12 things you should know about Pope Francis

In January of this year a biography of Pope Francis was published. Although it focuses mainly on the events of your life, Hope: Autobiography It also includes moral and spiritual reflections.

Some have pointed out that much of the information is already well known. However, for those who are not so familiar with Pope Francis, the book offers interesting perspectives, not only for what he says but for what he does not say.

Below are some key conclusions:

1. butcher, chemist, chocolate analyst

The white apron and the sharp knife of a safe hand butcher, in a street market of Buenos Aires in the 40s, fascinated the young Jorge, to the point of thinking that he would like to become one.

“It was a show to see it cut the meat into pieces, with fast and precise cuts, and also seemed to be a good money,” writes the Pope.

When he was a teenager he thought of being a doctor and later thought he would like to be chemical.

During high school, he studied Food Sciences at a State Chemistry Institute.

“I remember that we once had to analyze the rancidity of chocolate, and between one test and another, I confess that I ate a lot,” he writes.

2. Papal pugilist

In the Institute of Chemistry, two boys stood out for being uncompetent and suffered a lot of harassment, even by the young Jorge, who fought with one of them. Pope Francis is not proud of that.

“In the fight I threw him to the ground, and he hit his head when he fell and even lost his meaning; And I also did it in a cowardly way, which was not worthy of me, ”writes the Pope, without giving more details. He says his father took him to the child’s house, where he apologized.

Years later, being archbishop of Buenos Aires, he reunited the boy, who at that point had already become an evangelical minister with five children “and looked like a man of great goodness.”

3. It wasn’t a good athlete

Pope Francis is at least the second Pope who often played as a football goalkeeper in his youth.

But unlike San Juan Pablo II, whose companions described him as a good athlete, Pope Francis was not.

“I always liked to play football and it doesn’t matter if it wasn’t very good,” writes Pope Francis.

There is a term in Argentina for people like him: patadura“What means having two left feet,” he writes.

4. Close meeting with confession

On September 21, 1953, when Jorge was 16, he was making a message for his mother when he felt a strange impulse to enter a church through which he passed.

Once inside, he saw a priest who had never seen before, “although this was the church he was regularly for Sunday Mass.” “I suddenly felt the need to confess,” he writes.

He went to confess with the priest, who treated him “with loving goodness.” Then the Pontiff writes: “The fact is that it was no longer the same and I went out with the knowledge that I was going to be a priest.”

5. His mother was against his priestly vocation

Pope Francis describes his mother’s family as a practicing Catholic, but not especially jealous. His mother, for example, was baptized almost a year and a half after his birth.

In December 1955, when Jorge was about 18, his mother made a disturbing discovery in his bedroom: “Theology textbooks; Above all, some in Latin. ”

“Didn’t you say you wanted to be a doctor? His mother asked.

“Yes, he replied,” but for souls. “

That did not reassure her.

She did not accompany him the day she moved to a diocesan seminar, did not attend her formal admission ceremony and never visited him there.

Only later, when she entered a Jesuit seminar, she accompanied him – along with her father, who had accepted her son’s vocation – although “he maintained a certain reservation in the first days.”

6. Persistent regrets

In 2009, then Cardinal Bergoglio called the father of a policeman to apologize for an incident that occurred 59 years before, when they were students. After the boy borrowed the Bergoglio bicycle and damaged it, Bergoglio insisted that he pay the repairs. When looking back, he felt that he had been “unfair” and “little generous.”

The Pope also says that he emotionally wounded an old priest, a dear friend of the family, twice in the fall of 1961.

He frustrated the elder priest’s desire to take a picture of the five Bergoglio brothers with his father, while Mr. Bergoglio agonized in the hospital. A few weeks later, when he visited the same priest, now dying in a hospital, he arrived while he slept, then he left the room without waking him and later said falsely that he had already left the hospital.

“I don’t know what happened to me, if it was shyness, ineptitude or penalty, sorrow for my father’s death, in addition to this new perspective of pain, or something else,” said the Pope. “But one thing is true: I have often felt a deep pain and suffering for this lie of mine,” he added.

7. It tends to melancholy

“I had a tendency to feel sudden nostalgia for the past,” says Pope Francis about himself during his childhood. “Not so much sadness but melancholy,” he adds. He did not overcome it over time.

His tenth or eleventh birthday worried him, even when his grandparents arrived to celebrate him with him.

“This melancholy has sometimes returned,” he writes. “From time to time it is a place where I find myself, a place that I have learned to recognize,” he says.

In the book he acknowledges having visited a psychiatrist for almost a year, “a very wise and capable Jewish woman” whose “suggestions were always useful.” He says he remembers them and finds them “instructions even today.”

8. Laughter is a good medicine

Pope Francis states that sadness is not the best way to reach God. “A sad person, in the end, is always a sad Christian,” he writes.

The same goes for anger. “Bad character is never a sign of holiness, but quite the opposite,” he says.

On the contrary, says the Pope, joy is essential.

“Few living beings know how to laugh: we are made in the image of God and our God smiles. We must smile with Him. We can even smile at him, with the love we feel for the parents, and in the same way we play and joke with the people we love, ”says Pope Francis.

He says he has prayed the Prayer of good humor of Santo Tomás Moro every day for more than 40 years.

9. Your reaction to JFK

For many Catholics in the United States, John F. Kennedy’s election as president of the country 65 years ago was a decisive moment, when Catholics felt that they had finally triumphed in American society.

Many outside the United States also saw unlimited possibilities in the “new border” that JFK promised, in the form of ending poverty, exploring space and promoting freedom worldwide.

Pope Francis, however, saw things differently.

“I remember that a priest of Buenos Aires became euphoric when John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, was elected president in 1960, almost as if Pope Juan himself had been chosen for the White House. That naivety enraged me, ”shares the Pope.

It does not give more details in the book and never mention Kennedy again.

10. I’m not a television fan

Once, in 1990, Fr. Bergoglio was watching television with other Jesuits in Buenos Aires “and a sordid scene appeared on the screen, which deeply offended me,” he writes.

“I got up and left,” he writes. “It was as if God had told me that television was not for me, that he did not do any good,” he says.

During a Mass, he says: “I brought a vote to Our Lady” of not watching television.

He made exceptions after the news of a plane crash in Buenos Aires in 1999 and terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, but “little else.”

Therefore, he does not even see his favorite football team, San Lorenzo, in Buenos Aires. But a member of the Swiss Guard, “who leaves the results and classifications in my desk”, helps him follow the team from afar.

11. Pope and connoisseur of pizza

When I was a child, the Bergoglio went to San Lorenzo football matches and then celebrated with pizza and snails in spicy sauce.

“I can still smell the aroma of pizza,” writes Pope Francis. “To tell the truth, go out to eat pizza is one of the small things that strange,” he shares.

12. A funeral for a shepherd

Pope Francis has said he wants to be buried in the Basilica of Santa María la Mayor in Rome. Although other pontiffs are buried there, most of the potatoes of modern times have been buried in the Basilica of San Pedro.

The funeral of Pope Francis will also be different from his last predecessors.

“The funeral service was excessive, so I have arranged with the master of ceremonies lighten it: nothing of catafalco, nor ceremony to close the coffin, or deposition of the cypress coffin in a second lead and a third of oak,” says Pope Francis.

“With dignity, but like any Christian, because the bishop of Rome is a shepherd and a disciple, not a powerful of this world,” he writes.

Translated and adapted by the ACI Press team. Originally published in the National Catholic Register.