BBC News with Marion Marshall

Cardinals gathered in the Vatican have elected a new pope. St Peter’s Square erupted into cheers and applause as white smoke issued from a floodlit chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel to signal a decision had been made. A short while later the identity of the new pope was announced as the Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The 76-year-old has become the first-ever pope from the Americas in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, taking the papal name of Francis I. Dressed in his white robes and wearing large round spectacles, Pope Francis emerged on the balcony overlooking St Peter’s Square to roars of joy from the tens of thousands of people gathered in the square below.

"Good evening. You know that the duty of the conclave was to provide Rome with a bishop. It looks as if my brothers, the cardinals, went to fetch him at the end of the world.”

Our Vatican correspondent, David Willey, was in St Peter’s Square when the new pope appeared.

He’ll be the first pope to call himself Francis, which of course is homage to the famous saint of the same name. Cardinal Bergoglio from Argentina, who is a Jesuit, first Jesuit pope, and he is famous in his home country for the simplicity of his life. He’s an intellectual clearly, but I think what attracted people to him was the fact that he spent a lot of time among impoverished people and he also is well-known at home for his efforts in trying to repair the reputation of his church, which lost a lot of people after failing to challenge the dictatorship in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. So a very imaginative choice, I think-- of course the first non-European pope in modern history.