The pope is dead, long live the pope. Having died of a stroke on April 21, 2025 at the age of 88, Pope Francis had acceded to the supreme office of the Catholic Church in 2013. For 12 years, the Argentinian was involved in numerous social issues that were as unifying as they were divisive.
His name was Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Born in December 1936 in a working-class district of Buenos Aires, Argentina, he had a divine revelation at the age of 17 and decided to become a priest when he was 21, following a lung ablation. “In the hardest moments, the memory of that first encounter helped me a lot, because the Lord always meets us definitively, the Lord doesn’t enter into the culture of the provisional: he loves us forever, he accompanies us forever,” the Pope had declared in 2015.
Priest in 1969
Jorge Mario Bergoglio entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1958, while studying chemistry and philosophy. He was officially ordained a priest in 1969, and took his final vows four years later. The same year, he was appointed Provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina.
Between 1980 and 1986, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was rector of Saint Joseph’s College in San Miguel and parish priest. He taught pastoral theology, before leaving to work on a thesis in Germany. It wasn’t until 1990 that the man of the cloth returned to Argentina as parish priest and confessor. Two years later, he was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires by Pope John Paul II at the instigation of Cardinal Antonio Quarracino.
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