Pope Francis

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio lived in a small apartment rather than the bishop's residence, cooked his own meals and rode the bus and the subway around the city. When he was elected pope in March 2013, he declined to move into the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace and stayed instead in the Vatican guesthouse, the Casa Santa Marta. He chose the name Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron of the poor, and it became a statement of what kind of pope he meant to be.

He was born on December 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, at nine in the evening, as his birth record states. His Sun is in Sagittarius, the sign of faith, philosophy and the search for meaning, and it lies in the sixth house, which concerns service, daily work and humble duty. Jupiter, in Capricorn, shares that house. A Sagittarius Sun in the sixth describes someone whose faith is expressed through service rather than grandeur, and Francis repeatedly told priests to be "shepherds living with the smell of the sheep."

Cancer is his rising sign, a sign associated with family, nurture and protecting the vulnerable, and Pluto, retrograde in Cancer, sits in the first house. Pluto there gives a quiet intensity and an instinct for transformation. Francis became known for pastoral gestures that carried enormous symbolic force: washing the feet of prisoners, including women and Muslims, embracing a man with a disfiguring disease in St. Peter's Square and answering a question about gay priests with "Who am I to judge?"

He was the son of Italian immigrants. He trained as a chemical technician and worked in a food laboratory, and as a young man, he later said, he even worked as a nightclub bouncer. At twenty-one he had part of one lung removed after a severe infection. He entered the Jesuits in 1958 and led the order in Argentina from 1973 to 1979, including the first years of the military dictatorship, a period whose role he discussed for the rest of his life.

The Moon, Venus and Mercury all fall in the seventh house, which governs relationships with others. The Moon and Venus are in Aquarius, a sign concerned with the collective and the common good, and Mercury is in Capricorn. That cluster describes a man whose emotional life was directed outward toward people, and whose leadership took the form of dialogue: with other faiths, with nonbelievers and with critics inside his own church.

He was the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas and the first from outside Europe in more than twelve centuries. His encyclical Laudato si', published in 2015, called care for the environment a moral duty, and he spoke constantly about migrants, poverty and the dangers of indifference.

Pope Francis died on April 21, 2025, Easter Monday, the morning after he had appeared in St. Peter's Square to bless the Easter crowds. The Sagittarius Sun in the house of service had kept working almost to the last day.