The 78-year-old who lives behind a gas station in Vatican City previously worked as a nightclub bouncer. He'll suffer the white robes of his office, but he won't abide the red shoes his predecessor wore. He wants to save souls, but also save the Earth. During his first week on the job, he jokingly blessed a dog. He doesn't really like it when they kiss the ring. He has his own flash mob. He's on Twitter.

But as Americans brace for the coming of Pope Francis, here's a basic fact about the man often dubbed the coolest-ever leader of the Roman Catholic Church: He's also plenty old school.

He rises like clockwork at 4:30 a.m. and spends hours praying before Mass. Although he famously declared "who am I to judge" when asked about gay priests, he calls the Western rise of LBGT equality "a new sin against God." He says the Devil is as real as God, and he endorses exorcisms. In an age when fewer and fewer believe in miracles, he is a saint-making machine. He hasn't watched television in 25 years.

This is the riddle of Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope and a man who has brought a dose of magical realism to the job of being pontiff. And as he prepares to stage his first official visit to the United States 2 1/2 years into his revolutionary papacy, perhaps only one thing about the Argentine-born Francis is crystal clear: He is upending convention in one of the world's oldest institutions.

Francis never saw the need to come to the United States before, but now that he's pope, he's embracing reality: The American Catholic church is one of the wealthiest, most vibrant and influential segments of Catholicism, even if it makes up only 8 percent of the global Catholic population. For a pope who has made clear that his focus is on those without power — migrants, the elderly, addicts, prisoners — visiting this superpower could be one of the most important stops of his papacy.

"The impact of the U.S. on the world is never absent from the Holy See's view of the world — whether they think about it in positive or negative terms," said the Rev. Bryan Hehir, who teaches about religion and global politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and is a top adviser to Francis confidant Cardinal Sean O'Malley. "And this pope is pretty critical of the international global economy."

(Tribune wire reports) (Tribune wire reports)

To tackle the topics he has prioritized — immigration, poverty and the environment — Francis has to sway and involve Americans, Hehir said. He's coming to tell the U.S. church, "You better attend to these issues."

But will they listen? His climate-change encyclical, which challenged unbridled growth, aroused bitter responses among conservative American Catholics, who are also deeply unhappy with other signals Francis has been sending. Meanwhile, more liberal Catholics want to know whether he will follow his empathetic rhetoric on issues such as divorce and homosexuality with concrete change.

"My guess is he won't be too specific," Hehir said. "As others have said, he hasn't changed the words, he's changed the music. But that's no small thing."

For a guy who barely left his country at the tip of South America and seemed initially terrified at the prospect of being elected pope, Francis has turned out to be a natural global leader. But he has also been a surprise to the cardinals who thought they were putting a cautious moderate on Saint Peter's throne.

To the chagrin of conservatives, he has evolved into a sort of pontifical version of Reagan-appointed Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whose judicial decisions have upended his supporters' expectations. After two popes who concentrated on doctrine and traditional families, Francis is clearly in a different mold.

The cardinals "thought he was going to be more conservative than he has been, but that was partly because he did not speak English, and many bishops outside of Latin America did not know him so well as they thought," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter. "In Buenos Aires, he had sat in the homes of poor people and heard their stories and did not see the marketplace or globalization as helping these people."

But his economic pronouncements are not what rankles many traditional Catholics. Their concern is the absence of an emphasis on core teachings of the church — against abortion and for the traditional family.

Almost every other day since his election in March 2013, it seems, the pope makes news with his off-the-cuff comments and actions. He was the first pope to kiss the feet of female prisoners — a gender tweak to an ancient pre-Easter ritual that riled traditionalists. Earlier this year, responding to a reporter's question about overpopulation and the church's ban on artificial birth control, he said Catholics should not feel compelled to breed "like rabbits." In an interview with Jesuit journalists, he said the church "sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules," which many took to mean the focus on strict doctrine.

The Rev. Robert Sirico, a prominent conservative who founded the free-market-promoting Acton Institute, said "the pot is boiling over" among conservatives, who are uncharacteristically speaking out — at least to one another — against Francis. They are concerned that his style of discussion is leading many to think everything is on the table.

Catholic audiences have besieged Sirico with questions about the climate-change encyclical and whether they are obliged to embrace it even if they disagree. He tells them the pope's authority extends to giving moral guidance, not resolving scientific disputes such as whether human beings are responsible for global warming.

That said, conservatives are also worried about Francis' comments suggesting he is open to resigning, as his predecessor did in 2013, blowing the minds of church historians who hadn't seen a pope step down in centuries. Like talking off the cuff, stepping down humanizes the papacy a bit too much, they feel. "The pope is supposed to be the Holy Father," Sirico said. "Fathers don't resign. They stay."

"He is, more than any other pope, a pope of gestures. And I'm not sure he intends to be a pope of gestures," said Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.