Bergoglio's enemies, both inside and outside the Society of Jesus, have never forgiven his principled stand. They accuse him of siding with the military regime that ruled Argentina in the 1970s, and specifically of abandoning two Jesuits who were imprisoned and tortured. Bergoglio always denied these allegations, insisting that he worked behind the scenes on their behalf, even securing an audience with the dictator, General Videla; both priests were in fact released. No hard evidence against Bergoglio has been produced, and the Argentine branch of Amnesty International told the respected American journalist John Allen that the claims against him of collaboration with the junta were all lies. Even so, it is a safe bet that attempts to smear his pastoral record will now be revived, especially if he continues to criticise the authoritarian regime of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, as he has done. However eager she may be to capitalise on the euphoria that surrounds the Argentine Pope, Francis will be at pains to distance himself from Ms Kirchner's demagogy, while she is quite capable of blackening the name of a man she once called an "inquisitor".

While robustly denying these "slanders", Pope Francis does not pretend that he was a hero of resistance during the murkiest period of his country's history. In keeping with his emphasis on humility, Bergoglio and his fellow bishops apologised for the Church's failure to do more to resist the junta during the "dirty war" of 1976-83. Predictably, that apology has not silenced accusations of complicity, which recall similar charges against Pius XII and even Benedict XVI, who was a reluctant member of the Hitler Youth. In The Times, Ben Macintyre implied that Bergoglio ought to have risked martyrdom, like Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, the last survivor of the plot against Hitler. But martyrdom is a course of action easier to preach than to practise.

Pope Francis will not, then, conform to the BBC's image of the Latin American priest. However, he will be a radical in other ways. He will doubtless pick up the reform of his own order where John Paul left off, giving the Jesuits a fresh raison d'être as the vanguard of the New Evangelisation launched by the Polish Pope and driven forward by the German one. Mission and reform go hand in hand, especially where the Vatican itself is concerned. A new broom that will sweep out the Augean Stables of the papal administration is not so much a choice as a necessity. The secret dossier on corruption in the Curia, which Italian press reports suggest includes evidence of homosexual networks, will give Pope Francis some sleepless nights. Doubts have been expressed about whether a septuagenarian with one lung is strong enough to take on the Vatican; but a man accustomed to dictatorships, death squads and drug cartels is unlikely to be intimidated by a mitred mafia that, by Latin American (or even Italian) standards, is tame: more Father Brown than Dan Brown.

The expectation is that Pope Francis will take the legacy of his patron, St Francis of Assisi, seriously, but there is no consensus about what that might mean. The founder of the mendicant orders did not become the most popular saint of the Middle Ages without speaking truth to power. As a young aristocrat, he followed the Gospel literally, gave away all his wealth and won over the mightiest pope of them all, Innocent III, to his cause. St Francis not only spoke to birds and animals, praised creation in his Canticle of the Sun, and composed the great prayer that bears his name, but addressed his evangelism equally to kings, emperors and sultans as well as the poorest of the poor. This is what we may expect from Pope Francis, too, as he divests the papacy of its last vestiges of worldly power in favour of a spiritual authority that only grows with time. Benedict retired to be a pilgrim, and Francis will pick up that theme as he demands that the Church travel lightly in its pilgrimage on earth.