US secret services allegedly eavesdropped on cardinals before the conclave in March to elect a new pope, Italian weekly magazine Panorama has claimed.

The Pope’s Jews

IN TERMS of symbolism, Jorge Mario Bergoglio hasn’t put a foot wrong since becoming the first Jesuit and the first South American to be elected Pope and taking the name Francis.

POPE Francis surprised crowds of Catholic faithful who waited through the night for his inaugural Mass with a telephone call from the Vatican to the cathedral in Buenos Aires where he used to be archbishop.

After only a few days, the new pope is already impressing people with his unregal approach, writes Tom Heneghan

There were no little old ladies dashing about with fresh cuts of altar flowers.

Catherine Shanahan reports on how the ‘man of the people’ is viewed in Rome by Irish members of religious orders

The election of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy is great news.

The Vatican has lashed out at what it called a “defamatory” and “anti-clerical left-wing” campaign to discredit Pope Francis over his actions during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military junta.

On CNN’s Connect the World programme on Mar 11, the day before the conclave opened, host Becky Anderson asked me a question about geographic blocs in the college of cardinals.

An Irish priest who lived through a South American dictatorship has defended Pope Francis against claims he failed to stand up to abuses by the military regime in his native Argentina.

The sharp knives of politics have prepared the new pope well, say Joshua Goodman and Juan Pablo Spinetto.

President Michael D Higgins has conveyed his sincere best wishes to the new head of the Catholic Church.

Pope Francis is the first ever from the Americas, an austere Jesuit intellectual who modernised Argentina’s conservative Catholic church.

Brian Murphy and Michael Warren profile the man formally known as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio

Latin Americans reacted with joy, bursting into tears and cheers yesterday at news that an Argentinian cardinal has become the first pope from the hemisphere.

Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio was tonight elected pope – the first ever from the Americas and the first from outside Europe in more than a millennium.

Pope Benedict XVI faced a strong challenge for the papacy from an Argentine cardinal, a secret diary kept by a member of the conclave that elected him to the Holy See revealed today.