His Holiness Pope Francis

Pope Francis is the 266th and current Pope of the Catholic Church, elected on 13 March 2013. As such, he is Bishop of Rome, the head of the worldwide Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State.

Born in Buenos Aires of Italian descent, Bergoglio worked briefly as a chemical technician before entering seminary; he was ordained in 1969. From 1973 to 1979 he was Argentina's Provincial superior of the Society of Jesus, became Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, and was created cardinal in 2001. Following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, on 13 March 2013 the papal conclave elected Bergoglio, who chose the papal name Francis in honour of Saint Francis of Assisi. Bergoglio is the first Jesuit pope; the first pope from the Americas, and the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere.

Throughout his life, both as an individual and a religious leader, he has been known for his humility, his concern for the poor, and his commitment to dialogue as a way to build bridges between people of all backgrounds, beliefs, and faiths. Since his election to the papacy, he has displayed a simpler and less formal approach to the office, including a decision to reside in the Vatican guesthouse rather than the papal residence used by his predecessors since 1903.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Flores, a district of Buenos Aires. He was the eldest of five children of Mario José Bergoglio, an Italian immigrant railway worker born in Portacomaro (Province of Asti) in Italy's Piedmont region, and his wife Regina María Sívori, a housewife born in Buenos Aires to a family of northern Italian (Piedmontese-Genoese) origin. Bergoglio's sister María Elena told reporters decades later that her father often said that "the advent of fascism was the reason that really pushed him to leave" Italy. She is the pope's only living sibling.

Bergoglio has been a supporter of the San Lorenzo de Almagro football club since his childhood. Bergoglio is also a fan of the films of Tita Merello and of neorealism and of tango dancing, with an "intense fondness" for the traditional music of Argentina and Uruguay known as the milonga.

As a sixth-grade pupil, Bergoglio attended Wilfrid Barón de los Santos Ángeles, a Don Bosco Salesian school in Ramos Mejía in Greater Buenos Aires.

He attended the technical secondary school Escuela Nacional de Educación Técnica N° 27 Hipólito Yrigoyen and graduated with a chemical technician's diploma. He worked for a few years in that capacity in the foods section at Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory. In the only known health crisis of his youth, at the age of 21 he suffered from life-threatening pneumonia and cysts and had part of a lung removed shortly afterwards.