When you walk in the back entrance to Vatican City, you quickly realize what a small world the center of the Catholic Church is. The hundred-and-nine-acre complex, built largely during the Renaissance, is the spiritual and administrative headquarters of a global institution with 1.2 billion followers. The first building you see is the Santa Marta guesthouse, where Pope Francis lives and works, in a three-room space of some seven hundred square feet, rather than in the traditional, and grander, papal apartments, in the Apostolic Palace.

As you turn a corner, there is a yellow building that houses several cardinals. On one floor is Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was Secretary of State under Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. Cardinal Paolo Sardi, considered to be one of Bertone’s political adversaries within the Curia, occupies the floor just below. A short stroll through the Vatican gardens takes you to the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, where Benedict XVI now lives. When he resigned, in 2013, he flew off in a helicopter to begin a life of retreat and prayer, and many might have thought that he had retired to a monastery somewhere in his native Germany. But he is right here. Just outside the Vatican walls, in Piazza della Città Leonina, there is another apartment building filled with cardinals. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Benedict’s successor as the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, lives in the apartment occupied by Benedict when he was merely Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and above him is Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri.

The neighbors have been feuding: Müller is a defender of doctrinal orthodoxy, while the reform-minded Baldisseri has presided over the Synod on the Family, a council meeting initiated by Francis last year, at which Church progressives have advocated greater flexibility on such matters as the treatment of divorced couples and homosexuals. There has been an ongoing dispute—now, apparently, resolved—over the noise level in the building: Baldisseri, an accomplished pianist, likes to practice after lunch, when Müller takes a nap.

In this compacted world, close friendships, intense rivalries, clashing ambitions, and personal enmities all flourish. Perhaps because members of the Church rarely criticize the Pope publicly, personal differences often take the form of backbiting, corridor gossip, and behind-the-scenes intrigue. It is in this peculiar setting that Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, finds himself attempting to “shake up” the Catholic Church, as he likes to say. Unlike most of his predecessors, he had spent little time in Rome before his election, on March 13, 2013.

The first Jesuit Pope in history, Bergoglio spent virtually his entire career in Latin America. At thirty-six, he became head of the Jesuit order in Argentina. During the Dirty War carried out by the country’s right-wing junta, he was accused of handing over to the military two priests, but the evidence is ambiguous, and he has argued that he worked to free the priests and other victims of the regime. (Some political dissidents have testified that Bergoglio helped hide them during the persecutions.) After he was named Archbishop of Buenos Aires, in 1998, Bergoglio began to dedicate himself to the poor, travelling by bus through Buenos Aires and spending time in the city’s shantytowns.

When Cardinal Bergoglio came to Rome in 2013, for the gathering that would choose Benedict’s successor, he addressed a group of cardinals before the conclave got under way. He briskly criticized the Rome-centered Church’s “self-referential” tendency toward “theological narcissism” when it should be reaching out to the periphery of the world, and to the most marginal members of society. Just before Christmas last year, Francis surprised an audience of cardinals and monsignors by denouncing the various “diseases” of the Curia—its “pathology of power,” its “rivalry and vainglory,” its “gossiping, grumbling, and backbiting,” its “idolizing of superiors,” its “careerism and opportunism.” Although he has introduced some new people into the Vatican government to carry out his vision for the Church, for the most part he must work with the singular community that he inherited.

I got a glimpse of how difficult that might be when I attended a gathering of high-level Vatican officials in Rome earlier this year and overheard a cardinal talking about how L’Espresso, an Italian news magazine, would soon be publishing a damaging exposé of the free-spending ways of Cardinal George Pell, the Australian whom Francis brought in to clean up the Vatican’s finances. The article was based on leaked documents, and the cardinal was clearly pleased with its imminent publication. “When Francis came in, the attitude was that everything that the Italians did was bad and corrupt—now it is a little more complicated,” he said. He felt that it was important to settle accounts with those he viewed as “pseudo-reformers.”

Toward late afternoon, the Swiss Guards who stand sentinel at the Vatican clear out any straggling visitors in the gardens for the moment when the Pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, takes his daily stroll. Benedict uses a walker to move around but by all accounts is in good mental health. Now that he can no longer be blamed for everything that goes wrong in the Catholic world, his papacy is undergoing something of a reassessment.

Benedict does not give press interviews; most news about his life is filtered through his personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gänswein, a German theologian who began working with him in 1996 and became his secretary in 2003. Gänswein also lives at the Mater Ecclesiae. He is frequently referred to as Gorgeous George, or as the George Clooney of the Vatican. A dashing man of fifty-nine, he has graying blond hair, chiselled features, and penetrating blue eyes. He has been an avid tennis player and skier. Dressed in an elegant black cassock, he received me in a frescoed room in the Apostolic Palace. Shortly before Benedict resigned, he elevated Gänswein to the rank of archbishop and made him Prefect of the Papal Household, a position that he has retained under Francis.

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Some of Francis’s first moves—his decision not to live in the Apostolic Palace, and not to wear some of the regal papal vestments—were viewed in certain quarters as subtle rebukes of Benedict, a scrupulous observer of papal traditions and dress. In a slightly irritated tone, Monsignor Gänswein explained to the German newspaper Die Zeit that Pope Benedict did not live in the Apostolic Palace out of egotism, and that he had very modest, sober habits. Gänswein seemed to bristle at the wave of Francis-mania that swept the world after his election. The Pope, he said, cannot be “everybody’s darling,” and the media infatuation with him would fade. He told me that the Pope was like a finger pointing to the moon, the moon being God. “Sometimes this gets turned upside down, and all people see is the finger—they don’t see the moon,” he said. “Not that this is what the Pope wants—the Pope is not a pop star—and not that Francis is trying to draw attention to himself, but the mass media have their own dynamic.”

Benedict’s relations with the media were less charmed. At first, many reporters explored his life during the Second World War and his reputation for theological rigidity and conservatism. He never quite shook the reputation that he acquired as John Paul II’s enforcer of doctrinal orthodoxy, a reputation that had earned him the nicknames the Pope’s Rottweiler and the Panzer Cardinal (after the tank used by the Wehrmacht). Some who worked with him closely describe a man of great courtesy and personal tenderness, shy and reserved but kind, of high moral rectitude and exceptional intelligence.