They went, Pope Francis joked in 2013, to the ends of the Earth to find him. The then-newly-anointed head of the Catholic Church was the first from Latin America to be pontiff. But the joke — as indeed his choice of name, drawn from Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the poor — contained a deeper message. It signalled a new vision for the Church, one that would embrace the outcast and the marginalised. Under his leadership, the Pope said, it would be “a Church that is poor and for the poor”.

Pope Francis, who died this week aged 88 following a period of illness, never stopped speaking up for the disenfranchised and the disempowered, travelling around the world to urge peace,........

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