At the age of 12, Jorge Mario Bergoglio harbored feelings for a girl named Amalia. Despite objections from both sets of parents regarding their youth, Jorge proceeded to propose marriage to Amalia.
She recalled with a laugh: ‘He said that if I didn’t say yes, he would have to become a priest. Fortunately for him I said no.’
This rejection could be considered one of the most significant in history, as Bergoglio eventually became ordained and later rose to the leadership of the Roman Catholic church.
Pope Francis, who has died aged 88, was the first non-European to be elected to his office in 13 centuries.
A Jesuit from Argentina, Francis was also the most liberal, the most political and the most controversial of modern popes.
While his approachability, modesty, and charisma gathered him a considerable following, his ambiguous involvement with the Argentinian dictatorship might elucidate his delayed response to the various scandals that unfolded during his time as pontiff.
His 12 years as Supreme Pontiff were marred by bitter divisions over doctrine between liberals and traditionalists, while cases of clerical sexual abuse and cover-ups continued to surface in many countries.
Francis caused consternation among conservative Catholics soon after his election in 2013 by telling journalists: ‘If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?’
The Pope sparked pandemonium again three years later by issuing a document advocating a relaxation of the Church’s ban on the sacrament of Communion for divorced and civilly remarried couples. Four leading cardinals publicly dissented and the issue continues to divide Catholics.
But it was his actions during the ‘Dirty War’ waged by the Argentine military junta against domestic opposition between 1976 and 1983 that proved the most lasting stain on his legacy.
Almost 20,000 people who went missing during this period are still listed in official documents as ‘disappeared’, while human rights groups put the figure closer to 30,000.
Then the head of the Argentinian branch of the Society of Jesus, an order considered to be the church’s intellectual powerhouse, Bergoglio was an opponent of the Marxist-inspired Latin American movement known as ‘liberation theology’.
Much of the criticism of Francis’s behaviour under the generals relates to the kidnapping of two priests in May 1976. Father Franz Jalics and Father Orlando Yorio, who had both embraced liberation theology, were living among the poor in a Buenos Aires slum, an activity viewed as suspicious by the dictatorship.
They were abducted by heavily armed men and taken to a concentration camp where, blindfolded and shackled hand and foot, they lived for five months, before being dropped off in a field by helicopter.
Father Yorio later claimed that Bergoglio said they were in the slums without his permission and urged them to leave the Jesuits. When they refused, said Yorio, he had them expelled from the order just days before the kidnapping, a move that, his critics claim, left them vulnerable to kidnap.
When Bergoglio testified in a court case decades later, he claimed that, on the contrary, he was active behind the scenes in saving their lives and those of others from the death squads.
According to the Vatican’s official spokesman, the accusations against the future pope came from ‘parts of the anti-clerical Left’.
Ironically, when Bergoglio became Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1997, he placed great emphasis on evangelism and poverty relief in the city’s most deprived barrios (neighbourhoods), acquiring the nickname ‘the Slum Bishop’.
As pope he also broke with the politically conservative stance of his two predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, siding with the Left across a range of issues and proved more ready to compromise with authoritarian regimes.
In 2022, Francis courted controversy by refusing to explicitly condemn Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Instead, the Vatican has maintained dialogue with the pro-Putin Russian Orthodox Church.
His conciliatory attitude to China, meanwhile, led to accusations that he had abandoned the underground Church there to persecution by the communist authorities.
Perhaps his most distinctive achievement was to shift the attention of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics away from issues of personal morality, such as birth control and abortion, towards threats to the environment and the plight of the poor.
Having adopted the name of St Francis of Assisi, famous for his humility and love of animals, this ‘ecological Pope’ never ceased to remind humanity of its duty to preserve God’s creation.
Born in 1936, the future Pope grew up in a large family of middle-class Italian immigrants living in a suburb of Buenos Aires. His parents had left Mussolini’s fascist Italy before his birth, for political rather than economic reasons.
The young Jorge was not always wedded to the priesthood. As a young man, he once worked as a bouncer at a night club and was, reputedly, an enthusiastic dancer of the tango.
He went on to train as a chemical technician and, in 1958, at the age of 21, he had most of one lung removed after a serious bout of pneumonia. Despite periodic respiratory infections, plus colon and heart conditions in later years, Bergoglio was able to live a normal life.
Later that same year he did find his vocation: after going to confession he was inspired by the priest to take the cloth. While a seminarian, he fell in love with another young woman and briefly considered dropping out but, in the end, persevered with his studies.
Once he became a Jesuit, Bergoglio rose rapidly in the Order to become a professor of theology and later the Jesuits’ provincial-general in Argentina from 1973-79.
In 2001, he was given the cardinal’s hat by John Paul II. By then he was already emerging as the best hope of the liberals within the Church elite to reverse the conservative restoration inaugurated by the Polish Pope.
When John Paul died in 2005, the conclave was divided between two rival candidates: Joseph Ratzinger, the late Pope’s right hand man and dean of the College of Cardinals, and Bergoglio, who attracted strong support from liberals and the southern hemisphere.
Ratzinger’s election as Benedict XVI was a triumph for traditionalists, but Bergoglio bided his time. Eight years later, in 2013, Benedict suddenly announced his resignation — the first pope to have done so in five centuries.
This was Bergoglio’s chance, despite his fragile health. By now 76, the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires soon emerged as the clear favourite. His election was greeted with joy by Catholics in the developing world, although – given his parents’ roots – Italians saw him as one of their own, after 35 years under first a Pole and then a German.
Francis became the first Pope for more than a century to live outside the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace, choosing to reside in the Vatican guest house.
His predecessor Benedict, now Pope Emeritus, lived nearby. Their relations were described as friendly but tensions remained. Benedict continued to publish books and articles while conservative Catholics rallied around him.
For his part, Francis kept up a punishing schedule of foreign visits until the Covid pandemic forced him to remain isolated in the Vatican. Having put on weight after an operation for diverticulitis – inflammation of the large intestine – the increasingly sedentary Pope became reliant on a wheelchair.
His loss of mobility became evident at the funeral of Benedict in January 2023, when Francis presided over the Requiem Mass from his cathedra (episcopal throne) and blessed the departing coffin from his wheelchair.
Finally his failing lungs caught up with him and he was admitted to hospital on Valentine’s Day to be treated for bronchitis – especially dangerous given his existing respiratory ailments. He was later diagnosed with double pneumonia and his condition was later described as critical.
As his condition worsened, there were rumours that the Swiss Guard had started funeral rehearsals. And today came the news that the Catholic faithful had dreaded for so long.
