The Vatican announced early Monday morning that Pope Francis had passed away.
He had served as pope since 2013, and his official cause of death is not yet public, though he has had ongoing health issues for months.
The pope’s health had been waning over the past several years, and in the months before he passed, he was hospitalized for double pneumonia.
Cardinal Kevin Farrell will be the church’s administrator until a new pope is chosen.
The pope, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 1936, marked a number of firsts for the Catholic Church.
He was the first pope from the Americas and the first from a Jesuit order, as well as the first pope to publicly endorse same-sex civil unions. He also authorized priests to give blessings to same-sex couples, though they are still not allowed to marry them.
“Homosexual people have the right to be in a family… What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,” he said in the 2020 documentary, Francesco.
He also addressed climate change in an official church document for the first time in his Laudato Si’ in 2015.
The White House has not yet released an official statement, but President Donald Trump did react to the news on TruthSocial.
“Rest in Peace Pope Francis! May God Bless him and all who loved him!” Trump wrote.
Vice President J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism in 2019, visited the pope on Sunday while on a diplomatic trip to Rome and also posted to social media about his death with a link to an homily he gave in March 2020.
“I’ll always remember him for the below homily he gave in the very early days of COVID,” Vance wrote. “It was really quite beautiful. May God rest his soul.”
Former President Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic and the only Catholic president since John F. Kennedy, also took to social media to speak on the pope’s passing.
“He was unlike any who came before him. Pope Francis will be remembered as one of the most consequential leaders of our time and I am better for having known him,” Biden wrote.
Biden went on to note how the pope served the poor, “reached out to different faiths,” stood up for climate change, and “made all feel welcome and seen by the Church.”
“He promoted equity and an end to poverty and suffering across the globe,” Biden said. “And above all, he was a Pope for everyone. He was the People’s Pope – a light of faith, hope, and love.”
