on issues from abortion to climate change, from an all-male priesthood to baptism for LGBTQ+ people, from contraception to the death penalty.

But according to some who knew, worked for and studied Francis, whose funeral is April 26, his lasting influence on the world stage may turn out to be having exercised a form of Vatican "soft power" that privileged getting closer to people and communities over the trappings of the church as an institution. He viewed social outreach as the core business of his papacy, not fights over doctrine.

"He spoke directly to people. He went to them and captured their imaginations − and their hearts," Bishop Paul Tighe, an Irish-born prelate who has been the Vatican’s dicastery for culture and education since 2022, said in an interview. "There was an authenticity about him. That was the power he had. I think people felt good when they met him. He gave power to their better nature."

When Francis in 2019 kissed the feet of the South Sudanese leaders at the head of a country grappling with civil war, he was 82 and suffering with chronic leg and back pain. He urged them to lay down their weapons. Four years later, he traveled to South Sudan and bluntly warned the nation's authorities: "Future generations will either venerate your names or cancel their memory, based on what you now do."

When the Argentina-born pontiff visited Japan that same year, he became the first pope to do so in nearly 40 years. Kayoko Mori, an 82-year-old Catholic who survived the atomic bomb, met the pope in Hiroshima. "Seeing him call for the abolition of nuclear weapons made me feel deeply that he was on our side," she said.

After the Vatican announced Francis had died, members of the Holy Family Church in Gaza gathered at the church to mourn and pray for someone who was not only the head of one of the major branches of Christianity but who phoned them almost every night throughout the war around 7 or 8 p.m., according to the Vatican News Service. The pope would check on how those huddled inside the church were coping. About 1,000 Christians live in Gaza, a majority Palestinian Muslim enclave, according to State Department figures.

"What did you eat today?" the pope asks the Rev. Gabriele Romanelli, the parish priest at Holy Family, and his assistant, Yusuf Assad, in one such video call that was filmed by the Vatican in late February.

"Chicken. The rest of the chicken we had left from yesterday," the church officials in Gaza responded.

Romanelli said the church last received a call from Francis about 36 hours before he died.

Pope Francis: 'Not an emperor in his palace'

Michel Chambon is a French-born Catholic theologian and cultural anthropologist who researches religion and globalization at the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute.

He said in an interview that it was notable that Francis visited dozens of countries and territories around the world and that apart from one trip to the United States − in 2015 − these were predominantly destinations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and outside Western Europe. He did not visit his native Argentina as pope.

Chambon said this was part of a "deliberate agenda" that was carefully designed to give more visibility to marginalized people caught up in specific "points of tension and conflict" such as poverty, illness and climate change. He said the pope was not interested in making "courtesy calls" to world leaders. (Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert who has disagreed with Francis over immigration, visited him at the Vatican a day before he died.)

"He saw himself as a pastor who cared for those people who are on the margins," Chambon said.

Chambon said that the pope led the Catholic Church with humility and simplicity and that this will be, ultimately, part of his enduring global message and influence. Francis was sometimes referred to as "the pope of the peripheries" for this reason. Chambon said this extended to his living circumstances and attire.

When the pope gave his first speech on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica in 2013, he was dressed in simple white robes, not the luxurious ermine-trimmed cape typically worn by new pontiffs. Francis never moved into the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City, the pope's official residence and the opulent and historically significant center of the Catholic Church's administration. Instead, he chose to live in a more modest Vatican guesthouse. He took his meals in the common dining room downstairs. His remains will be placed in a simple wooden coffin lined with zinc. For his funeral, it will not be raised on a platform.

"He was not an emperor in his palace," Chambon said.

Pope Francis: His impact

Tighe, the Vatican culture secretary, said that in more bureaucratic terms Francis restructured many of the organizations within the Roman Curia, the various units and bureaus that make up the Catholic Church's administration, including his own. He said they were streamlined and new leadership was brought in.

"Those reforms will persist," he said.

"But his real legacy will be that somehow people will not be able to think of him without seeing him as a challenge to be more focused, rather than simply concerned with our own problems."

Rabbi Rick Jacobs agreed with that sentiment.

He is the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, a New York-based group that represents progressive American Jewish synagogues, organizations and ideas.

Jacobs had a private audience with the pope in 2017 when he had convened religious leaders from around the the world for a Vatican conference on migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

"What I loved about the pope was that he had this gentle, humble manner. But he was fierce, and fearless, in taking on not only the issues but the leaders of the world," Jacobs said in a phone interview.

He said the contrast with the pope's predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, a "scholar and recluse who rarely seemed to weigh in on the urgent matters of the day, could have not be starker."

Jacobs said the pope "almost singlehandedly put climate change on the world agenda as a fundamental religious conviction" when he spoke about it at the United Nations in New York in 2015.

He said some people criticized Francis when he made public statements about conflicts, whether to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine or the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

He is not one of them.

"He was always on the side of those suffering the most. He also took aim at those who wanted to narrow our understanding of what human obligation puts upon all of us. I fear a world without him."