VATICAN CITY — The cardinals of
the Roman Catholic Church broke Europe’s millennium-long stranglehold on
the papacy and astonished the Catholic world Wednesday, electing Jesuit Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as the 266th pope.
The choice, on the second day of deliberations in a papal
conclave, opened a direct connection to the Southern Hemisphere at a
critical juncture when secularism and competing faiths are depleting the
church’s ranks around the globe and dysfunction is eroding its
authority in Rome.
“The duty of the conclave was to appoint a bishop of Rome,” said Bergoglio, 76, who took the name Francis,
making him the first pope in history to do so. “And it seems to me that
my brother cardinals went to fetch him at the end of the world. But
here I am.”
Bergoglio is widely believed to have been the
runner-up in the 2005 conclave, which yielded Francis’s predecessor,
Pope Benedict XVI. Last month, Benedict became the first pope in nearly
600 years to resign. Francis will be the first pope in twice that long to hail from outside Europe.
Shortly after his election, Francis called Benedict, now known
as pope emeritus, with whom he will meet Thursday. As the third
consecutive non-Italian pope, after the Polish John Paul II and the
German Benedict, Francis seems to have ended the era of Italian
dominance of the papacy.
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