Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was my pick to be elected pope. I was wrong.
It was 2005, and the Argentine cardinal, a South American Jesuit known for riding the bus, ticked many of the boxes that church experts told me needed to be filled to move the church forward. Instead, the College of Cardinals chose the archconservative Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI. When, eight years later, I reported on another conclave and again stood in St. Peter’s Square scrutinizing the color of smoke leaking out the Sistine Chapel, I thought the Argentine cardinal had become too old to be a top candidate. I was wrong again.
Cardinal Bergoglio, who took the name Pope Francis, the first to do so in the history of the church, was a pope of surprises. Over the dozen years I covered him, from the day of his election to the day of his death on Monday, he kept the church he led, the world he cared so much about and the reporters who followed him on their toes. I covered him in unexpected destinations — Mongolia, Iraq, Myanmar — where he drew attention to humanitarian plights that were off the global radar.
One indelible image for me in my years covering Pope Francis was seeing him visibly moved, his voice tight, as he came face to face in Bangladesh with members of the Rohingya ethnic minority who had suffered enormous persecution. For me, that hammered home how much Francis cared about the plight of migrants, the displaced victims of war and the most forgotten and marginalized among us, no matter their religion. For him, their suffering was real.
On the papal plane, he was an easygoing guy with a good sense of humor, better at glad-handing the press than all of the presidential candidates and presidents I had covered. In the Vatican, he surprised me with a governing style that his critics considered so tough as to be authoritarian and an ability to get around the traps of an institution built to slow things down. At other times, he stunned me with his apparent indecision, punting important decisions, like allowing some older, married men to serve as priests in remote locations.
In short, Francis was never predictable.
Jason Horowitz is the Rome bureau chief for The Times, covering Italy, the Vatican, Greece and other parts of Southern Europe.
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