The stunned silence in the second or two after the announcement from the central balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica spoke volumes. No one was expecting the cardinal-archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, to be named the immediate successor of Pope Benedict XVI and the 265th successor of Saint Peter. Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio, the first Jesuit to be elected pope and the first pope from the Americas, had been mentioned on various lists of papabile but universally dismissed as too old. Never mind that he is two years younger than Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was in 2005, and, by all accounts, in better health than Ratzinger was in then (let alone than Benedict is in now). The conventional wisdom was that the Catholic Church “needed” a younger, stronger, more...