Argentine boy who became great Catholic moderniser

Pope Francis’s humility, social activism and reforms made him popular with the Church’s faithful, if not all the clergy

- JOE SOMMERLAD, PHILIP PULLELLA

Pope Francis, the 266th Supreme Pontiff and the first Latin American and first Jesuit to lead the Roman Catholic Church, has died aged 88.

He was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio on 17 December 1936 in the Flores district of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the son of Italian immigrants. His father, Mario, whose family had left their homeland when Benito Mussolini came to power, was an accountant employed by the railways and his mother, Regina Sivori, a housewife devoted to raising the couple’s five children.

As a boy, Jorge Bergoglio attended the Wilfrid Baron de los Santos Angeles school in Ramos Mejia before earning a qualification as a chemical technician from the Escuela Tecnica Industrial 27 Hipolito Yrigoyen, which enabled him to give up his part-time jobs as a bouncer and janitor to work at the Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory, a food processing plant.

As fond of football, neorealist cinema and tango as any self-respecting Argentine, Bergoglio abandoned his career after being inspired to join the priesthood, instead studying at the archdiocesan seminary at Villa Devoto in his home city. His resolve was tested when he fell in love with a young woman, although ultimately it never wavered. A dangerous bout of pneumonia, contracted when he was 21, might also have curtailed his mission, but his life was saved when surgeons removed a portion of his right lung.

Recovering, Bergoglio entered the Jesuit novitiate of the Society of Jesus on 11 March 1958 before turning to academia, studying humanities in Santiago, Chile, until 1963 when he returned to Buenos Aires to earn a licentiate in philosophy from the Colegio Maximo de San Jose in San Miguel. After graduating, he taught literature and psychology at Santa Fe’s Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepcion from 1964 to 1965 and then at the Colegio del Salvatore in 1966.