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Pope Francis has spent his first day at the helm of the Catholic Church meeting people in Rome ahead of a Sistine Chapel Mass with cardinals.


After private prayers at the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, he crossed the road to a local school to meet children and commuters heading to work.
The Pope later went to the priests' residence in Piazza Navona to pick up his belongings and pay his bill.
He will also start the process of appointing senior staff at the Vatican.
As the first Latin American - and the first Jesuit - pope, Francis has received a flood of goodwill messages from around the world.

Analysis

Pope Francis will deal with the problems of his Church first of all prayerfully rather than as a CEO coming in with a new broom.
But the fact that the new Pope will meet the media before anyone else at a special audience on Saturday morning shows a vivid awareness that prayer may not be enough to deal with the situation facing the Catholic Church at this critical moment in its long history.
Francis is a Jesuit, a member of perhaps the most powerful and experienced religious order of the Catholic Church. The Jesuits are expert communicators and it is significant that one of the first people summoned to meet the new Pope this morning was Father Federico Lombardi, head of Vatican Radio (run for many years by the Jesuits) and the Vatican Press Office.
Under Pope Benedict, Father Lombardi was a mere functionary who had no direct access to the Pope. He could not pick up the phone and talk things through quickly - he just received orders from the Vatican Secretariat of State. That has now changed overnight.
But the 76-year-old Argentine, formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, also faces a series of tough challenges.
The Church has been dogged by infighting and scandals over clerical sex abuse and alleged corruption.
The BBC's David Willey, in Rome, says that Pope Francis becomes head of the Church at a critical moment in its history.

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