Pope Francis’ cultural heritage (1936-2025)

Pope Francis deceased Monday April 21 at the age of 88 will have printed a singular brand on the Vatican cultural policy: more inclusive, more mobile, and turned towards the margins. He made culture a space for meeting, dialogue and hospitality. One of his most emblematic gestures was to invite homeless people to visit the Vatican museums and the Sistine Chapel in 2015, declaring them: “This is your house”. Culture should not be reserved for an elite, but open to those who are usually excluded from it. Concerts “With and for the poor”valuation of indigenous cultures: François has moved the center of cultural gravity of the church to the “Peripheries”one of his watchwords.

His dialogue with contemporary artists was also renewed. In 2023, he hosted two hundred creators from around the world in the Sistine Chapel, calling them “beauty prophets”. Since 2013, the Vatican has participated in the Venice Art Biennial. His very first pavilion had as a common thread the accounts of Genesis, returning to the vatican tradition of ordering works to the great artists. In 2024, Pope Francis was the first pontiff to go in person to the Biennale de Venice, where the Saint-See pavilion-entitled “With my eyes”-was distinguished by his unprecedented establishment in the prison for women of the Giudecca.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio also reformed cultural institutions, as part of a vast movement to reorganize the curia and modify the apostolic constitution. In 2022, he merged the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Congregation for Catholic Education in a new dicastery for culture and education. At his head, he named Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Portuguese poet and theologian. He also entrusted Barbara Jatta the direction of the Vatican museums, the first woman to occupy this position.

It was in interreligious dialogue and human fraternity that his cultural project was most asserted. In 2019, he signed with the great imam of Al-Azhar a founding text calling for peace between religions. In 2021, he met the Al-Sistani Shiite Ayatollah in Iraq.

Cinema, literature, media: François did not hesitate to venture into the territories of popular culture. He quoted Dante or Fellini, appeared in documentaries, dialogued with young people on streaming platforms. He modernized the Vatican communication by launching Vatican Newsthe official multimedia portal of the Holy See and invests social networks in a simple and direct language.

With François, the cultural policy of the church is off the beaten track. Where John Paul II exalted the Christian roots and Benoît XVI was very critical of the “Dictatorship of emotion”François preferred the outskirts, concrete gestures, accessible beauty. Thus he gave up the holiday residence of the popes in Castel Gondolfo to open it to the public in 2016. His cultural heritage remains that of a Jesuit and Argentinian pope, inhabited by the taste of otherness, convinced that culture is only alive when it becomes fraternal.