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Pope Francis, a leader known for steering the Catholic Church toward mercy and care for the marginalized, often to the point of controversy, has died at the age of 88.

The church that he leaves behind is remarkably different from the one he was first elected to lead. In his nearly 12 years as the highest spiritual authority to more than a billion people, Francis loosened official attitudes around divorce, de-emphasized conservative sexual morality in favor of preaching the moral urgency of caring for migrants and the Earth, instituted broad reforms to the church government, and made overtures to LGBTQ Catholics, approving blessings for same-sex couples.

But many observers believe that Francis will not necessarily be remembered primarily for his progressive actions. He was, after all, not a consistent champion for change: Many critics on the left have charged him with dragging his feet on women’s rights in the church, for example, by appointing token women to high-profile roles rather than opening the institution to more seismic changes. He also moved haltingly when dealing with sexual abuse, spoke harshly at times of “gender ideology,” and was prevented, either by personal belief or by church doctrine, from more fully accepting gay Catholics. He could be considered the most progressive pope in history, but he was still, ultimately, a pope—a man bound by the traditions of an ancient institution.

Instead, experts said, his legacy may be related to something even more unprecedented: his identity as the first Latin American pope.

It may sound like a minor bit of trivia—the first non-European pope since the 8th century, and the first pope from outside of Europe or the Mediterranean—but Francis’ outsider identity shifted, in a way, how the entire Catholic Church came to see itself.

Looking back, it’s doubtful that the conclave that elected the Argentinian cardinal formerly known as Jorge Bergoglio knew what they were ushering in. In 2013, Bergoglio was not considered a radical. Argentine Jesuits—the more activism-friendly order that he led as a young man, notably during Argentina’s Dirty War of the 1970s—distrusted him. He was not a champion of the more leftist “liberation theology” percolating in South America. His contrast to the others in the region was actually reassuring to the more old-fashioned European cardinals who voted for him. “What they saw in Bergoglio was a tough old Jesuit who would come in and reform the curia,” said David Gibson, the director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, referring to the Vatican bureaucracy. “He had a reputation as an authoritarian-type figure in Argentina.” But the cardinals who hoped for law and order in the Vatican had miscalculated.

The pope they got wanted more fundamental philosophical changes. His formative years were spent in a city far from Rome, where poverty and war, not the theological correctness of the faithful, were his most pressing concerns as a community leader. He wanted the “peripheries,” as he called the more far-flung and forgotten members of the global church, to feel more present in the halls of power. “He viewed the church and its role in the world from that experience,” said Tim Byrnes, a political scientist who has studied the church’s international politics. “So everything was different. His emphasis on the poor. How the church should be a ‘field hospital for the broken.’ That’s rhetoric someone might hear from a priest in a barrio in Buenos Aires, rather than an archbishop in Milan.”

In detaching the church’s identity from Europe, Francis made enemies. He tried to decentralize some of the operations of the Vatican, butting heads with bureaucrats in the process. He brought in the public for large-scale dialogue and advisory sessions with bishops and cardinals, affronting traditionalist clerics nostalgic for the positions’ more princely past. He recognized the supernatural practices common in Latin America and the native iconography of the Amazon, shocking Europeans who accused him of promoting paganism. He tried to welcome disenchanted young people by signaling tolerance for the LGBTQ community, infuriating a huge portion of the church’s leadership. And most importantly for the medium-term future of the church, he appointed bishops and promoted cardinals who hailed from Asia, Africa, and other regions typically underrepresented in the hierarchy—regions he saw as the church’s demographic future.

His biggest opposition came from the United States. Francis’ two predecessors, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, were natural allies to American foreign-policy leadership in terms of societal values and political aims—battling communism and secularism. Not so Francis, who harshly rebuked unconstrained capitalism. He found significant conflict with American conservatives by speaking out, pointedly, about the death penalty, immigration, and corporate greed. Conservative Catholics—both laypeople and clergy—protested what they saw as an assault on traditional forms of worship; some bishops spoke openly against him. (Francis had, in an effort to tamp down the dissent movement largely based in the U.S., restricted a particular Latin-language liturgy. Some experts said he potentially misjudged the political cost of these changes.)

Francis showed significant restraint when it came to most diplomatic affairs. Because of complex relations with the Orthodox church in Russia, for example, he resisted criticizing Vladimir Putin by name over the Ukraine invasion. And because of China’s vast population, he struck a controversial deal with the communist government that ceded some control of the church there in an effort to bring the faithful out of hiding.

But he could be unsparing with the American right. In 2016, Francis called then-candidate Donald Trump “not Christian” because of his desire to build a border wall; nine years later, he called Trump’s second administration’s deportation policy a “disgrace.” More recently, Francis took the unprecedented step of writing a public letter condemning Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic, for stirring “narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.” “That was a document that you have once in a century,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University.

Even as secular world leaders seemed to abandon the lofty promises of a shared humanitarian project made in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, Francis was uncompromising about mercy for the dispossessed. He castigated rich countries for fueling climate change, which ravages poorer ones. He warned that it was a “grave sin” to turn away migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea and gave a dozen Muslim refugees refuge in the Vatican. He risked political backlash by calling Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza a “barbarity” and accusing the country of committing “terrorism” and acting with “cruelty” in attacking civilians and killing children.

“The conclave always responds to its times in interesting ways,” Faggioli said. Francis’ time “was the age of Trump, Brexit, and the mass migration crisis.”

Despite being an outsider, Francis became a shrewd Vatican politician, laying a deep groundwork so that his priorities would survive into the next papacy. He moved aggressively to appoint more cardinals—a full 110 of the 138 voting members of the coming conclave. And he appointed them from areas around the world, cementing a legacy of bringing more outsiders into the inner sanctum.

Still, there’s no guarantee that this conclave of cardinals will select a pope who shares Francis’ more progressive ideals. The geographically and linguistically diverse cardinals of Francis’ ilk barely know each other and will likely have a harder time hashing out priorities and creating alliances than the more cohesive European contingent. And non-European doesn’t necessarily mean progressive. The African and Asian churches often clash with Western cardinals on economic and political matters but hold harshly conservative views of social issues, including sex- and gender-related issues, as well as the church’s relationship with Islam.

And there’s always the question of whether the cardinals, exhausted by Francis’ aggressive reforms, will flinch. “The College of Cardinals will have to make some choices on whether they want a pope who brings back the papacy to a more stable, predictable profile of a European pope,” Faggioli said. “Pope Francis has really shaken up the whole picture. The question is will this picture go back to the previous stability, which was hiding all kinds of tensions.”

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Vatican observers believe that regardless of what happens next, it will be hard for any future pope to walk back the de-Westernization of the church. Francis’ approach wasn’t just about his own personal beliefs; it was a strategy for the church’s survival. Europe’s religious population stagnated long ago, and the only real hope Catholicism has for growth is in Asia and Africa. The two previous popes had hoped to convince the non-European world to see the appeal of the existing European church; Francis believed that the church had to reform itself to fit the shifting base of its membership—“a complete inversion of how the church normally conceives itself,” as Gibson said.

This is the legacy experts think is sure to outlast Francis’ personal priorities. “What is impossible to undo is the pivot that Francis embodied of Catholicism toward the global south,” Faggioli said. “He was the first pope who saw that and did something about that—about building a global Catholic culture.”

We can’t yet know if the next pope will have the courage to embrace the chaos in the same way—on the world stage or within the Vatican. But Francis challenged the church’s identity in a way that chewed away core assumptions of what the ancient institution could be in the modern world. “That,” Faggioli said, “cannot be put back.”

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