Picked from the Ends of the Earth he became the Pope of the Peripheries

"You know that it was the duty of the Conclave to give Rome a Bishop. It seems that my brother Cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth to get one, but here we are." That was then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Buenos Aries, Argentina, and newly elected as Pope Francis on 13 March 2013, addressing the throng of faithful Christians and curious tourists from the papal balcony of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome.

- BY RAJAN PHILIPS

"Sacristy sarcasm," as a Catholic writer has aptly described it, was one of many endearing attributes of Pope Francis who passed away on Easter Monday after celebrating the resurrection of Christ the day before. Francis was the first Jesuit to become Pope, the first Argentinian Pope, and the first Pope from outside of Europe in over a 1,000 years.

He broke conventions from the outset, preferring the plain white cassock and his personal cross to richly trimmed capes and gold crucifixes, and took the name Francis not after any preceding Pope but after Saint Francis of Assisi, the 13th century Italian Catholic friar, one of Italy's patron saints and the Church's patron of the environment. Born to immigrant Italian parents in Argentina, the quintessential periphery of the modern world order, Pope Francis became the Pope of the world's migrants, its peripheries, and its environment. The protection of migrants, the theme of the peripheries and the stewardship of the environment have been the defining dimensions of the Francis papacy.

Addressing the cardinals before the Conclave, Francis called on the Church to "come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not only geographically, but also the existential peripheries". Francis was the first Pope to break the Eurocentric matrix of the Church. His predecessor from Germany, Pope Benedict XVI, had been an unabashed Europhile who had expressed concerns over non-Christian Turkey joining the European Union and was known for his views alluding to violent aspects of Islam.