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When the conclave of Cardinals met in Rome this month to elect Pope Benedict XVI’s successor, few predicted that Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina would emerge victorious. However, the fact that a Latin American Cardinal would rise to the throne of St. Peter took almost no one by surprise. Latin America is home to nearly half of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, but there had never been a Latin American pope. Further, the Vatican had been anxious about the dramatic decline of Catholicism across the region in the last decade. Mexican journalist Diego Cevallos, a seasoned observer of religious life in Latin America, had aptly captured the sentiment in 2004 when he noted that, although the Vatican had once seen the area as a “continent of hope,” it now thought of...