The crisis that helped change Pope Francis

His autocratic style as leader of the Jesuits in Argentina was a chastening experience that shaped Pope Francis’ life and led to his transformation as champion of the poor, Paul Valley reports.

HE WAS not what she was expecting, in several ways. The man who would one day be Pope Francis had come to hold a service far from the grandeur of the great cathedral of Buenos Aires.

He had travelled — taking the subway train and then the bus — to arrive in one of the shanty-towns, which Argentines call villas miserias — misery villages. He had picked his way down crooked and chaotic alleyways, criss-crossed with water pipes and dangling electricity cables, along which open sewers ran as malodorous streams when the rain came. There, amid ramshackle houses of crudely-cemented terracotta breezeblock, he fell into conversation with the middle-aged mother.