The life of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first Jesuit and first Pope from the Americas
– Made in Italy Stories –
When Jorge Mario Bergoglio stepped onto the central balcony of Saint Peter's Basilica on the evening of 13 March 2013, Rome had just acquired a Pope unlike any it had seen before. He was the first Pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit to become Bishop of Rome and the first pontiff in history to choose the name Francis. He was also an Argentine whose family story was deeply Italian. The man who greeted the crowd with a simple "Buonasera" had been born almost eleven thousand kilometres from Rome, yet the language, food, memories and Catholic habits of Italian immigration had surrounded him since childhood. His election therefore contained one of those wonderfully complicated truths that Italy produces so well: the first Latin American Pope was, at the same time, the son of an Italian migrant family.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires on 17 December 1936. His father, Mario, had come from Piedmont and worked as an accountant for the railways; his mother, Regina Sivori, devoted herself to raising their five children. The family belonged to the vast world of Italian Argentina, a society in which surnames, dialects, recipes, religious devotions and family stories had crossed the Atlantic without entirely leaving Europe behind. The young Jorge grew up in a household where Catholic faith was practical rather than decorative. His grandmother Rosa was particularly important in his religious formation, and the future Pope would remember family prayer, ordinary parish life and the moral seriousness of immigrant households far more often than he spoke about anything resembling aristocratic Catholicism. This was a Pope who came from a railway employee's family, not a palace, and he never seemed inclined to forget the difference.
Before the priesthood, there was chemistry. Bergoglio trained as a chemical technician and worked for a period in a laboratory. As a young man he also suffered a serious respiratory illness that required surgery on part of a lung. None of this suggested an obvious future in Vatican ceremonial, though perhaps laboratory work was useful preparation for an institution where one occasionally needs patience, precision and the ability to recognise when several substances should never have been mixed in the first place. His decisive vocational experience came as a young man after confession, and in 1958 he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits would shape his intellectual discipline, his spirituality and his understanding of mission for the rest of his life.
His formation took him to Chile and then back to Argentina. He studied philosophy, taught literature and psychology, and later studied theology. One of the charming stories from these years is that he invited Jorge Luis Borges, already one of the giants of Spanish-language literature, to speak with his students. It is difficult to imagine a school administrator today casually deciding that the person needed for a classroom visit is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, but Bergoglio had an ability to create relationships outside predictable circles. He was ordained a priest on 13 December 1969 and made his final Jesuit profession in 1973. That same year, at only thirty-six, he became provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina.
The timing could hardly have been more difficult. Argentina was moving toward the military dictatorship and the period later remembered as the Dirty War, when state violence, disappearances, torture and political terror devastated the country. Bergoglio's leadership of the Jesuits during those years later became one of the most debated chapters of his pre-papal biography. Critics accused him of failing to protect two Jesuit priests who were kidnapped by the regime; Bergoglio rejected allegations that he had collaborated in their detention and said he had worked privately to obtain their release. The historical debate has continued for decades, and no responsible biography should turn a morally complicated period into a slogan. What is certain is that his years as provincial were formed in a society where political choices could become matters of life and death, and where Church leaders faced questions that were anything but theoretical.
After his term as provincial, Bergoglio became rector of the Colegio Maximo in San Miguel and continued in formation and academic work. He later spent time in Germany and then lived for a period in Cordoba. His relationship with the Jesuit order was not always easy. He had strong opinions, a forceful leadership style and, by his own later admission, had learned painful lessons about exercising authority too quickly and too decisively. This period of relative obscurity is important because the future Pope was not carried smoothly upward by an ecclesiastical conveyor belt. There were setbacks, disagreements and years when his future looked far less obvious than retrospective biographies make it seem. History has a bad habit of making every successful life look inevitable. Bergoglio's was not.
Cardinal Antonio Quarracino brought him back toward senior leadership in Buenos Aires. In 1992 Pope John Paul II appointed Bergoglio auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, and in 1998 he succeeded Quarracino as archbishop. Three years later John Paul II created him a cardinal. The new archbishop became known for a style that was strikingly unceremonious. He lived simply, used public transport, cooked for himself and spent time in the poor neighbourhoods of the Argentine capital. During the devastating economic crisis that struck Argentina around 2001, his public criticism of corruption, inequality and social indifference gave him a national profile. He did not speak about poverty as an interesting sociological category. He knew priests working in the villas miserias and treated those peripheral communities as a central part of diocesan life.
This concern for the "peripheries" would later become one of the defining words of his papacy. Bergoglio believed the Church understood itself better when it moved outward toward people who were ignored rather than remaining comfortably occupied with its own internal machinery. That conviction was already visible in Buenos Aires. He was not a doctrinal revolutionary in the easy sense sometimes suggested by media labels; on many moral questions he remained clearly within traditional Catholic teaching. What changed was the angle from which he liked to begin the conversation. He often started with the person who was wounded, poor, imprisoned, migrant, excluded or simply tired of being spoken about rather than spoken with.
