section_path: Archbishop of Buenos Aires (1998–2013)
section_name: Archbishop of Buenos Aires (1998–2013)
paragraph_text: Archbishop of Buenos Aires (1998–2013)
  
  He became metropolitan archbishop after Quarracino's death on 28 February 1998. As archbishop, he established new parishes, restructured the archdiocese, led pro-life efforts, and formed a commission on divorces. One of Bergoglio's major initiatives as archbishop was to increase the church's presence in the shantytown (villa miseria, or just villa) slums of Buenos Aires. Under his leadership, the number of priests assigned to work in the shantytowns doubled, and he visited them himself. This work led to him being referred to as the " villero bishop", sometimes translated as the "slum bishop".
  
  Early in his tenure as archbishop, Bergoglio sold the archdiocese's bank shares and moved its accounts to regular international banks. This ended the church's high spending habits, which had nearly led to its bankruptcy, and enforced stricter fiscal discipline. On 6 November 1998, while remaining archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio was named Ordinary for Eastern Catholics in Argentina, who lacked a prelate of their own church. On Bergoglio's election to the papacy, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said that Bergoglio understood the liturgy, rites, and spirituality of Shevchuk's Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and always "took care of our Church in Argentina" as Ordinary.
  
  In 2000, Bergoglio was the only church official to reconcile with Jerónimo Podestá, a former bishop who had been suspended as a priest after opposing the Argentine Revolution military dictatorship in 1972. He also defended Podestá's wife from Vatican attacks on their marriage. That same year, Bergoglio said the Argentine Catholic Church needed "to put on garments of public penance for the sins committed during the years of the dictatorship" in the 1970s, during the Dirty War.
  
  Bergoglio regularly celebrated the Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual in jails, hospitals, retirement homes, and slums. Bergoglio continued to be the archbishop of Buenos Aires after his elevation to the cardinalate in 2001. In 2007, shortly after Benedict XVI introduced new rules for pre – Vatican II liturgical forms, Bergoglio established a weekly Mass in this extraordinary form of the Roman Rite.
  
  On 8 November 2005, Bergoglio was elected president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference for a three-year term (2005–2008), and re-elected on 11 November 2008. He remained a member of that commission's permanent governing body, the president of its committee for the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, and a member of its liturgy committee for the care of shrines. While head of the Argentine Catholic bishops' conference, Bergoglio issued a collective apology for his church's failure to protect people from the junta during the Dirty War. When he turned 75 in December 2011, Bergoglio submitted his resignation as archbishop of Buenos Aires to Pope Benedict XVI as required by canon law. As he had no coadjutor archbishop, he stayed in office, waiting for the Vatican to appoint a replacement.
  
  As a bishop, he was no longer subject to his Jesuit superior. From then on, he no longer visited Jesuit houses and was in "virtual estrangement from the Jesuits" until after his election as pope.