To read about TIME’s choice in Spanish and Portuguese, click below. 
 
 EL ELEGIDO: El Papa Francisco es la Persona del Año 2013 de TIME 
 
 A Escolha: O Papa Francisco é a Personalidade do Ano eleita pela Time em 2013 
 
 Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson. 
 
 How do you practice humility from the most exalted throne on earth? Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly—young and old, faithful and cynical—as has Pope Francis. In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very center of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power. 
 
 At a time when the limits of leadership are being tested in so many places, along comes a man with no army or weapons, no kingdom beyond a tight fist of land in the middle of Rome but with the immense wealth and weight of history behind him, to throw down a challenge. The world is getting smaller; individual voices are getting louder; technology is turning virtue viral, so his pulpit is visible to the ends of the earth. When he kisses the face of a disfigured man or washes the feet of a Muslim woman, the image resonates far beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church. 
 
 (PERSON OF THE YEAR: Pope Francis, The People’s Pope) 
 
 The skeptics will point to the obstacles Francis faces in accomplishing much of anything beyond making casual believers feel better about the softer tone coming out of Rome while feeling free to ignore the harder substance. The Catholic Church is one of the oldest, largest and richest institutions on earth, with a following 1.2 billion strong, and change does not come naturally. At its best it inspires and instructs, helps and heals and calls the faithful to heed their better angels. But it has been weakened worldwide by scandal, corruption, a shortage of priests and a challenge, especially across the fertile mission fields of the southern hemisphere, from evangelical and Pentecostal rivals. In some quarters, core teachings on divorce and contraception are widely ignored and orthodoxy derided as obsolete. Vatican bureaucrats and clergy stand accused of infighting, graft, blackmail and an obsession with “small-minded rules,” as Francis puts it, rather than the vast possibilities of grace. Don’t just preach; listen, he says. Don’t scold; heal. 
 
 And yet in less than a year, he has done something remarkable: he has not changed the words, but he’s changed the music. Tone and temperament matter in a church built on the substance of symbols—bread and wine, body and blood—so it is a mistake to dismiss any Pope’s symbolic choices­ as gestures empty of the force of law. He released his first exhortation, an attack on “the idolatry of money,” just as Americans were contemplating the day set aside for gratitude and whether to spend it at the mall. This is a man with a sense of timing. He lives not in the papal palace surrounded by courtiers but in a spare hostel surrounded by priests. He prays all the time, even while waiting for the dentist. He has retired the papal Mercedes in favor of a scuffed-up Ford Focus. No red shoes, no gilded cross, just an iron one around his neck. When he rejects the pomp and the privilege, releases information on Vatican finances for the first time, reprimands a profligate German Archbishop, cold-calls strangers in distress, offers to baptize the baby of a divorced woman whose married lover wanted her to abort it, he is doing more than modeling mercy and ­transparency. He is ­embracing complexity and acknowledging the risk that a church obsessed with its own rights and righteousness could inflict more wounds than it heals. Asked why he seems uninterested in waging a culture war, he refers to the battlefield. The church is a field hospital, he says. Our first duty is to tend to the wounded. You don’t ask a bleeding man about his cholesterol level. 
 
 (MORE: Everything You Wanted to Know about TIME’s Person of the Year) 
 
 This focus on compassion, along with a general aura of merriment not always associated with princes of the church, has made Francis something of a rock star. More than 3 million people turned out to see him on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro last summer, the crowds in St. Peter’s Square are ecstatic, and the souvenirs are selling fast. Francesco is the most popular male baby name in Italy. Churches report a “Francis effect” of lapsed Catholics returning to Mass and confession, though anecdotes are no substitute for hard evidence, and surveys of U.S. Catholics, at least, see little change in practice thus far. But the fascination with Francis even outside his flock gives him an opportunity that his predecessor, Benedict XVI, never had—to magnify the message of the church and its power to do great good. 
 
 The giddy embrace of the secular press makes Francis suspect among traditionalists who fear he buys popularity at the price of a watered-down faith. He has deftly leveraged the media’s fascination to draw attention to everything from his prayers for peace in Syria to his pointed attack on trickle-down economics, which inspired Jesse Jackson to compare him to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rush Limbaugh to wonder whether he’s a Marxist. When you are a media celebrity, every word you speak is dissected, as are those you choose not to speak. Why has he not said more about the priest sex-abuse scandal? ask victims’ advocates. (Just this month, he set up a commission to address the abuse of children by priests.) Why does he not talk more about the sanctity of life? ask conservatives, who note that in his exhortation, abortion is mentioned once, mercy 32 times. Francis both affirms traditional teachings on sexuality and warns that the church has become distracted by them. He attacks priests who won’t baptize children born out of wedlock for their “rigorous and hypocritical neo-clericalism.” He declares that God “has redeemed all of us … not just Catholics. Everyone, even atheists.” He posed with environmental activists holding an antifracking T-shirt and called on politicians and business leaders to be “protectors of creation.” 
 
 (MORE: Behind the Pope Francis Cover) 
 
 None of which makes him a liberal—he also says the all-male priesthood is not subject to debate, nor is abortion, nor is the definition of marriage. But his focus on the poor and the fact that the world’s poorest 50% control barely 1% of its wealth unsettles those who defend capitalism as the most successful antipoverty program in history. You could argue that he is Teddy Roosevelt protecting capitalism from its own excesses or he is simply saying what Popes before him have said, that Jesus calls us to care for the least among us—only he’s saying it in a way that people seem to be hearing differently. And that may be especially important coming from the first Pope from the New World. A century ago, two-thirds of Catholics lived in Europe; now fewer than a quarter do, and how he is heard in countries where being gay is a crime and educating women for leadership roles is a heresy may have the power to transform cultures in which Catholicism is a growing, even potentially liberating force. 
 
 These days it is bracing to hear a leader say anything that annoys anyone. Now liberals and conservatives alike face a choice as they listen to a new voice of conscience: Which matters more, that this charismatic leader is saying things they think need to be said or that he is also saying things they’d rather not hear? 
 
 The heart is a strong muscle; he’s proposing a rigorous exercise plan. And in a very short time, a vast, global, ecumenical audience has shown a hunger to follow him. For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets, for committing the world’s largest church to confronting its deepest needs and for balancing judgment with mercy, Pope Francis is TIME’s 2013 Person of the Year. ||||| A year ago, on 13 March 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, became the 266th head of the Roman Catholic church. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, had resigned the month before, citing a decline in his physical and mental strength, leading to an almost unprecedented handover of power. After the remote, intellectual German theologian came the church's first Jesuit leader, its first Latin American pontiff – and the first pope to take the name of Francis. 
 
 The pope was elected with a mandate to shake up the church in Rome and help turn the page on an increasingly fraught and scandal-bedevilled papacy. His many fans argue he has vigorously pursued a reformist agenda within the Vatican while radically improving the church's image outside it. But, as Rome marks his first anniversary, just how successful has this peculiarly popular pontiff been? 
 
