Sergio Sanchez stood behind Pope Francis at his Vatican inauguration ceremony, wide-eyed amid all the pomp, glitter and VIPs of a slice of history. That was Tuesday, but on Friday he was back at his job in Buenos Aires, hunting for anything useful in the city's garbage. Sanchez is a leader in one of Argentina's lowliest professions -- head of a 3,000-member garbage scavenger cooperative in the capital. But he was friends with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, before Bergoglio became leader of the world's Catholics.

Pope Francis was "not complicit" with Argentina's brutal military dictatorship and pursued a "silent diplomacy" , Nobel peace laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel said on Thursday, following criticism the pontiff had failed to speak out. "He was not complicit with the dictatorship, he did not collaborate," the Argentine Perez Esquivel said after meeting with Latin America's first pope. The pope, Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio at the time, was head of the powerful Jesuit order in Argentina during the 1976-1983 regime.

A Jesuit priest kidnapped and tortured during Argentina's military dictatorship said he and a fellow abductee priest were not denounced to the rightwing junta by Pope Francis. After the new pope came under intense scrutiny for allegedly playing a role in the arrest of Francisco Jalics and the late Orlando Yorio, Germany-based Jalics issued a statement Wednesday saying: "These are now the facts. "Orlando Yorio and I were not reported by Father Bergoglio," Jalics said, referring to Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis and formerly the head of the Jesuit order in Argentina.

Pope Francis, when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Bergoglio, condemned "careerism" in the Roman Catholic Church in a book of interviews, according to extracts published on Thursday from an Italian translation due out this month. "When the pope was a terrestrial and spiritual king, the intrigues of the court got mixed up with everything else. But are they not still getting mixed up?" he was quoted as saying in 2010 in the extracts published by Italian newsweekly Panorama.