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Argentines long waited for Pope Francis to visit the homeland he left in 2013 to become the head of the Roman Catholic Church. With his death today at the age of 88 after a long illness, those hopes for his return end unrealized.
The Vatican announced that Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, who shook up the Catholic Church, had died after he battled a bout of double pneumonia that had hospitalized him for weeks before he was discharged on March 23.
Pope Francis made more than 45 international trips during his papacy, including the first by any pope to Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Myanmar, North Macedonia, Bahrain and Mongolia.
But the one-time Archbishop of Buenos Aires never returned to Argentina, where he divided opinion but gained the moniker of the “slum pope” for his focus on the poor and spending time in the capital’s tough urban neighbourhoods, or ‘villas’.
“One of the great curiosities of his papacy was the fact that, unlike his predecessors, Francis never visited his native country,” Jimmy Burns, author of the 2015 biography “Francis, Pope of Good Promise”, told Reuters weeks before his death.
Burns said he believed Pope Francis did not want to be seen siding either with the left-leaning Peronists or the conservatives in the country’s polarized political environment.
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– Reuters
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