In the books of global contemporary history it will be written that on March 13, 2013, an event never seen before happened: a Latin American cardinal became the new Pope. Francisco would replace Benedict XVI after his resignation.
Francisco is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, an Argentine priest born on December 17, 1936 in the Flores neighborhood in the City of Buenos Aires, capital of that country. A religious man who grew up in a Catholic environment from a very young age, surrounded by his family and whom he remembers to this day.
“He loved to walk all over the neighborhood and all over the city. He has once said, already being Pope, ‘for me Buenos Aires is the best city in the world,’ ”he recounts when asked by the voice of americaSergio Rubín, a journalist specializing in the Vatican who wrote two books about the Pope, “El Jesuita” and “El Pastor”.
Francisco himself once publicly asked “Do not deny the history of your family, do not deny your grandparents, search the roots, search history and from there I built the future.” Those who know him assure that it is something that he currently fulfills, and for this reason his past is so rich to be studied.
Bergoglio, or Pope Francis, is of Italian descent and the eldest of five children. He was raised in a family with strong Catholic values, although it was his grandmother Rosa de él who had the greatest religious influence on him.
On a spring day, on September 21, he was walking to meet friends in his beloved neighborhood of Flores when he came across the Basilica of San José de Flores. “He went to confession and had an illumination, a conversion, about his vocation, about what he wanted to be in life and he realized that he wanted to do everything from God,” says Guillermo Marcó, who was his spokesperson while he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
After finishing high school, Jorge Bergoglio entered the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Seminary, where he was ordained a priest in 1969. He studied and trained in different provinces of Argentina as well as in Chile and Spain. Being one of the most important Jesuit leaders in the country, he played a very active role during the darkest years of recent Argentine history: those of the last military dictatorship in 1976.
After a period in the Argentine province of Córdoba, which many considered an “exile”, in 1992 the then Pope John Paul II named him auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. The fact that he was increasing his influence within the Church until he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires in February 1998, the highest position in the country and which he held until the day he was elected Pope.
A long life and Catholic career in Argentina that, according to experts, reflects the actions and decisions that Pope Francis took in his first 10 years of papacy.
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