While Bergoglio previously was a member of different Vatican departments, he never previously worked within the Vatican, in contrast to Ratzinger, who had spent the bulk of his career within the Church’s apparatus in Rome. With the nomination of Pope Francis, the Church’s senior cardinals are apparently hoping that an “outsider” can reorganise the institution amid reports of murky financial arrangements and money laundering, and factional rifts revealed in the so-called “Vatileaks” affair, including groups of senior clergy being blackmailed for homosexual activities.

Ratzinger’s resignation, it is now clear, was prompted by these scandals. While “health reasons” was the stated reason, the Church has now elected a new 76-year-old pope who is just two years younger than Ratzinger was when he became pope in 2005, and who only has one lung, with the other removed when he was a teenager.

The Church’s nomination of an Argentinian pope is aimed at bolstering its international standing. Part of the calculation is demographic—the number of active Catholics in Europe is rapidly declining and insufficient numbers of young people are now joining the priesthood to sustain existing parishes without importing clergy from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. An estimated 40 percent of the world’s Catholics are in Central and South America, though the Church is also under pressure there from rival evangelical groups on the one hand, and growing numbers of young people rejecting all religion on the other. Within Argentina, for example, fewer than 10 percent of the population regularly attend mass.