POPE FRANCIS I

The man who will move into the 10-room papal residence inside the vaulted gates of the Holy See lives in a simple, austere apartment across from the Cathedral of Buenos Aires.
In a city with a taste for luxury and status, he frequently prepares his own meals and abandoned the limousine of his high office to hop on “el micro” – Argentine slang for the bus.
A staunch conservative and devout Jesuit in Latin America’s most socially progressive nation, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, is an almost Solomonesque choice by the princes of the church.
The 76-year-old hails from a country and a continent where the once powerful voice of the church is increasingly falling flat, losing ground – as it is in Europe – to a tide of more permissive and pragmatic faiths and to fast-rising secularism. He gives voice to a church whose centre of global gravity is increasingly shifting south.
But the first Latin American pope also represents a cultural bridge between two worlds – the son of Italian immigrants in a country regarded by some as the New World colony Italy never had. For many Italians, his heritage makes him the next best thing to the return of an Italian pope.

Fierce critic of gay marriage

Bergoglio remains a fierce critic of socially progressive trends, including gay marriage, representing a continuity of Benedict XVI’s conservative doctrine. Though questioned for some of his actions during Argentina’s Dirty War, he may also be a target hard for progressives to hit. In recent decades, he has emerged as a champion of social justice and the poor who has spoken out against the evils of globalisation and slammed the “demonic effects of the imperialism of money.”
His papal name honours St Francis of Assisi, the son of wealthy merchants who abandoned all for a life of poverty in the path of Jesus Christ.
At the same time, in the age of 24-hour news cycles and the cult of celebrity excess, he is described by some as so retro as to be something oddly new. He represents a flashback to an old-school view of the Catholic leaders as humble, soft-spoken clerics who walked among their flock and led by example – though he has also used the Internet as a tool to reach lapsed Catholics.
Born in Buenos Aires on December 17, 1936, Bergoglio was raised in a struggling middle-class home of a railroad worker and a homemaker. Ordained a priest in 1969, his ascent toward higher office occurred during a time when the Catholic Church in Argentina stood accused of, at best, failing to speak out against – and, at worst, being complicit in – the harsh right-wing dictatorships of the Dirty War, under which an estimated 30,000 dissidents disappeared between 1976 and 1983.
A book by the noted Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky, “The Silence,” claims that Bergoglio, then a Jesuit leader, lifted church protection from two leftist priests of his order, effectively allowing them to be jailed for refusing to end their politically charged ministry in the Buenos Aires slums. Bergoglio’s supporters have cited a lack of evidence, countering that he endeavoured to aid dissidents in danger during a dark period in Argentine history.
“What this says about him is that there is a big distance between what he says and what he does,” Verbitsky said in an interview from Buenos Aires. “He portrays himself as popular, almost revolutionary, a man who goes into the ghettos. But when the military came to power, he did not protect his own.”
One thing is certain – he rose fast. In 1992, Pope John Paul II named him assistant bishop in Buenos Aires, then made him archbishop five years later. He served on a number of Vatican commissions and in 2005 is widely believed to have come in second to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – now the pope emeritus – to succeed John Paul II.

Vatican outsider

Bergoglio was mostly absent from the short lists for pope this time and has been largely regarded as a Vatican outsider. That is seen as positive by reformers who are looking for a cleanup of the Roman Curia, the Vatican City administration now battered by allegations of corruption and misconduct.
In recent years, Bergoglio has become known for creating new parishes, reorganising administrative offices and spearheading a fiercely conservative social agenda. He has butted heads repeatedly with increasingly secular Argentine governments. In 2006, he attacked a proposal to legalise abortion under certain circumstances, accusing the government of lacking respect for human life.
In 2010, he rallied against a measure that made Argentina the first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage. He also argued that a decision by the government to allow same-sex couples to adopt would deprive children of “the human growth that God wanted them to have by a father and a mother.”
His vociferous protests led President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner to criticise him sharply, saying, “It’s worrisome to hear phrases such as ‘war of God’ and ‘projects of the devil,’ which are things that send us back to medieval times and the Inquisition.”
In a 2012 interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Bergoglio spoke of his desire to broaden the church’s reach and increase its involvement in the world, and he alluded to the infighting that plagued the Vatican during the tenure of Pope Benedict XVI.
“We need to avoid the spiritual sickness of a church that is wrapped up in its own world,” Bergoglio told the Italian newspaper. “If the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age.”