American Robert Prevost was announced on Thursday as the new pope after intense deliberations in the Sistine Chapel. White smoke emerged Thursday from a specially installed ceremonial chimney to announce that the Catholic Church had chosen its next leader. Bells rang out in St Peter’s Square and thousands of pilgrims, tourists and curious Romans looked on as the fabled white smoke streamed into the sky, indicating that the 133 sequestered cardinals had voted by a two-thirds majority for a new clergyman to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

Cardinal Robert Prevost, an American missionary who spent his career ministering in Peru and leads the Vatican’s powerful office of bishops, was elected the first American pope in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church. Prevost, 69, took the name Leo XIV.

Cardinal Robert Prevost has become the first North American pope, breaking a long-held taboo in a move likely to please Donald Trump. Insiders have long thought that the US, as the world’s only superpower, had more than enough geopolitical clout without taking over the papacy as well. A Vatican insider said: “He was not one of the obvious candidates, but he knows everybody, he spent 30 years as a missionary, he has languages. “His time in Peru means he is one of the least ‘American’ of the American cardinals. But he understands America and he can speak to the country, which is important in the Trump era.”