POPE Francis has named a Spanish Franciscan as No. 2 at the church's office for religious orders, his first appointment to a Vatican bureaucracy badly needing a shakeup.
Jose Rodriguez, who has also been elevated to archbishop, replaces US Archbishop Joseph Tobin.
Tobin has been transferred from the high-ranking Vatican post to a midwestern US archdiocese following his efforts to mediate tensions between the Vatican and American nuns, who in the view of theological conservatives had become too secular and political.
Rodriquez, 60, is an outsider to the Vatican administration and comes from the world of religious orders, like Francis who is a Jesuit.
Rodriguez is well-thought of among the orders, and last year was elected president of an international association that gathers the heads of the male orders.
He has been twice elected head of the Franciscans' Friars Minor order, one of the main branches of the Franciscan order founded by St Francis of Assisi, the pope's namesake.
American nuns have seen the election of a Jesuit pope devoted to the poor as a glimmer of home following a Vatican crackdown under Francis' predecessor, Benedict XVI.
The nuns were accused of focusing too much on social justice - one of Francis' priorities - at the expense of other church issues, like abortion.
Rodriguez' predecessor, Tobin, is now archbishop of Indianapolis, which has fewer than 230,000 parishioners.
POPE Francis has named a Spanish Franciscan as No. 2 at the church's office for religious orders, his first appointment to a Vatican bureaucracy badly needing a shakeup.