 Good works 
 
 
 
 Image management 
 
 Pope Francis blesses Vinicio Riva in November. Photograph: Claudio Peri/EPA 
 
 Talk of the "Pope Francis effect" is ubiquitous for a reason: since stepping out on to the balcony of St Peter's on the evening of 13 March 2013 to joke that the cardinal-electors had been forced to cast their nets to "the end of the Earth" to find a successor to Benedict, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has scarcely put a humbly shod foot wrong PR-wise. Despite adhering to church teaching as closely as his predecessor, Francis has, through a mixture of charm, humour and openness, turned many preconceptions – and prejudices – on their heads. His decision to abjure the splendour of the apostolic palace in favour of the modest Casa Santa Marta guesthouse has offered proof of his personal commitment to a humbler church, while his tender embracing of Vinicio Riva, a man terribly disfigured by tumours, underlined his hands-on pastoral approach. Such actions saw him voted person of the year by both Time magazine and the US gay and lesbian magazine The Advocate, while his Twitter account - @pontifex – has almost 3.8 million followers. 
 
 Church governance 
 
 Francis's decision to appoint eight "outsider" cardinals to advise him on church reform was described by one observer as the "most important step in the history of the church for the past 10 centuries". The council, which includes cardinals from the US, Australia, India, Honduras and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has inevitably been dubbed the papal G8. "[They are] not courtiers but wise people who share my feelings," said Francis, who has often been scathing about the "introspective and Vatican-centric" nature of the Holy See. "This is the start of a church with not just a vertical but horizontal organisation." Jesuits, who have had to wait almost 500 years to see one of their number sit on the papal throne, proudly point out that consultation is one of the foundations of their order. 
 
 Overhaul of the Congregation for Bishops 
 
 Pope Francis meets bishops at the end of his weekly general audience, in St Peter's Square last month. Photograph: Alessandra Tarantino/AP 
 
 As well as assembling his own G8, Francis has revamped the powerful Congregation for Bishops, the Vatican department responsible for selecting bishops. By appointing 12 new members and not confirming 14 existing members, he rebalanced the department to make it more moderate and progressive. Among those who were not confirmed was the highly influential conservative US cardinal Raymond Burke, who has been an outspoken critic of US presidential candidates who are in favour of abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, human cloning and same-sex marriage. New members include Vincent Nichols, the leader of Catholics in England and Wales praised for his pastoral and inclusive style, whom Francis made a cardinal last month. The papal historian Michael Walsh described the overhaul of the congregation as a "tectonic shift" in governance. 
 
 Inclusivity 
 
 On Maundy Thursday 2013, a fortnight after becoming pope, Francis exhorted his priests to abandon introspection and to get out "to the outskirts where there is suffering, bloodshed, blindness that longs for sight and prisoners in thrall to many evil masters". He washed and kissed the feet of two Muslims – one a woman – at a youth detention centre near Rome. It was the first time a pontiff had included women in the ceremony. For many, the greatest proof of the pope's commitment to inclusivity and his desire to appeal to those who have long felt ignored or criticised by the church came during an impromptu press conference on a flight back from Brazil in July. "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?" he asked journalists. 
 
 Anglican relations 
 
 Francis's determination to "intensify dialogue among the various religions" has not been confined to reaching out to Jews and Muslims. Last June, he had lunch with the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the pair chatted for four hours. Despite frosty relations that have existed between the churches in recent years – caused mainly by the C of E's decision to ordain women and Pope Benedict's creation of an ordinariate to bring disaffected Anglicans into the embrace of Rome – Francis and Welby appear to have a genuine rapport. According to Sir David Moxon, the archbishop of Canterbury's representative to the Holy See and director of the Anglican centre in Rome, there was an "immediate chemistry" between the two leaders, whom Moxon describes as "men of action" equally committed to tackling poverty and social injustice. It has not hurt that Welby's personal spiritual director is a Benedictine monk; nor that the archbishop recently signalled a further rapprochement by inviting members of a Roman Catholic ecumenical community to take up residence in Lambeth Palace. 
 
 Political player 
 
 Pope Francis (kissing the feet of a young offender during a mass at the church of the Casal del Marmo youth prison on the outskirts of Rome in 2013. Photograph: AFP 
 
 It was no accident that Francis chose a career Vatican diplomat, Pietro Parolin, as his secretary of state, a position often likened to the papal prime minister. The pope has shown a desire to put the Vatican back on the international stage as a key player in external – not just messy, internal – affairs, and his stance on Syria has been the clearest sign that under him the Catholic church's voice will be loud and clear. With an open letter to the leaders of the G20, repeated exhortations for a non-violent, mediated solution, and a day-long fast and mass prayer vigil, he provided a moral counterweight to the Obama administration and its proposed air strikes. His powerful criticisms of capitalist excesses have seen the church regain relevance in the contemporary debate on social justice. And his decision to make Lampedusa the location of his first trip outside Rome, slamming a "globalisation of indifference" that allowed migrants to die in the Mediterranean, he focused the eyes of the world on an often-overlooked problem." 
 
 The jury's out 
 
 Curia reform 
 
 The "outsider" pope was elected with a mandate to come to Rome and bang heads together. In the fading light of Benedict's papacy, infighting and corruption within the Curia – the Vatican's central bureaucracy – had dominated amid the so-called Vatileaks affair. Francis has announced measures to engender reform, most notably the creation of a secretariat of the economy – a kind of finance ministry – to centralise the handling of business and administrative affairs. That will be led by the outspoken Australian Cardinal George Pell. The other key staffing decision was to replace the widely discredited Tarcisio Bertone as secretary of state –a symbolic and practical move Francis must hope will draw a line under an era of scandal and incompetence. 
 
 Core teachings 
 
 The pope appearing in a selfie taken by young pilgrims in St Peter's, Rome. Photograph: AP 
 
 Liberals who would like to see significant doctrinal shifts from Francis should alter their expectations. The pope has made clear his commitment to core church teachings on issues such as abortion and women's ordination. But that doesn't mean there will be no change at all. For one thing, Francis has said the church needs a "new balance" and a less condemnatory attitude to sexual morality. For another, he has shown himself to be a pragmatic conservative, committed to doctrine but concerned with how the church responds to pastoral realities. In concrete terms, speculation centres on whether he will see fit to announce a shift on the treatment of remarried divorcees, now banned from receiving holy communion. Walter Kasper, the cardinal Francis chose to speak on the subject at a consistory earlier this year, told La Repubblica newspaper this week that the church should try to find a "realistic application of doctrine", adding: "The church must never judge as though it had a guillotine in its hands." 
 
