The election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope in March 2013 was unexpected, even to the then cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires himself. He may have come a distant second in the previous papal conclave in 2005, but at 76 and, following the resignation on the grounds of old age of the candidate who had come first back then, the 85-year-old Benedict XVI – Bergoglio was convinced that a younger man was needed.
However, the majority of cardinals who gathered in the Sistine Chapel to vote were looking for something more than (relative) youth. Top of their agenda as they assembled was openness to fresh thinking after 35 years of no change under the almost seamless reigns of Pope John Paul II and Benedict, his erstwhile right-hand man. And so they surprised everyone by opting for Catholicism’s first Jesuit pope, the first Latin American successor to Saint Peter, and first leader from outside Europe in over a millennium.
The break with tradition that Francis, who has died aged 88 after suffering from double pneumonia, represented even managed to trump the shock value of the resignation of Benedict, who was the first pope for 600 years to take that option rather than die in office. Immediately, Bergoglio signalled unambiguously that he intended to be a different kind of pope, one for the 21st century. He boldly chose to be known as Francis, becoming the first pontiff to take on the name of the radical saint from Assisi who had turned his back on privilege and status in this world, and lived with and for the poor. No more pomp and ceremony, the new pope seemed to be saying, but sleeves rolled up and joining the fight for social and economic justice.
On that night of his election he stepped out on to the balcony overlooking Saint Peter’s Square in simple white robes, refusing the fancy red mozzetta or cape that Benedict had sported when he had been announced as pope. When told to put on white trousers, he later remembered in his autobiography, he replied: “I don’t want to be an ice-cream seller.”
Smiling winningly, Francis described himself as an outsider, someone “from the end of the world”, who wanted to “walk together and work together” with the crowds who greeted him, rather than tell them what to do.
The excitement was palpable for believers and non-believers alike. Next, Francis declined to move into the gilded papal apartment vacated by his predecessor. Instead he was going to remain in the small room in the Santa Marta hostel in the Vatican where he had stayed during the conclave.
This personal modesty never wavered in all his years in Rome. He picked up his own phone, shunned limos and preferred to walk if possible (sciatica later caused him to use a wheelchair) – as, for example, on the day after his election when he slipped away on foot to collect his suitcase and settle the bill at the modest pensione where he had been booked in before the conclave began. If it had to be four wheels, he took a bus, or frequently squeezed his bulky frame into the papal Fiat 500 saloon.
“Bergoglio was a once-in-a-generation combination of two qualities seldom found together,” his biographer Austen Ivereigh wrote. “He had the political genius of a charismatic leader and the prophetic holiness of a desert saint.”
He set out immediately to show there was substance behind his eye-catching gestures. In his first Urbi et Orbi (To the City and the World) Easter ad...
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