When Benedict XVI announced his resignation in February 2013, Bergoglio travelled to Rome for the conclave as one of the senior cardinals of the global Church. On 13 March he was elected Pope at the age of seventy-six. His choice of name immediately became a programme. No Pope had ever called himself Francis. Bergoglio later explained that, during the election, Cardinal Claudio Hummes had embraced him and reminded him not to forget the poor. Bergoglio thought of Saint Francis of Assisi: the man of poverty, peace and care for creation. A papal name can be ceremonial branding if nothing follows it. In this case, the name proved remarkably predictive.
His first appearance set the tone. Rather than beginning with majestic language, he greeted Rome almost conversationally and described the conclave as having gone to the ends of the earth to find a bishop for the city. Before blessing the crowd, he bowed his head and asked the people to pray for him. It was a small reversal of the expected choreography and therefore, inevitably, became an enormous news story. Rome has always possessed a genius for turning symbolic gestures into political theology before breakfast, but in Francis's case the gestures were consistent enough to become part of his identity.
He chose not to live in the traditional papal apartments and instead remained at the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican guesthouse where cardinals stay during a conclave. He preferred comparatively modest cars and simplified some elements of papal dress. These decisions were sometimes treated as though the future of Christianity depended on footwear, but their significance lay in repetition. Francis was trying to communicate that office should not become distance. His papacy would be built around physical proximity: touching the sick, embracing prisoners, visiting refugees, telephoning ordinary people and appearing in places where a pontiff was not always expected.
His first journey outside Rome, in July 2013, was to Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island that had become a symbol of migrant crossings and deaths at sea. The choice was deliberate. Francis spoke about what he called the "globalization of indifference" and mourned people who had died trying to reach Europe. Migration remained one of the most consistent themes of his pontificate. His position was admired by many and criticised by others who believed he underestimated political and social pressures surrounding migration. Francis rarely appeared troubled by the fact that the subject was controversial. He considered the Christian obligation toward the stranger more fundamental than the comfort of the debate.
His 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium provided a broad map of the new pontificate. Francis called for a missionary Church willing to go outward rather than becoming trapped in self-preservation. He criticised an economy of exclusion and warned against reducing Christianity to bureaucracy, pessimism or moral bookkeeping. His language was deliberately vivid. He preferred an imperfect Church that had been "bruised, hurting and dirty" because it had been out in the streets to one that was unhealthy from being confined. Nobody could accuse him of writing like a committee, which in the Vatican is already a minor miracle.
In 2015 came Laudato si', the encyclical on care for the common home. Francis treated environmental destruction, climate change, poverty and patterns of consumption as interconnected moral problems. The document attracted global attention far beyond Catholic circles because it insisted that ecology could not be separated from economics and human dignity. Admirers praised its concept of integral ecology; critics objected to parts of its economic analysis or believed the Pope was moving into scientific and political territory. The debate itself demonstrated how far papal teaching had entered an issue often treated as technical rather than spiritual.
Mercy became another central theme. Francis declared an Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy beginning in 2015 and, in a striking gesture, opened the Holy Door not first in Rome but in Bangui, capital of the war-torn Central African Republic. The symbolism was unmistakable: the centre of Catholic attention could temporarily be placed somewhere the world normally considered peripheral. During the Jubilee he encouraged access to confession, authorised Missionaries of Mercy and repeatedly presented the Church as a place where forgiveness should be possible before perfection is achieved. His famous question "Who am I to judge?" became one of the most quoted lines of his pontificate, though it was frequently detached from the specific context in which he had spoken.
Francis also attempted substantial institutional reform. He created new economic structures, reorganised Vatican communications, combined offices and eventually promulgated the apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium in 2022 to reform the Roman Curia. He strengthened procedures concerning the sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable persons, particularly through Vos estis lux mundi, while continuing to face criticism from victims and advocates who argued that implementation remained inconsistent and that accountability in the global Church was still too slow. The abuse crisis was not created by his pontificate, but it remained one of the heaviest moral burdens he inherited and one against which every reform was judged.
His approach to family and pastoral questions also generated intense debate. The synods on the family and the 2016 exhortation Amoris Laetitia placed greater emphasis on discernment in complicated personal situations, especially concerning divorced and remarried Catholics. Supporters saw a pastoral application of mercy; critics feared ambiguity in moral teaching. Later decisions concerning blessings for people in irregular relationships and his restrictions on the older Latin liturgy deepened divisions among Catholics who already disagreed about the direction of the Church. Francis was often described as progressive by secular media and dangerously traditional by secular critics on other issues, which is perhaps evidence that ideological filing systems are less reliable than they think.