 Vatican Bank 
 
 All too often the cause of embarrassment for the papacy, the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) is at the heart of Francis's reform – and ethical finance – agenda. He has set up a commission of lay experts and clerics to investigate the bank's running, and has replaced four of five cardinals appointed under Benedict on an oversight body. Under German president Ernst von Freyberg, the bank is trying to improve transparency and has hired an outside firm of accountants to help it meet international standards. But an Italian investigation into allegations of money laundering – which the bank denies – continues and a report by a Council of Europe body, Moneyval, in December said the IOR still had some way to go. Francis has made it clear that, if the bank cannot be adequately reformed, he would have no compunction about closing it for good. 
 
 Must try harder 
 
 
 
 Clerical sex abuse 
 
 There are growing suspicions that this, more than any other issue, is emerging as Francis's blind spot. Critics say he has done little to ramp up the church's response to the scandal. Though he has said officials must "act decisively" on the problem – and in December announced a new commission to examine ways of better protecting children and helping victims – most advocates for abuse victims say another commission is not what is needed and criticise him for not making the deep changes they, and the UN, say are necessary. They have been left despondent by Francis's occasional comments on the issue, in which he has generally defended the church while condemning the abuse. An interview published this month in which he claimed that no other institution had acted with the same "transparency and responsibility" elicited particular anger. "His comments about clerical sex abuse [in the interview] make it clear that he is using the same tired and irrelevant playbook the bishops have worn out over the past few years," wrote priest and victims' supporter Tom Doyle in the National Catholic Reporter. ||||| Nearly every Wednesday in Rome, the faithful and the curious gather in St. Peter's Square for a general audience with the pope. Since the election of the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio last March, attendance at papal events has tripled to 6.6 million. On a recent chilly morning in December, the thousands of amassed pilgrims appear to gleam in the sunlight, covering the square like a pixelated carpet. Maybe it's all the smartphones raised to the heavens. 
 
 Beyond Pope Francis: 10 conservatives who have gone liberal 
 
 Up close, Pope Francis, the 266th vicar of Jesus Christ on Earth, a man whose obvious humility, empathy and, above all, devotion to the economically disenfranchised has come to feel perfectly suited to our times, looks stouter than on television. Having famously dispensed with the more flamboyant pontifical accessories, he's also surprisingly stylish, today wearing a double-breasted white overcoat, white scarf and slightly creamier cassock, all impeccably tailored. 
 
 The topic of Francis' catechesis, or teaching, is Judgment Day, though, true to form, he does not try to conjure images of fire and brimstone. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, speaking on the topic, once said, "Today we are used to thinking: 'What is sin? God is great, he understands us, so sin does not count; in the end God will be good toward all.' It's a nice hope. But there is justice, and there is real blame." 
 
 Francis, 77, by contrast, implores the crowd to think of the prospect of meeting one's maker as something to look forward to, like a wedding, where Jesus and all of the saints in heaven will be waiting with open arms. He looks up from his script twice to repeat key lines: avanti senza paura ("go without fear") and che quel giudizio finale è già in atto ("the final judgment is already happening"). Coming from this pope, the latter point sounds more like a friendly reminder. His voice is disarmingly gentle, even when amplified over a vast public square. 
 
 Eventually, he moves to greet the crowd. Benedict, a dour academic, kept this portion of the general audience to a minimum. But Francis, like Bill Clinton, thrives on personal contact, and he spends the better part of an hour greeting believers. Next to the dais, a rowdy hometown team of Italians, a couple of whom spoke loudly on their cellphones throughout the pope's sermon, have their cameras out like paparazzi. "Papa Francesco! Papa Francesco!" they shout, shrilly and incessantly, trying to get the Holy Father of the Catholic Church to gaze in their direction. The most shameless hold up children. "Papa Francesco!" they cry. "I bambini! I bambini!" 
 
 It's a funny thing, papal celebrity. As the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio had never been an especially gifted public speaker. But now that he's Pope Francis, his recognizable humanity comes off as positively revolutionary. Against the absurd, impossibly baroque backdrop of the Vatican, a world still run like a medieval court, Francis' election represents what his friend Elisabetta Piqué, an Argentine journalist who has known him for a decade, calls "a scandal of normality." Since his election last March, Francis has consistently confounded expectations with the simplest of gestures: surprising desk clerks at the hotel where he'd been staying during the papal conclave by showing up to pay his own bill; panicking bodyguards by swigging from a cup of maté (the highly caffeinated tealike beverage popular throughout South America) handed to him by a stranger during a visit to Brazil; cracking up cardinals with jokes at his own expense hours after being elected (to those assembled at his first official dinner as pope, he deadpanned, "May God forgive you for what you've done"). 
 
 After the disastrous papacy of Benedict, a staunch traditionalist who looked like he should be wearing a striped shirt with knife-fingered gloves and menacing teenagers in their nightmares, Francis' basic mastery of skills like smiling in public seemed a small miracle to the average Catholic. But he had far more radical changes in mind. By eschewing the papal palace for a modest two-room apartment, by publicly scolding church leaders for being "obsessed" with divisive social issues like gay marriage, birth control and abortion ("Who am I to judge?" Francis famously replied when asked his views on homosexual priests) and – perhaps most astonishingly of all – by devoting much of his first major written teaching to a scathing critique of unchecked free-market capitalism, the pope revealed his own obsessions to be more in line with the boss' son. 
 
 5 economic reforms millennials should be fighting for 
 
 The touchingly enduring Mr. Smith Goes to Washington/Bulworth/Aaron Sorkin fantasy in which a noble political figure finally tells the American people the truth tends not to happen in real-life democracy, you may have noticed. There's too much money, too many special interests infecting electoral politics. Such a scenario could probably take place only in an arcane throwback of an institution like the Vatican, where secret ballots and an utter absence of transparency made the rise of an unknown quantity like Bergoglio possible. Had the race instead been for an obscure House seat in Kentucky, the opposition research team would have reduced his campaign to rubble within a couple of weeks. 
 
 By all accounts, the papal conclave that elevated Bergoglio assumed it was electing a fairly anodyne compromise candidate. Cardinals liked the idea of a pope from Latin America, one of the Church's leading growth markets. They also responded well to a stirring three-minute speech Bergoglio gave during the conclave, in which he said the Church, in order to survive, must stop "living within herself, of herself, for herself." 
 
 But he gave no other indication that he'd be any kind of change agent. In the days after his election, most newspapers described him as a safe, conservative choice. Bergoglio himself had already picked out a retirement spot back home in Argentina, where he fully expected to return after participating in the conclave as a voter. "When he first found out he was elected," says Piqué, "he didn't know if it was a dream or a nightmare. I'm sure he's feeling like he's in a cage." 
 
 There would be many reasonable ways to respond to this new reality. Stoical Christian resignation. A cry of "Why me, Lord?" One could also be invigorated by the challenge, and maybe even decide to cause some trouble. 
 
