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An unlikely choice to be pope championed causes and challenged orthodoxy, keeping allies and critics alike on their toes.
- April 21, 2025Updated 6:46 p.m. ET
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 (which signals that a new pope has been chosen), 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 Catholic Church, was a pope of surprises. Over the dozen years that I covered him, from the day of his election to the day of his death at 88, he kept the church he led, the world he cared 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 I recall 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 migrants, the displaced victims of war and the most forgotten and marginalized among us, no matter their religion. For him, their suffering was real.
But I also came to appreciate Francis as a savvy political operator not to be trifled with.
When conservative cardinals eager to erode the pope’s authority wrote Francis an official letter of “dubia,” Latin for doubt, asking him to clear up the “grave disorientation and great confusion” they said a document written by him had caused, prompting a question of church law, he simply refused to respond.
That infuriated them, and over the years the pressure, and noise, the conservative opposition produced on affiliated news outlets led some of them to suggest that the time of a schism, or formal break, with the church, was nigh.
