Jorge Mario Bergoglio's election as Pope Francis made history: the first non-European pope, the first Jesuit, and the first to take the name of Francis of Assisi. This film, broadcast a year into his papacy, traces the parallels between the medieval friar who renounced wealth to live among the poor and the Argentine cardinal who chose a modest apartment over the archbishop's residence in Buenos Aires. Interviews and archival footage follow Bergoglio's years as a priest and bishop in Argentina, where he rode public buses and worked in the slums, through to his emergence at the Vatican as a pope who washes prisoners' feet and speaks plainly about mercy and inequality. The documentary sets his reputation for austerity and dialogue against the pageantry of the institution he now leads, asking how far one man can push a two-thousand-year-old church toward the example of its patron saint of the poor. Church historians and Vatican observers provide context throughout.