Pope Francis never returned to his Argentine Christmas after becoming head of the Catholic Church. But some faithful here believe that he sent a final message home in the most unlikely but perhaps the most appropriate.
Francisco was a football fan and a portion member of his favorite club, San Lorenzo. And it’s the number of that card that has become a subject in Buenos Aires.
“It has to be the destination,” said Ramiro Rodríguez, who arrived wearing a rosary about the team’s shirt in a small chapel that is the club’s spiritual cradle, for a mass in honor of Francisco’s life.
The number that is causing the remake is attributed to the “regular member” Jorge Mario Bergoglio, name of the Pope’s birth: 88235.
And as several people have stressed, Francisco was 88 years old when he died at 2:35 am, Argentina’s time, on Easter Monday.
For Rodríguez, it was another supernatural, even divine connection.
“I went to the Vatican in 2019 and, of course, I used my shirt from St. Lourenço,” said Rodríguez, 23. “I didn’t see him, but he knew he was there with all his energy, healing the world, and that’s very significant to me.”
In the preface that the late Pope contributed to a next book by Cardinal Angelo Scola, he left an eloquent message about aging and death.
“Death is not the end of everything, but the beginning of something,” he wrote.
Talking to those who knew him well, it seems likely that he would also have appreciated the affection and good nature of the desire to see a meaning in the number of member of his soccer club.
Omar Abboud knew how insightful his friend was (which he still knew as Jorge) and how much he liked a joke, but never at anyone’s expense.
“He has a different kind of humor,” Abboud said about the Pope, “a kind of joke that was with the people, not about the people. He has intelligent and insightful humor.”
Abboud, an important Muslim leader in Argentina, formed the Institute of Interreligious Dialogue with then Cardinal Bergoglio and Rabbi Daniel Goldman in 2002. They visited communities from each other and regularly held public meetings and interchange to break barriers among religious groups.
Abboud said he last visited the Pope in January, when the two talked about artificial intelligence and how it could be regulated. He said he learned a lot from his friend Jorge and his discussions about literature and sacred texts. And it’s just starting to talk about him in the past.
“He was a good friend, we need him. Seriously, words are not enough,” he said, with his voice disappearing.
Francis is in the minds of everyone we know – from his friends to people who admired him from afar, and those he gave.
Flowers and messages are left in honor of his childhood, a square where he used to play soccer with other children, and the church where he heard God’s call to join the priesthood.
This church, the Basilica of St. Joseph of Flores, has a print marking the date on which Francis received his vocation while in the confessional – September 21, 1953.
So many candles have been burned in honor of Francis that the steps of the Metropolitan Cathedral are covered with wax.
Seven days of official mourning were declared in honor of Francisco in Argentina, but not all will be full of sadness.
The Mass held at the San Lorenzo chapel ended more as an incentive demonstration and there will be another crowd for the next football team match on Saturday, a few hours after Francis was buried in Rome.
The team will wear commemorative shirts to honor the late Pontiff, and there is rumors that a new stadium will be named “Papa Francisco”. In a sign of humility, Francis once wrote that she didn’t like this idea very much.
A Swiss guard used to keep Francisco updated on the results of the matches and the progress of San Lorenzo leaving notes on his table; The Pope said he did not watch television – except at seismic events like 11 September – since 1990.
Francisco said his love for the sport was not just for the competition – and San Lorenzo is just one of several teams of Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, passionate about football, whose players are the current champions of the World Cup – but for participation.
He believed that sports, especially team games, pushes young people away from canvases and virtual lives, teaching them to live in the world.
The club may have lost the regular member 88235, but Buenos Aires will remember him.
A homemade flag on the cathedral linked Francisco and St. Lourenço with a simple phrase that seems to apply to today’s Buenos Aires: “Mis loves”, my two loves.
Francis returned this love, writing in his book “Hope”: “My homeland, by which I still feel the same great and deep love. The people I pray every day, who formed me, who trained me and then offered me to others.
In Flores, the worker neighborhood where Francis lived and worked, a woman left a note outside the house where he spent his childhood.
He said, “You were one of us – an Argentine – and a gift to the world.”
