Pope Francis §

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires on 17 December 1936 to Italian immigrants from Piedmont; entered the Society of Jesus in 1958, ordained priest in 1969, served as Provincial of the Argentine Jesuits during the 1976–83 dictatorship and was made Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and Cardinal in 2001. Elected the 266th Bishop of Rome on 13 March 2013, the first Jesuit and first non-European pope of the modern era. On 12 April 2015, the centenary year of the genocide, he opened a Mass at St Peter's Basilica with a homily that explicitly described the events of 1915 as "the first genocide of the twentieth century", quoting John Paul II's 2001 declaration; Turkey withdrew its ambassador to the Holy See in protest. Repeated the formulation during his June 2016 apostolic visit to Armenia, where he prayed at the Tsitsernakaberd memorial. Died in Rome on 21 April 2025; his Armenia interventions were the most explicit papal recognitions of the genocide on record.