 Alongside many noble men of God, there have been plenty of truly terrible popes, as John Julius Norwich's history of the papacy, Absolute Monarchs, which often reads like a freaky hybrid of House of Cards and Game of Thrones, makes clear. There was Stephen VI, who exhumed the eight-month-old corpse of his predecessor, Formosus, and subjected the body, dressed in papal vestments and propped up on a throne, to a mock trial. (The corpse was found guilty and thrown into the Tiber.) Writing of the Church under Clement VI, elected in 1342, Petrarch described prostitutes "swarm[ing] on the papal beds," adding, "I will not speak of adultery, seduction, rape, incest; these are only the prelude to their orgies." Norwich quotes the writer Gerard Noel on Pope Innocent VIII, who "grew grossly fat and increasingly inert, being able, toward the end of his life, to take for nourishment no more than a few drops of milk from the breast of a young woman." The loathsome, anti-Semitic Paul IV "took a special delight in the Inquisition" and managed to halve the Jewish population of Rome in five years. Pius XI described Mussolini as "a man sent by Providence." 
 
 The Catholic church's secret sex-crime files 
 
 Benedict XVI would certainly not merit inclusion in this rogues' gallery, but it's hard to imagine a worse choice to meet the particular challenges facing the Catholic Church over the past decade than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Prior to being named pope in 2005, Ratzinger had served the role as chief doctrinal enforcer for his predecessor, the beloved, but also quite reactionary John Paul II. In his fight against the liberalizing efforts of the Second Vatican Council, JPII, as he's known around the Vatican, cracked down on progressive Catholic groups like the Jesuits, while welcoming controversial hypertraditionalists Opus Dei into the Church's mainstream. Lay "numerary" members of the latter group take vows of celibacy and practice corporal mortification: whipping themselves or wearing a cilice, a spiked metal chain bound to the thigh as a penance and a reminder of Jesus' suffering. 
 
 A 1986 letter issued by Ratzinger, "On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons" (also known as Homosexualitatis Problema), described homosexuality as an "intrinsic moral evil." Leading proponents of liberation theology, an explosive, Marxist-tinged Catholic movement that swept through Latin America in the Seventies and Eighties, were marginalized by Ratzinger's office and seen as heretics. At the same time, his team responded to the endless pedophilia revelations that wracked the Church in recent decades with "denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction," to quote an exhaustive 2010 New York Times investigation. 
 
 After he became Pope Benedict in 2005, Ratzinger couldn't seem to catch a break, and he certainly lacked the ability to apply his widely acknowledged brilliance as an academic to snuffing out fires in the real world. In 2009, a massive money-laundering scandal was uncovered at the Vatican bank, which controls about $8.2 billion in assets. Then came the betrayal known as VatiLeaks, in which Benedict's own trusted butler stole reams of secret documents revealing embarrassing inner workings of the Holy See. The Italian press thrilled to the juiciest particulars, including allegations of a gay smear campaign, missing cash, attempted tax evasion (abetted by the Berlusconi administration), runaway spending (e.g., a $350,000 crèche) and suspicious gifts (e.g., the $100,000 worth of truffles offered to the pope by an Italian businessman). 
 
 Reportedly, the tipping point for Benedict came after a trio of cardinals charged with investigating VatiLeaks submitted their report, revealing a network of gay Vatican employees and outsiders making threats of exposure. "He just didn't have the personality or the strength to deal with everything that was happening," one Vatican insider tells me. Shortly after Benedict shocked the world last February by announcing he'd be the first pope to resign in more than 700 years, one final indignity followed him out the door: the disclosure in La Repubblica that Italy's largest gay bathhouse happened to be a tenant of a building owned by the Vatican. 
 
 One town's war on gay teens 
 
 Through it all, though, as church attendance in the United States and Europe continued to plummet, one group remained loyal to its pope: ultraconservative American Catholics. In particular, politicians. The religious right's pact with the GOP had initially been brokered by evangelicals like Pat Robertson, historically never huge fans of their spiritual brethren in Rome. (As recently as 2011, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod attempted to clarify accusations of anti-Catholic bigotry by explaining that his group "primarily views the office of the papacy as the Antichrist, not the individual popes themselves.") But the lines have blurred. Right-wing Catholics like Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush populate GOP presidential fields past and future, and Rick Santorum as well as Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas have been linked to Opus Dei. 
 
 Open dissent, of course, is a rare thing in an organization as hierarchical as the Catholic Church. But I figured if any group would express a distinct lack of enthusiasm about their new Jesuit pope, it would be Opus Dei, and so one afternoon, I met up with Father John Paul Wauck, an American Opus Dei priest who has been living in Rome for nearly 20 years, where he teaches literature at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. Before taking his vows, he worked as a political speechwriter for William Barr, the attorney general under George H.W. Bush, and Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, whom Wauck describes as "the last of the big pro-life Democrats." A trim, cheery 50-year-old who grew up in the same Chicago suburb as Hillary Clinton, Wauck displays a Midwestern eagerness to please as he leads me on a tour of Holy Cross. Up on the roof, which provides a panoramic view of Rome, he points out a villa where Galileo was imprisoned by the Church during his Inquisition for promoting the dangerous idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. Downstairs, we duck into an 18th-century chapel where, Wauck says, Mozart played as a boy. Wauck directs my eye to a painting of Aloysius Gonzaga, the great Jesuit saint. At Gonzaga's feet, a fat cherub holds a tiny spiked whip. "Corporal mortification used to be universal!" Wauck says. "Until fairly recently, pretty much all religious orders did it. Mother Teresa's nuns still do. It's not something unique to Opus Dei. We just didn't abandon it." 
 
 Wauck, who does not seem all that conservative for a member of Opus Dei – at one point, he asks excitedly if I've read Eminent Hipsters, the new memoir by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan – nonetheless downplays the pope's call for a truce in the culture wars. "I certainly have no problem at all with anything the pope says," he tells me. "I do think there has been a bit of selective reading. People are emphasizing certain things and forgetting other things that he also said." For instance, Wauck points out that the pope often speaks about the devil, "much more than I ever remember Benedict doing." Likewise, he notes that Francis' comments about the church's obsession with gay marriage and abortion did not propose any real doctrinal changes. "The pope never said those issues weren't important," Wauck says. "He said that when we talk about these things, we have to talk about them in a context. And who would disagree with that? So when people are trying to figure out what kind of guy is this, you have to hear all the bells, not just the ones that sound like, 'Oh, he's going to change everything.'" 
 
 This is a common retort among conservative Catholics about Pope Francis: You guys in the secular liberal media just aren't listening. Santorum has insisted the pope's comments on gays and abortion were taken out of context. New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, a conservative who had made a number of papal long lists in March, also wasted no time in translating Francis' message, telling CBS This Morning, "Pope Francis would be the first to say, 'My job isn't to change church teaching. My job is to present it as clearly as possible. . . . While certain acts may be wrong . . . we will always love and respect the person and treat the person with dignity.'" 
 
