At ten o’clock on Saturday morning, already closed where the body of the Argentine Jorge María Bergoglio, Bishop of Rome and the last Pope of the Catholic Church, the simple wood and zinc coffin was transferred to the exterior of the Basilica of San Pedro to begin the funeral. There, tens of thousands of faithful were waiting for him. But, above all, Giovanni Battista Re, the dean of the cardinals, with 91 years and a marble health, to gloss his life in a simple and concise homily.
Francisco written that he did not want to filigraine or tinsel. And the story of his life, of the same raw material and as he would probably have liked, was direct and simple in his mission to gloss the works and the pontificate of the deceased. A story that began, precisely, by the end of his days, when last Sunday, despite being already in conditions of obvious difficulty and fragility, “of the serious health problems” that did not go unnoticed by anyone, he decided to go down to the square to give blessings to the faithful. “Despite its final fragility and suffering, Pope Francis chose to travel this delivery path until the last day of his earthly life,” Cardinal Re began, without saving energy.
On March 13, 2013, arrived from the end of the world, as he proclaimed to refer to the anomaly that an Argentine was to occupy Pedro’s chair, Bergoglio was chosen in a conclave that lasted just five votes. “The decision to name Francisco immediately seemed a programmatic and style choice with which he wanted The last of the Earth, the marginalized, ”Real recalled, whose voice crossed the radical silence imposed by the occasion throughout the center of Rome.
The dean’s words were obvious about Francisco’s life. But pronounced now, by the most veteran of the sloping, they acquire a somewhat different meaning. Especially in the light of the divisions that their personality and opening caused in a group of cardinals where an ultraconservative concentration emerged that proposed to knock him down during his pontificate and that today attended in obedient discretion to his march, perhaps asking God that the next pontiff again hinders the doors of a church in which, suddenly, suddenly, socially, socially and sudden A current of air that the next conclave will determine whether it was just a morning breeze, or the beginning of a revolution in a church that decided that everything should change so that everything continued the same.
And re, in front of tens of thousands of faithful, glossing trips and adventures, with a voice already fatigued, continued with his homily in front of the coffin. “He was a Pope in the midst of the people, with his heart open towards everyone. Attentive to the new that arose in society and what the Holy Spirit raised in the Church. With the vocabulary that was characteristic and his language rich in images and metaphors, he always sought to illuminate with the wisdom of the gospel the problems of our time. […] He had great spontaneity and an informal way to go to everyone, even to the people far from the Church, ”he recalled, perhaps thinking about that background melody that always accompanied Bergoglio, that of being the first Pope who liked atheists more than Catholics.
The tens of thousands of people who continued listening in silence in the square, however, invited to deny that idea. Or at least to weigh it. Also to imagine the weight that this massive influx may have in the decision that the cardinals will take within a few days about the need to find a relay that continues the reforms that Francisco promoted – and that he has continued glossating in his homily – or that cancels them backing down. “Full of human warmth and deeply sensitive to current dramas, Pope Francis really shared the concerns, sufferings and hopes of our globalization time. […]. Innumerable are their gestures and exhortations in favor of refugees and displaced. His insistence on acting in favor of the poor was also constant. It is significant that Pope Francis’s first trip went to Lampedusa, island symbol of the emigration drama with thousands of people drowned in the sea, ”he said remembering the beginning of Bergoglio’s obsession for placing immigrants as the main victims of our time, of that fierce and exclusive capitalism that always denounced winning the contempt and insult of the most conservative sectors.
The Pope, and that also has a certain merit in the times of fear and fear that certain governments inflict, also managed to piss political leaders determined to raise walls. Along the same lines, Real remembered, it was also the trip to Lesbos, “as well as the celebration of a mass at the border between Mexico and the United States.” Raising walls is not a Christian, he told Trump in the first mandate of the current president of the United States. The now president listened to the words of Re, nothing agreed, like half of the Catholic Church of his country, with Francisco’s postulates.
The interreligious dialogue, the approach to the Muslim world to sew wounds and contribute to display the wave of attacks that ravaged the world. Also their efforts for ecology, baffled much of the Church. “Faced with the outbreak of so many wars in these years, with inhuman and innumerable horrors dead and destruction, Pope Francis incessantly raised his voice imploring peace and inviting the sense, to honest negotiation to find possible solutions.” Francisco – very skilled to move in the street than in the rooms of power – did not achieve great results in this aspect; And he plunged the legendary Vatican diplomacy in a sterile and sometimes counterproductive period, as in the cases of the war in Ukraine or the Vatican’s negotiation with China.
This is the last time that Francisco will step on the Plaza de San Pedro. The funeral courtship will take him out of the walls of Vatican. But every Sunday, the Pope appeared here to the balcony of his study and pronounced the usual prayer of the Angelus. He did it in a flat language, he remembered unusually of concrete cases of people who needed help and, above all, in that way of normalizing the church, he wanted people to have a good meal that day and asked not to forget to pray for him. “Dear Pope Francis, now we ask you to pray for us and that from heaven you bless the church, bless Rome, bless the entire world, as you did last Sunday from the balcony of this basilica,” he ended.
