“For a nine-year-old boy in lower-middle-class Buenos Aires in 1946, there were three towering influences: the Catholic church, Argentina’s new president, Juan Domingo Perón, and football. Jorge Mario Bergoglio absorbed them all. He used to go with his father, an immigrant Italian railway worker, to watch the San Lorenzo team. In that magical year of ’46, San Lorenzo became Argentine champions. Bergoglio – now Pope Francis – likes to say that a crucial San Lorenzo goal that season ‘just about deserved a Nobel Prize’.” FT – Simon Kuper