 While much of this sounds like wishful thinking, they also have a point: The pope's tonal changes don't necessarily signal a wild swing from tradition. Francis has ruled out the ordination of women, for example, and he still considers abortion an evil. But those obsessed with contextualizing Francis would do well to take a look at the impromptu press conference he granted last summer to gathered Vaticanisti (members of the Vatican press corps) during the flight back from a trip to Rio. Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, told me he'd expected the press conference would go about 20 minutes. It lasted for nearly 90, and ended up including the pope's famous "Who am I to judge?" response, which is normally the only part of the exchange that's quoted. But reading the full transcript or, better yet, watching longer excerpts on YouTube helps to convey the true context. 
 
 A reporter asks Francis, who is standing at the head of the aisle, about the existence of a "gay lobby" within the Vatican. Francis begins by making a joke, saying he hasn't yet run into anyone with a special gay identification card. But then his face becomes serious and, gesturing for emphasis, he says it's important to distinguish between lobbies, which are bad – "A lobby of the greedy, a lobby of politicians, a lobby of Masons, so many lobbies!" he says later in the press conference – and individual gay people who are well-intentioned and seeking God. It's while speaking to the latter point that he makes the "Who am I to judge?" remark, and this part of the video is really worth watching, because, aside from the entirely mind-blowing fact of a supposedly infallible pope asking this question at all, his answer is never really translated properly. What he actually says is, "Mah, who am I to judge?" In Italian, mah is an interjection with no exact English parallel, sort of the verbal equivalent of an emphatic shrug. My dad's use of mah most often precedes his resignedly pouring another splash of grappa into his coffee. The closest translation I can come up with is "Look, who the hell knows?" If you watch the video, Francis even pinches his fingers together for extra Italian emphasis. Then he flashes a knowing smirk. 
 
 Father Thomas J. Reese, a senior analyst at the left-leaning National Catholic Reporter, says the arguments about style versus substance when it comes to Pope Francis are missing the point entirely. "In the Catholic Church, style is substance," Reese says. "We are a church of symbols. That's what we call the sacrament: symbols that give us grace. These things really matter. So Francis is already changing the church in real ways through his words and symbolic gestures. He could sit in his office, go through canon law and start changing rules and regulations. But that's not what people want him to do." 
 
 Reese, who is 68, used to be editor in chief of America, the Jesuit magazine that published a long interview with Pope Francis in the fall. Reese was forced to resign in 2005 after the Vatican – specifically, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, just before he became Pope Benedict – repeatedly complained about articles challenging church orthodoxy on issues like stem cell research, gay marriage and ecumenicalism. "I was Ratzinger's last victim," Reese jokes. The election of Francis took him completely by surprise. He hadn't expected to see another pope who created such hope for the church. 
 
 "The problem with the last two popes is they were academics at heart," Reese says. "Both had taught at universities where students write down everything you say, go home, memorize it and give it back on an exam. The European educational system is even worse that way than the U.S. The word 'magisterial' comes from magister, 'the teacher,' and that was their attitude." 
 
 For Reese, this pedagogical obsession, which he traces back to "Martin Luther, a brilliant theologian, leading everyone astray as far as the Church is concerned," gets to the heart of what's driving conservatives crazy about the loose-speaking ways of the new pope. "You've heard the phrase about generals fighting the last war?" Reese asks. "Well, the Church has been doing that for centuries. We're still fighting the Reformation!" 
 
 Thus far, Francis' humble lifestyle decisions as pope – riding around town in a Ford Focus instead of a chauffeured Mercedes limo, for example – have been terrific and all, but the hosannas directed his way can feel a bit like he's being graded on a curve. Yes, obviously you shouldn't live in an insane palace if you're the head of a religion based on principles of charity and compassion and founded by a homeless proto-hippie. But Francis threw down a real marker in November, with the release of his first apostolic exhortation, or official written teaching. Apostolic exhortations under John Paul II and Benedict tended toward the dogmatic (JPII's Familiaris Consortio restated orthodox Church teaching on birth control and the traditional family) or the wonky (Benedict's Sacramentum Caritatis spent 32,000 words on the Eucharist). In this context, the blistering attacks on income inequality in Francis' Evangelii Gaudium ("The Joy of the Gospel") resonate like a bomb. 
 
 He describes a "culture of prosperity" that "deadens us" to the misery of the poor: "All those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us." Debt, corruption, tax evasion, mass layoffs ("attempting to increase profits by reducing the workforce and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded") and environmental degradation all come under attack. Some people, Francis wrote, "continue to defend trickle-down theories," a belief that "has never been confirmed by the facts" and one that "expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power. . . . Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting." 
 
 It's one thing to question God's will when it comes to sexual morality, but for American conservatives, taking on the sacred economic doctrines of Ronald Reagan is a mortal sin. Sarah Palin told CNN some of the pope's statements have "taken me aback" and sounded "kind of liberal." (She later apologized for even such a mild rebuke.) Rush Limbaugh was less circumspect, calling the pope's message "pure Marxism." Ken Langone, the billionaire Home Depot co-founder and would-be Republican kingmaker, told Cardinal Dolan that a multimillion-dollar restoration of St. Patrick's Cathedral might run into funding difficulties if wealthy Catholics keep getting their feelings hurt by "exclusionary" papal remarks. 
 
 And yet, in a stroke of what one might be tempted to call divine justice, the GOP, having played the God card so shamelessly for so many years, finds itself largely powerless to rebut the most prominent critic of income inequality on the planet. Paul Ryan, the architect of a budget proposal so regressive he drew the ire of a group of nuns, explained away Francis' analysis by saying the pope never experienced "real capitalism" in Argentina. (Shantytowns are bad and all, but come on: Has His Holiness been apprised of the employer mandates in Obamacare?) Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, seems to see the writing on the wall, telling The New York Times, "I think the pope may, in fact, be starting a conversation at the exact moment the Republican Party itself needs to have that conversation." 
 
 The reaction on the other side of the spectrum has been less complicated. "Pope Francis is a gift from heaven, a prophetic voice willing to be a critic of capitalism and imperialism," says Cornel West, long a leading voice on the Christian left. "I don't want to fetishize the pope. He heads a deeply patriarchal and homophobic organization that I'm critical of. But I love who he is, in terms of what he says, and the impact of his words on progressive forces around the world." 
 
 Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires, but his parents were Italian; his father fled Italy when Mussolini came to power. The family settled in Flores, a leafy, solidly middle-class neighborhood. There were many Italian relatives around, including a great-uncle whom Bergoglio described in a 2010 book of interviews as a "rascally old man" who "taught us to sing some rather risqué ditties in Genoese dialect. That explains why the only things I can say in Genoese do not bear repeating." 
 
 Buenos Aires was a cosmopolitan city, where vestiges of Spanish colonialism blended with an aspirational embrace of European culture. (There's an old joke about Argentines being Spanish-speaking Italians who think they're British.) 
 
 Bergoglio studied chemistry at a technical school, worked in a laboratory, moonlighted as a bouncer at a Buenos Aires bar, loved soccer and dancing the tango. Then, at 17, while meeting some friends, he walked past a church and had an epiphany. In an interview with a Buenos Aires radio station, Bergoglio described feeling "like somebody grabbed me from inside and took me to the confessional. . . . While I was there I felt that I had to become a priest, and I didn't doubt it." 
 
