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.
