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First Jesuit. First Latin American. And a new pope who chose as his first act a simple request: please pray for me. The recent resignation of Pope Benedict XVI took the world by surprise and for good reason. More than 600 years had passed since a pope last left his post. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, is a man of prayer, a man of action, and a humble man who has always promoted others over himself. In fact, it was Bergoglio who bowed out of the running in the papal election of 2005 to facilitate the rise of Benedict XVI. However, the new pope faces a Catholic Church in crisis—a church that has lost the media pull of John Paul II and is still hounded by pedophile scandals and the filtration of documents from former papal administrations.
