Born Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the eldest of 5 kids of Italian immigrants.
He credited his religious grandmother Rosa with educating him learn how to pray. Weekends have been spent listening to opera on the radio, going to Mass and attending matches of the household’s beloved San Lorenzo soccer membership. As pope, his love of soccer introduced him an enormous assortment of jerseys from guests.
He stated he acquired his spiritual calling at 17 whereas going to confession, recounting in a 2010 biography that, “I don’t know what it was, but it surely modified my life. … I noticed that they have been ready for me.”
He entered the diocesan seminary however switched to the Jesuit order in 1958, drawn to its missionary custom and militancy.
Round this time, he suffered from pneumonia, which led to the removing of the higher a part of his proper lung. His frail well being prevented him from turning into a missionary, and his less-than-robust lung capability was maybe accountable for his whisper of a voice and reluctance to sing at Mass.
On Dec. 13, 1969, he was ordained a priest, and instantly started educating. In 1973, he was named head of the Jesuits in Argentina, an appointment he later acknowledged was “loopy” given he was solely 36. “My authoritarian and fast method of constructing choices led me to have severe issues and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he admitted in his Civilta Cattolica interview.
His six-year tenure as provincial coincided with Argentina’s murderous 1976-83 dictatorship, when the navy launched a marketing campaign towards left-wing guerrillas and different regime opponents.
Bergoglio didn’t publicly confront the junta and was accused of successfully permitting two slum monks to be kidnapped and tortured by not publicly endorsing their work.
He refused for many years to counter that model of occasions. Solely in a 2010 licensed biography did he lastly recount the behind-the-scenes lengths he used to save lots of them, persuading the household priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to name in sick so he may say Mass as a substitute. As soon as within the junta chief’s house, Bergoglio privately appealed for mercy. Each monks have been finally launched, among the many few to have survived jail.
As pope, accounts started to emerge of the many individuals — monks, seminarians and political dissidents — whom Bergoglio really saved through the “soiled warfare,” letting them keep incognito on the seminary or serving to them escape the nation.
Bergoglio went to Germany in 1986 to analysis a never-finished thesis. Returning to Argentina, he was stationed in Cordoba throughout a interval he described as a time of “nice inside disaster.” Out of favor with extra progressive Jesuit leaders, he was finally rescued from obscurity in 1992 by St. John Paul II, who named him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. He turned archbishop six years later, and was made a cardinal in 2001.
He got here near turning into pope in 2005 when Benedict was elected, gaining the second-most votes in a number of rounds of balloting earlier than bowing out.
The Related Press contributed to this report.
