When Jorge Mario Bergoglio began his journey as Pope Francis just over 12 years ago, he carried the hopes of many of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics that he would bring modernity and redress the ongoing scandal of sexual abuse that had plagued his predecessors and stained his church across the globe.

He was Argentinian, the first pope to be born or raised outside of Europe in 12 centuries. But he was more than an outsider. He was a Jesuit.

Jesuits are quite feared, if not loathed, by many other Catholic clergy because of their independence from the corporate church. Their leader, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, is called the “Black Pope”, and over the centuries the order’s priests have carried out the toughest missionary assignments or have been sent in to clean up the mess.

Yet there were hints of the old........

© The Sydney Morning Herald