The People’s Pope:
Bergoglio and Populism 

Published on 28 April 2025

Alessandro Volpi

University of Lucerne

Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, represented a significant innovation in the history of the Catholic Church. He was the first Jesuit pope, the first to take the name of Saint Francis of Assisi, known for his commitment to poverty and humility, and the first non-European to assume the papacy in over a millennium. Most notably – and relevant to the debate on populism – he was the first Latin American pope, coming from Argentina. A particularly compelling question is the nature of Bergoglio’s relationship with the Argentine populist tradition, an inquiry that not only contributes to our understanding of his pontificate but also sheds light on broader global political tensions in our current historical moment.

On 22 April 2025, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Joshua Chaffin and Aaron Zitner analysed the conservative and traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church in the United States, which is highly critical of Pope Francis’s pontificate and now considers Vice President J.D. Vance a figurehead. The two journalists quoted Stephen P. White, executive director of the Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., who described these positions as part of a broader “populist” movement with global reach. This refers to a form of populist and traditionalist Catholicism that opposes Pope Francis’s views.

At the same time, Pope Francis himself has often been described as a populist, given his cultural formation in Latin America and the tone of his public discourse. Loris Zanatta, a historian and expert on Argentine Peronism, has identified in the figure of Pope Francis a manifestation of Jesuit populist Catholicism, linked to the lack of modernisation in the Argentine context. This interpretation is undoubtedly problematic as it links populism with backwardness and the inability of Latin American societies to catch up with the ‘proper’ and ‘mature’ liberal democracies of Europe.  Yet in the case of Bergoglio, Zanatta’s interpretation does capture an essential point: first as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and later as Pope, Francis has consistently placed the concept of the people (el pueblo, il popolo) at the heart of his preaching.

Even though his position has evolved over time, the Argentine culture in which he received his intellectual formation has had a strong influence throughout his journey, including during his pontificate. We could say about Bergoglio what Ernesto Laclau, another important Argentine who developed his career in Europe, once said about himself: that all the theoretical problems he confronted were, in some way, rooted in his early experiences in Argentina and were shaped by Peronism – even during the years when the movement was outlawed and Perón was in exile. Not because Bergoglio was directly influenced by Peronism — in fact, he was critical of Kirchnerism — but because he engaged with many of the same social challenges that Peronism sought to address, adopting a similar social and political language that was dominant at the time. In other words, to understand the formation of Bergoglio’s discourse, one must look at the contextual dynamics of Argentina and the role they play in cultural, social, and political affairs — including the way religion interacts with politics. In particular, Bergoglio’s philosophical roots were more closely tied to the thought of his mentor, the theologian Juan Carlos Scannone, who first taught him at the theological seminary and later at university. Scannone was a key figure in the Latin American Theology of the People, and he described Bergoglio’s intellectual formation in a book tellingly titled The People’s Pope.

Even the communicative style of Pope Francis has contributed to his classification as a populist: his direct manner of speaking, his use of simple language aimed at ordinary people and his closeness to the poor. He struggled against elitism, seeking instead to reconnect with the Catholic people through a direct relationship – charismatic, we might say, but a charisma rooted in proximity and simplicity, not one based on distinction or distance.

So, was Pope Francis a populist Pope – or a pope criticised by the ‘populist forces’ he confronted? As always, when we speak of populism, the slipperiness of the concept takes over. The problem is how to connect – on the one hand – his reclamation of the category of ‘the people’, and even, at certain points, his defence of what he called the too often mistreated word populism; and – on the other hand – his criticism of right-wing populists (the case of Trump and the issue of immigration is a clear example).

There is enough material in Bergoglio’s public interventions, both as an archbishop in Argentina and as a Pope, to develop a comprehensive scientific research. But this is beyond the scope of this brief article. If, in the Latin American context, Bergoglio embraced a form of populism grounded in an anti-individualist and communitarian – yet socially progressive – idea of ‘the people’, his move to Europe saw a more negative articulation of the notion of populism that is typical of the European context. He came to juxtapose the positive notion of popolarismo (popularism) – rooted in the Italian Catholic democratic tradition – to populism, which he increasingly viewed as an exclusionary and demagogic expression of the right.

A constant in Bergoglio’s thought is the idea of the necessity of a mythical conception of ‘the people’ as a shared horizon of relations, standing in opposition to individualist and elitist tendencies. That is, the idea of a universal – though historically and geographically situated – participation of ordinary people in the political life of the community, in a perspective that coincides with the most advanced aspects of the Church’s social doctrine. However, as he stated clearly in an interview with El País (21 January 2017) – by which time he had already been in Europe for several years – if this mythical idea of ‘the people’ can be called ‘populist’ in Latin America, it is not possible to use the term in the same way in Europe, where populism is linked to fascism. Here, we witness the emergence of a new understanding of populism in Bergoglio’s thought – one that departs from the Latin American model and risks being seen as too simplistic, echoing the anti-populist discourse of Europe’s liberal progressive political actors and intellectuals.

In the 2020 Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti, we find a definitive clarification of Pope Francis’s thought on this topic, in the significantly titled paragraph Popular vs. Populist. Here, he clearly chooses to use the concept of the ‘popular’ in opposition to populism, with an implicit reference to the tradition of popolarismo (popularism), which he propose explicitly as an antidote to populism in his video message to the conference A Politics Rooted in the People (London 2021).

The passing of the Pope – a relatively progressive figure within a naturally conservative institution – leaves a space open. Given that in the current historical conjuncture one can clearly observe the rise and consolidation of new forms of right-wing conservatism and authoritarianism which Bergoglio opposed, the question about the political direction of the of the Catholic Church and its leadership is a crucial one. And it is particularly important because of the dynamic role the Catholic religion can play in contemporary politics – potentially steering Western societies in a reactionary direction. Regardless of what Bergoglio’s own understanding of ‘populism’ and ‘popularism’ he did grasp the mythical power and potentialities of ‘the people’. For him, ‘the people’ must not be connected with closure, exclusion, or xenophobia. On the contrary, it must remain open to the universal evangelical message of Jesus Christ, and always close to the least and most marginalised of the earth.

Alessandro Volpi has a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Law from the University of Salerno (Italy), and is currently a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, Lucernaiuris at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland).