In Pope Francis, the Catholic Church has found a charismatic leader who is striving to turn the page on Vatican financial and sexual scandals, while preaching mercy and compassion at the expense of doctrinarian inflexibility.
Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, the 77-year-old pontiff is the first non-European pope since the 8th century, and the first to name himself after St Francis of Assisi, a medieval monk who lived in poverty and sought to clean up the Catholic Church from corruption.
Upon his election on March 13, 2013, Francis quipped that he came “almost from the end of the world.”
He took command at a time of unprecedented crisis: his predecessor, Benedict XVI, was the first pope to quit his post in almost 600 years, dogged by cases of paedophile priests around the world and the VatiLeaks affair, which exposed alleged cronyism and infighting.
Over the past 17 months, Francis has made headlines with refreshing displays of humility, unusually outspoken remarks and wide-ranging administrative reforms, including a radical overhaul of the Vatican’s bank, the Institute for Religious Works.
The pope has called for “a poor church for the church,” while eschewing customary trappings of power: he lives in a Vatican guesthouse, rather than in grand papal apartments, and uses an ordinary hatchback as an official car.
“To paint the Pope as some kind of Superman, some kind of a star, I think it is offensive,” Francis told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in March.
“The pope is a man who laughs, cries, sleeps peacefully and has friends like everybody else. A normal person.”
He is known to make impromptu telephone calls to ordinary people, and, in one of several acts that has shocked traditionalists, he has performed the pre-Easter ritual of the washing of feet on inmates of a juvenile prison, including Muslims and women.
Francis has written that there will be “no solution” to the world’s ills as long as “the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality.”
The pope has also made waves by affirming that the Catholic Church should not “obsess” about hot-button issues, although he has not gone so far as to suggest that its traditional teachings on family life could be altered.
“If a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge?” Francis said in July last year. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible,” he added two months later.
A Jesuit like Matteo Ricci, a pioneering Western missionary to China from the 16th century, the pope has said that Asia is a priority of his papacy. After South Korea, he is expected to visit the Philippines and Sri Lanka in January.
As well as a defender of social justice, Francis has championed global peace. In June, he brought together Israeli and Palestinian leaders for peace prayers at the Vatican, which, however, failed to prevent the recent worsening of the Middle East conflict.
In South Korea, he was expected to call for reconciliation with the North, and speak up for religious freedom under that regime, as well as in China, Iraq and elsewhere in the world. His programme also includes the beatification of the Korean Catholic martyrs, who were killed in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
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