His international diplomacy was equally distinctive. In 2019, in Abu Dhabi, he signed the Document on Human Fraternity with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad al-Tayyeb. In 2021 he travelled to Iraq, where he met Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf and visited communities scarred by war and persecution. The images of an elderly Pope walking through the ruins of Mosul and visiting places associated with Abraham expressed his belief that interreligious dialogue had to move beyond polite conferences and enter landscapes where religion had been weaponised by violence.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. One image may eventually define that period of Francis's papacy more than any speech: on 27 March 2020 he stood almost alone in a rain-soaked Saint Peter's Square for the extraordinary prayer service later remembered as the Statio Orbis. The vast square, normally filled with pilgrims, was empty. He spoke about humanity being in the same boat, frightened by the storm and forced to recognise shared vulnerability. It was one of those rare occasions when the architecture of Rome itself seemed to participate in the message. Saint Peter's had seen coronations, funerals, councils and crowds; that evening its emptiness did the speaking.
The same year Francis published Fratelli tutti, an encyclical on fraternity and social friendship. Inspired again by Saint Francis, it challenged nationalism, social fragmentation and indifference, while calling for politics oriented toward human dignity and solidarity. His later encyclical Dilexit nos, published in 2024, returned to a deeply spiritual theme: the human and divine love of the Heart of Jesus. This combination is characteristic of Francis. He could spend one document discussing international economics and another exploring devotion and prayer, apparently without recognising the modern expectation that every public figure should stay inside one ideological department.
His travels became a major part of the pontificate. Over twelve years Francis made forty-seven apostolic journeys and visited sixty-six countries. He went to places previous Popes had never visited and frequently chose countries with small Catholic populations or societies marked by conflict. His final international journey, to Corsica in December 2024, made him the first Pope to visit the island. Within Italy he made numerous pastoral visits, often choosing prisons, earthquake zones, small towns or communities associated with migration and poverty rather than treating the country simply as a picturesque extension of Rome.
He also reshaped the College of Cardinals. Across ten consistories he created 163 cardinals from seventy-three nations, including countries that had never previously had a cardinal. The practical consequence was enormous: he changed the geographical profile of the body that would eventually elect his successor. This was Francis's version of the periphery expressed institutionally. Places far from Europe's traditional centres were no longer represented only as mission territories; they increasingly participated in the governance of the universal Church.
The final years of his life were increasingly marked by physical limitations. Knee problems often required a wheelchair, and he underwent abdominal surgery. Yet he continued travelling and receiving visitors at a pace that would have exhausted many people decades younger. In February 2025 he was admitted to Rome's Gemelli Hospital with bilateral pneumonia and remained there for thirty-eight days. His health became the subject of daily international bulletins. After returning to the Vatican, he continued working from Santa Marta even as his strength declined.
On Easter Sunday, 20 April 2025, Francis appeared once more at Saint Peter's Basilica to give the Urbi et Orbi blessing. He then went into the square to greet the faithful, blessing children and allowing the crowd one final encounter with the Pope whose pontificate had been defined by physical closeness. The following morning, 21 April, he died at the Domus Sanctae Marthae at the age of eighty-eight. His funeral took place on 26 April, and in accordance with his wishes he was buried not beneath Saint Peter's but in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, the Roman church he had visited repeatedly before and after his journeys to pray before the icon of Mary known as Salus Populi Romani.
That burial choice brought his story back to the city in a particularly Francis-like way. He had been born in Buenos Aires to an Italian immigrant family, became the first Latin American Pope and then chose to rest in one of Rome's great Marian basilicas rather than the Vatican grottoes. Argentina, Italy and the universal Church had become inseparable chapters of one biography. His Italian roots were not simply a genealogical curiosity for newspaper articles. They formed part of a larger migration story: an Italian family crossed the Atlantic, and two generations later one of its descendants returned to Rome as Bishop of the city.
Francis left a Church that had changed in tone, geography and institutional structure, but also one containing sharp internal disagreements. Admirers remember the emphasis on mercy, the poor, migrants, peace, environmental responsibility and a less regal papacy. Critics point to doctrinal ambiguities, governance problems, controversial appointments and divisions intensified rather than resolved. Both assessments belong to the historical record. A twelve-year pontificate cannot honestly be compressed into either a devotional portrait or an indictment. Francis was more complicated than either version, and his influence will continue to be argued about precisely because it was substantial.
Perhaps the most enduring image is still the simplest one: an elderly man in white asking a crowd to pray for him before he blessed them. Jorge Mario Bergoglio arrived in Rome with the habits of a Jesuit, the accent of Buenos Aires, the memory of Italian immigrants and decades spent among the social wounds of Argentina. He left behind a papacy that insisted the centre should keep looking toward the edges. Whether history ultimately judges every decision kindly is impossible to know. History rarely does that for anyone. But it is difficult to deny that for twelve years Francis made the ancient machinery of the papacy sound, look and sometimes even walk differently.
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