Pope Francis has died. He was eighty-eight years old.
Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His father was an Italian immigrant to Argentina whose family had escaped fascism under Benito Mussolini; his mother was born in Argentina and was also of Italian descent. Bergoglio was the eldest of five children, and initially pursued a career in chemistry. When he was twenty-one years old, he contracted life-threatening pneumonia with cysts and had a portion of one of his lungs removed.
After three years of study at the Immaculate Conception Seminary in Buenos Aires, Bergoglio entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) as a novice in 1958. In 1960 he made his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to formally enter the order as a religious brother. He taught literature and psychology at the College of the Immaculate Conception in Santa Fe, Argentina, and later at the College of the Savior, a private primary and secondary school in Buenos Aires.
Bergoglio entered theological study at San Miguel, a Jesuit seminary in Buenos Aires, in 1967. He was ordained a priest in 1969, then completed his Jesuit spiritual training and took his final vow of obedience to mission in 1973. He was the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina from 1973 to 1979, rector of the Philosophical and Theological Faculty of San Miguel—one of his alma maters—from 1980 to 1986, and confessor and spiritual director to Jesuits in Córdoba, Argentina, from 1986 to 1992.