 Bergoglio didn't tell anyone about this incident for the next four years, while he continued to work and go to school, but in 1958, at age 21, he entered a Jesuit seminary. His mother was unhappy with his decision, and for years refused to visit him. "My mother experienced it as a plundering," Bergoglio recalled. "'I don't know, I don't see you as . . . you should wait a bit. . . . You're the eldest. . . . Keep working. . . . Finish university,' she said. The truth is, my mother was extremely upset." Bergoglio later said he was drawn to the Jesuits because of their emphasis on obedience and discipline, and also because he hoped to work as a missionary in Japan, where the Jesuits had been the first to introduce Christianity in the 1540s, though health problems – he'd lost part of a lung after a bout with pneumonia – prevented him from such travel. Instead, he taught literature at a Jesuit school, bringing in the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges for a lecture and, eventually, at the age of 36, found himself appointed provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina, which meant he oversaw the activities of the religious order throughout the country. "That was crazy," the pope acknowledged in his interview in America. "I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself." According to Paul Vallely's biography Pope Francis, Untying the Knots, Bergoglio was a divisive figure, seen by some Argentine Jesuits, ironically enough, as a conservative throwback clinging to pre-Vatican II tradition. Bergoglio used the word "authoritarianism" to describe his leadership style back then, admitting, "I did not always do the necessary consultation. . . . My style of government as a Jesuit at the beginning had many faults." 
 
 Bergoglio's term as provincial superior coincided with one of the most traumatic eras in his country's history, the so-called Dirty War that tore Argentina apart in the wake of a 1976 military coup. For the next seven years, the country was ruled by a right-wing dictatorship; death squads terrorized the nation as tens of thousands of civilians were "disappeared." The junta was outwardly Catholic, and many church leaders openly collaborated. One of the few Argentine bishops to speak out against the government was murdered in a faked car accident. 
 
 If there is anything close to a stain on Bergoglio's record, it's his behavior during this period. As a provincial superior, he had far less power or stature than a bishop, and public denunciations of the junta would have likely gotten him killed. Defenders argue that he worked effectively behind the scenes, risking his own life by disguising hundreds of targeted civilians as seminarians and sneaking them out of the country. But critics believe he was complicit in the arrest and torture of a pair of activist Jesuits with whom he'd been feuding. Bergoglio has strongly denied the charge, insisting that he immediately "set the ball rolling" to orchestrate their release, but one of the priests, Orlando Yorio, wrote a book claiming Bergoglio had been the one who tipped off the junta. Yorio died in 2000. The other priest, Francisco Jalics, refutes Yorio's account; in October, he met with the pope in Rome, and they had previously celebrated Mass together. Elisabetta Piqué, who has spent much of her career as a journalist covering wars, believes Jalics, dismissing the controversy as "totally fake, as we know now. Bergoglio has a clear conscience. He's at peace with himself. He did whatever he could." 
 
 At the same time, liberation theology was spreading throughout Latin America. Its Marxist focus on the class struggle and open calls for revolution – some priests actually took up arms and joined groups like the Sandinistas – petrified Catholic traditionalists. John Paul II's Vatican denounced liberation theology as heresy and all but smothered it (clandestinely abetted, in many countries, by the CIA). In Vallely's telling, Bergoglio was also hostile to the movement during the Dirty War, even though the spirit of liberation theology has clearly influenced his own papacy, most markedly in the language of Evangelii Gaudium. He may have been responding to pressure from Rome in obedient Jesuit fashion; he also clearly worried that overtly radical activity by any of his priests could make the entire order a target of the junta. Whatever his true feelings back then, as pope, Francis has made his sympathies clear: Last September, he invited the Peruvian founder of the movement, Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, to visit him at the Vatican. 
 
 Bergoglio's self-described "authoritarian" reign ended in banishment. After his stint as provincial, his new Jesuit superiors received so many complaints about his difficult personality that he was eventually assigned to a new post in Córdoba, 400 miles away. There, Vallely writes, he "brooded," feeling "sidelined and belittled." The colleagues he'd alienated could barely recognize him when he returned to the capital in 1992. The chastening had forced Bergoglio to mature, mellow, open his mind. Six years later, in 1998, he became archbishop of Buenos Aires. Foreshadowing his behavior as pope, he rejected many of the princely trappings of his new office, getting around town via bus, residing in a simple apartment and cooking his own meals on weekends. An interviewer once asked if he was a good cook, to which Bergoglio responded, "Well, no one ever died." He would ask friends to tape CDs for him, because all he had was a cassette player. 
 
 Much of his attention was focused on the dispossessed: He wandered the city's worst neighborhoods, kissed the feet of AIDS patients in a hospice, heard confessions from prostitutes on park benches, disguised himself in a poncho to march in a slum procession, stood up to drug dealers who threatened one of his priests. Piqué's husband, Gerry O'Connell, also a journalist, who covers the Vatican for La Stampa, recalls visiting the archbishop's palatial residence shortly after Bergoglio took office. The "grand meeting room," where previous archbishops had received visitors, was now stuffed with boxes of clothes and food for the poor. "It was amazing – he'd turned it into a storeroom!" O'Connell says. 
 
 Bergoglio's ascension to the top of the Argentine church coincided with a national crisis that would leave indelible marks on his thinking: The year he took office, Argentina's economy plunged into a brutal recession, a situation that worsened when the International Monetary Fund pressured the government to undertake harsh austerity measures. More than half of the population fell into poverty, bringing a level of misery unfathomable in the United States. Riots broke out; paco, a cracklike drug made from cheap cocaine residue and additives like sulfuric acid, rat poison and kerosene, swept the shantytowns. Things began to turn around in 2003, when the country decided to default on its debts to the IMF, which, to the anti-globalization left, had come to be seen as a thuggish loan shark undermining the sovereignty of the developing world. It was a move that surely did not go unnoticed by Bergoglio, who, in Evangelii Gaudium, lashes out at "ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace . . . reject[ing] the right of states . . . to exercise any form of control" and calls the deification of the free market "a new tyranny . . . which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules." 
 
 A slapping-around by the forces of global capitalism tends to focus the mind, even one preoccupied with the mystical. You can see how "obsessing" over gay marriage and birth control might begin to feel like a first-world problem. Though still outwardly orthodox, Bergoglio joked to a friend about church leaders who "want to stick the whole world inside a condom." He also made enemies of Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her late husband (and predecessor), Néstor Kirchner, embarrassing them with denunciations of feeble poverty initiatives and unbridled corruption. One of the U.S. diplomatic cables released in the WikiLeaks dump described Bergoglio as a "leader of the opposition"; when news broke that Bergoglio had been elected pope, Kirchner allies in Congress passed on a tribute in favor of testimonials devoted to the late Hugo Chávez. 
 
