Father Tony Banks first met Bob Prevost in 1981, when they were skiving off a dull history lecture in Chicago to play tennis. A few days ago, Banks, who is the most senior Australian in Rome from the new pope’s Augustinian order, messaged his friend to wish him well in the conclave.

“I wrote to Bob and said, ‘Look, I think you’d make a wonderful pope, but I really hope for yourself you don’t get elected.’ And he wrote back and said, ‘Well, there’s no chance, because I’m an American’.”