With his death in the early hours of Easter Monday, at age 88, the global labour movement lost a powerful ally. As the first pope from the Global South - or as he described it, "from the end of the world," referring to his native Argentina - Francis consistently championed labour unions as "guardians" of workers' rights and gave voice to the marginalised, especially from the Global South. He described union members as "prophets" who could advocate for a “social market economy” that prioritizes people over profit.

As the first non-European pope in more than a thousand years, Jorge Bergoglio clearly signaled whom he wanted by his side from the very start of his pontificate - not only by choosing the name Francis as a political statement in support of the poor, but notably through actions and encyclicals that spoke boldly to the "masters of the world". 

His first apostolic visit to the island of Lampedusa, where he denounced the "globalization of indifference," and his final one to Corsica last December, both located in the world's "greatest graveyard", were not by chance. Throughout his 12-year pontificate, he maintained a consistent stance in support of the most vulnerable, seeing trade unions as allies and counterforces to exploitative capitalism.

There is no union without workers, and there are no free workers without a union [Pope Francis]

On three significant occasions, Pope Francis opened the Vatican doors to PSI. In 2017, PSI participated in a seminar on the Human Right to Water and attended an International Meeting of Trade Union Organizations on "Labor and the workers' movement at the center of a humane, integral, inclusive and sustainable development." The third time occurred on 13 February this year - one day before his hospitalization - when PSI led a global labour delegation at a high-level Vatican summit on Tax Justice to advocate for urgent international tax reform.

In the same year, speaking to members of the Confederation of Trade Unions in Italy, Pope Francis praised trade unions as "prophets" that give voice to workers and defend their dignity.

”Unions are an expression of the prophetic profile of society. Unions are born and reborn each time that, like the biblical prophets, they give a voice to those who have none, denounce those who would ‘sell the needy for a pair of sandals’, unmask the powerful who trample the rights of the most vulnerable workers, defend the cause of foreigners, the least, the rejected.”

On the same occasion, he criticized modern capitalism for prioritizing profit over people. “The capitalism of our time does not understand the value of the trade union, because it has forgotten the social nature of the economy.”

In 2022, addressing members of PSI affiliate the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL), Pope Francis said: "There is no union without workers, and there are no free workers without a union." He insisted that unions are called to be "a voice for the voiceless," emphasizing, "you must make a noise to give voice to the voiceless."

It is significant that he was a strong opponent of anti-Semitism and islamophobia and was a critic of Trump's policies, especially in regards to migrants. He spoke out in favour of protecting our planet from the rapacious march of a corporate class that would destroy the planet we all rely on, simply to extract private profit. 

He was a pope in favour of peace, not just as an individual spiritual concept but as a practical and moral obligation to act. His statements on Gaza were not widely reported in the Western media - certainly not when he said “This is cruelty, not war” and stated in his final published piece, his support for a Palestinian state, declaring “True peace cannot be imposed by force [...] God and future generations will judge us not by how many enemies we defeated, but by how many lives we saved.”

When I visited the Vatican earlier this year, I was reminded that he rang Gaza's only Catholic church every day - to be exact a total of 563 times since the war broke out - to offer solidarity and prayers, born out of his fears that the Christian community that has lived in Gaza for more than 1,600 years now faces destruction. 

Perhaps one of his most enduring legacies was to name injustice for all to see. To force those perpetuating these injustices to answer for their actions, and in doing so face the consequences of their meanness in the global public square. 

Shortly after the Pope's death, far-right US politician Marjorie Taylor Greene, tweeted, in seeming reference to the pope: “Today there were major shifts in global leaderships. Evil is being defeated by the hand of God.”  The extraordinary offensiveness of this intervention by a supposed Christian demonstrates the way that greed and self-interest warp and distort voices and traditions of love and compassion. And exposes the nastiness of those who, until recently, have gone to great lengths to hide their agenda.    

Our best tribute to Pope Francis as part of the global labour movement is to continue to name the injustices and their perpetrators so that they may face their reckoning. And to continue fighting against those - whether disguised as Christians or not - who do not want to see workers free.