 Piqué says Bergoglio became a convenient foil for the Kirchners, who "didn't have any real opposition, so it was useful for them to have an enemy to talk about." In Piqué's reading, Cristina Kirchner cannily employed a popular same-sex-marriage initiative as a wedge issue. Bergoglio, behind the scenes, pushed a compromise involving civil unions, but failed to win over conservative bishops. A private letter he wrote describing gay marriage as "the total rejection of the law of God" leaked, bruising his image, though Vallely argues he wrote the letter as a strategic means of currying favor with the conservatives. Marcelo Márquez, a gay-rights leader in Buenos Aires, delivered Bergoglio an angry note – and received a call an hour later. "He listened to my views with a great deal of respect," Márquez told The New York Times. They met on two occasions. Márquez told the future pope about his marriage plans, and departed with a gift: a copy of Bergoglio's biography. 
 
 Last February 27th, Bergoglio flew to Rome (insisting on coach, though the Vatican had sent a first-class ticket) and checked into a spartan hotel (60 euros per night, including breakfast) catering to priests. It seems unlikely that the job of pope was something Bergoglio sought or had even mentally prepared for. He later remarked, in a leaked private speech, that he'd come to Rome "only with the necessary clothes. . . . I did not have any chance! In the London betting houses I was in 44th place. Look at that. The one who bet on me won a lot, of course!" 
 
 Going into the conclave, there were three acknowledged front-runners, says Father Reese, who covered the event for the National Catholic Reporter. Bergoglio was not among them. Nearly every Vatican watcher assumed that even though he'd been runner-up to Ratzinger in the 2005 conclave, he'd aged out of any serious consideration. "If they had been united around one candidate, it would have been all over," Reese says. "The problem was, it looked like each group hated the other two groups." Because of the infighting, in Reese's estimation, none of the three front-runners would throw their votes to their rivals, so they wound up backing the dark horse. 
 
 When Bergoglio emerged as winner, the world media largely shrugged. A white guy of European origin in his late seventies: What a radical choice! The Washington Post claimed "Francis's humble ethos is matched with an unerring conservatism closer in substance to Benedict." A Slate column headlined WHY POPE FRANCIS MAY BE A CATHOLIC NIGHTMARE argued that the new papacy might be "one more in the pile of recent Catholic . . . mediocrities" and speculated that "an older pope who does not know which curial offices and officers need the ax will be even easier to ignore than Benedict." 
 
 Even within the Vatican, no one knew quite what to expect. "Ironically, I thought he'd be a disaster, PR-wise, because he doesn't do interviews," says Greg Burke, a media-savvy, former Fox News reporter (and lay member of Opus Dei) hired by Benedict to assist in the Holy See's public-relations efforts in the wake of VatiLeaks. But the media's normally infallible cynicism melted in the presence of such pontifical delightfulness. He canceled his own newspaper subscription, cold-called people who'd sent him letters ("Ciao, Michele, it's Pope Francis," he told one stunned Italian) and said nice things about atheists. A plotline that would've sounded preposterous six months earlier swept the secular media – that of "Cool Pope Francis," to borrow a headline from Gawker. (Gawker!) But this charm belied Bergoglio's dexterity – and, if the situation demands, ruthlessness – as an operator. Piqué calls him "a political animal," and indeed, over the past 10 months, Bergoglio has shown himself to be a stealth enforcer, capable of summoning that old authoritarian steel if it serves a higher purpose. 
 
 Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former archbishop of St. Louis, discovered this Francis the hard way. Burke had long been a darling of far-right Catholic circles. In a 2009 interview with The National Review, columnist Kathryn Jean Lopez asked the cardinal if he thought "Catholic voters collaborated with evil when they voted for Obama." Responded Burke, "Since President Obama clearly announced, during the election campaign, his anti-life and anti-family agenda, a Catholic who knew his agenda . . . could not have voted for him with a clear conscience." 
 
 Burke later became the only clergyman of any serious stature willing to publicly criticize Pope Francis, telling a Catholic television network, "One gets the impression, or it's interpreted this way in the media, that he thinks we're talking too much about abortion, too much about the integrity of marriage as between one man and one woman. But we can never talk enough about that." A week later, Francis essentially sacked Burke, removing him from his post on the influential Vatican Congregation of Bishops, a job that had afforded him kingmaker's status when it came to selecting new bishops in the United States. (Popes choose bishops the way presidents choose federal judges. Under the past two popes, with the help of advisers like Burke, the leadership of the 195 Catholic dioceses in the United States has become increasingly conservative; this will likely change under Francis.) 
 
 In July, Francis forbade the traditionalist Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate from saying the Latin Mass and launched an investigation of their finances. Some saw this move as a direct jab at Benedict, who had loosened restrictions on such ultratraditionalists. Francis' disdain for ultratraditionalists dates back to Buenos Aires, where the leaders of one of the groups supported by Benedict had praised the military junta and another member turned out to be a Holocaust denier. A pair of Italian journalists with links to the order attacked the pope's decision as "a slap in the face" and suggested that "the new pontificate seems to love the cameras and being in the spotlight." By the end of the year, Francis had shuttered the friars' seminary and suspended the order's ability to ordain new priests. His chief investigator described the founder of the order, who'd been banished to a religious home, as running a cult of personality. 
 
 Francis has also begun shifting the makeup of the College of Cardinals, where Italians have traditionally been overrepresented. His first round of appointments included cardinals from Haiti, Nicaragua and the Ivory Coast; of his 16 voting appointees, nine were from Asia, Latin America and Africa. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state under Benedict, portrayed as a scheming power player in the VatiLeaks documents, had backed conservative cardinals like Guido Pozzo (in charge of reaching out to ultratraditionalists) and Mauro Piacenza (who oversaw the clergy and was known as a firm supporter of priestly celibacy, which many believe might change under Francis). Both have since been demoted by the pope. Piacenza's curial version of Siberia is something called the Apostolic Penitentiary, not an actual jail but an obscure Vatican office where Piacenza will spend his days adjudicating extremely rare and esoteric sins (e.g., the desecration of Communion wafers). Francis replaced Bertone with Archbishop Pietro Parolin, who has said in an interview that priestly celibacy is not Church dogma – meaning, it can be changed. 
 
 Even simple gestures, like Francis' rejection of the papal palace, went beyond mere symbolism. "The main reason he didn't want to live there mostly had to do with autonomy," says a Vatican clergyman who has worked closely with multiple popes. "In the palace, they can control what gets to you." Now, while Francis' days in some ways follow an expected papal itinerary – early rising and prayer, morning Mass, visits with dignitaries and heads of state, the occasional off-site trip to a hospital or a church – the space he's carved out for himself has allowed for an unprecedented degree of independence. While past popes maintained detailed public schedules, Francis handwrites his own agenda in a private datebook. "This is unheard of," a senior Vaticanisti who wishes to remain anonymous tells me. "Aides who'd ordinarily know what's going on have to piece things together by talking to other people." Confirms Father Lombardi, the Vatican press secretary, with the hint of a sigh, "Before, I was in contact with the Curia and could ask them what the daily agenda is. Now, we have to discover what the agenda is. He is very free in organizing it." 
 
 By most accounts, Francis is constantly on the telephone (landline; he's never owned a mobile phone or a computer), consulting with trusted friends and colleagues. " John Paul II and Benedict both had an inner circle, so this is very disconcerting to people on the inside," the Vaticanisti says. "Does Francis have a war room? No, probably not. But who is he talking to back there? No one really knows." 
 
 Even power that's technically absolute has its limits, though, at least in a place as byzantine and disposed to palace intrigue as the Vatican. Lifers in the Curia, essentially medieval courtiers, adapt, confident they'll likely outlast any individual head of state. "If you don't go after the culture of the place, it'll be, 'OK, we're doing humility and simplicity now? Fine,' and nothing else will change," says the Vatican clergyman. He believes for any reform efforts to stand a chance, Francis must first "separate the Vatican from the Italians," who dominate the top levels of cardinals and comprise the bulk of the nearly 3,000 laypeople in charge of the everyday operations of the place. "If you want to end a culture of secrecy and impenetrable bureaucracy," says the clergyman, "you certainly don't want Italians running things!" 
 
 This won't be easy. Italian stereotypes aside, bureaucrats of any stripe have the power to slow change with "foot-dragging, dead letters, in all kinds of small ways," says the Vaticanisti. "You can shuffle around the upper layers of the bureaucracy all you want, but those lower levels are much harder to switch. No one gets fired here. Never, ever. This pope isn't going to come in like Jack Welch and start cutting. They didn't fire the butler!" (It's true: He was eventually pardoned and now works in a Vatican children's hospital.) 
 
 The Vatican clergyman adds, "The Curia bureaucracy are waiting to see what happens. I've heard whispers of 'OK, when are we getting back to business?' So far, it's not happening. The insecurity is good. I've never fully understood this place, but now they don't, either." Adds John Thavis, author of The Vatican Diaries, "I've covered the Vatican for 30 years, and the reaction from the old guard to this pope is the least enthusiastic I've ever seen. They no longer control the game." Other employees have been even less circumspect. "Some of the higher-up cardinals think he's reckless, that he doesn't know what he's doing," says the Vaticanisti. 
 
 In the months ahead, Francis will continue to meet with the eight cardinals he has appointed to a special task force to reform the Curia. He's also set up a commission to advise him on how to best deal with the problem of pedophilia within the church, ranging from preventative measures to the counseling of victims. Outside consultants have been hired to examine the workings of the Vatican bank, where Francis has already forced out several officials. And when the bishops gather in the fall for their next synod, or general assembly, which will focus on the theme of family, they'll have to reckon with the results of a new questionnaire that's been distributed to Catholic parishes by the pope, soliciting opinions about same-sex marriage, premarital sex, divorce and contraception. For an organization as rigidly hierarchical as the Catholic Church, such a nod to democracy is profound, and potentially earthshaking. 
 
 Back in the United States, Father Reese says Francis' stratospheric popularity brings its own momentum, that even bishops or priests who fall on the more conservative end of the spectrum have been enjoying the filled pews at their churches, the random compliments from parishioners and even strangers on the street. "The people Francis is going to have the most trouble with are the ideologues," Reese says. "They're basically like the Tea Party. They've made up their minds. They don't get it. And unless they go through some major conversion, they ain't gonna get it." 
 
 On my last Sunday in Rome, I return to the Vatican for the pope's weekly Angelus, a short prayer delivered from a window in the Apostolic Palace. Outside St. Peter's Square, hawkers are selling everything from Sistine Chapel tours to airbrushed paintings of Tupac, Bob Marley and the pope. I ask one of the vendors, a tall Belizean with a shaved head, if the increased crowds under Francis have been good for business. He scowls and shakes his head, then answers in perfect, New York-inflected English, "Naw, this guy, all he does is talk about the poor, and so he's bringing in these poorer tourists from places like Argentina. They ain't got no money, these people! When Ratzinger was pope, Germans would pull up on a bus. They're organized, they spend! Now, everyone wants a discount." 
 
 Today, the square is mostly packed with families, their children clutching little bambinelli figurines of the baby Jesus. The pope will be offering a special Christmas blessing of the Nativity figures. Three nuns in habits manage to squeeze to the front with impunity, like cute girls at a rock concert. 
 
 Finally, the pope emerges, waving from the distant window, a tiny figure the size of a single almond. "Fratelli e sorelle, buongiorno," he says, blessing us and our baby Jesuses, his voice echoing from hidden speakers and seeming slightly God-like. Toward the end of his prayer, it begins to rain – at first just a light drizzle, but then the sky really opens up. When the pope finishes, he goes off script and tells us how much it displeases him that he can't be down in the piazza with us in the horrible weather. He seems to really mean it. 
 
 Is he lonely up there? Vallely's book describes a man who, when not out among the people, leads a solitary monklike existence in which "he looks after his interior life and doesn't really have a social one." Those are the words of one of his closest aides in Buenos Aires, who adds, "If you define friendship as having fun with people, then he has no friends. Friendship is a symmetrical relationship. His relationships are not like that. People believe they are his friends, but he never goes to dinner at their homes." 
 
 Down in the rainy square, the crowd cheers for its new friend, Cool Pope Francis, until he retreats back into the mysteries of the walled city he now rules. I'm reminded of another moment from the press conference on the plane, when a reporter attempted to pin Francis down on gay marriage and abortion. And what is His Holiness' own position on these matters? The pope's artful dodge struck me as brilliantly Clintonian. "That of the Church," Francis said simply. "I'm a son of the Church." 
 
 He didn't add, because he didn't have to, that he's the father now, too. 
 
 This story is from the February 13th, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone.
– 2013 has been a pretty unbelievable year for Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis, dominated Facebook, and now finds himself Time's Person of the Year. Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs explains how he ended up on the cover after just nine months on the job: because of how he has positioned himself ("at the very center of the central conversations of our time," from wealth to the role of women to justice), for his reach in our flattening world ("far beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church"), and for what he has accomplished in such a short time. "Something remarkable: he has not changed the words, but he's changed the music." Gibbs acknowledges the skeptics' likely response—that Francis faces many obstacles "in accomplishing much of anything beyond making casual believers feel better about the softer tone coming out of Rome while feeling free to ignore the harder substance." But the fascination that swirls around him gives him an ability Benedict XVI lacked: "to magnify the message of the church and its power to do great good." Writes Gibbs, "The heart is a strong muscle; he's proposing a rigorous exercise plan. And in a very short time, a vast, global, ecumenical audience has shown a hunger to follow him. For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets, for committing the world's largest faith to confronting its deepest needs, and for balancing judgment with mercy, Pope Francis is Time's 2013 Person of the Year" (cover story here). Also, the runners-up: Edward Snowden, Edith Windsor, Bashar al-Assad, and Ted Cruz. See past winners here.