Cardinal Filipino Luis Antonio Tagle, former propes of the Dicastery for Evangelization and one of the cardinals who will participate in the conclave since May 7 to choose the successor of Pope Francis, said that the Argentine pontiff “believed in me more than I believed in myself.”
Before being Pope and “from Buenos Aires, I wrote congratulations letters when I learned something good that I had done. But I didn’t respond to any. He believed in me more than I believed in myself”, Said the cardinal in the homily of Mass for the soul of Pope Francis, who celebrated on April 25 with the workers of the Vatican Dicastery, in which he recalled some milestones of his friendship.
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“We were together in the Synod of the Bishops on the Eucharist in 2005 as delegates of our respective Episcopal Conferences. At the end of the Synod, we were both elected members of the Ordinary Council of the Synod of the Bishops for a three -year mandate,” said the purple of 67 years.
In 2008, the former president of Cáritas Internacional continued, “we were speakers in the International Eucharistic Congress of Québec. He represented Latin America and I Asia. I often expressed my little knowledge of the assigned issues and my lack of preparation for the speeches, but he never stopped encouraging me, to help me see the hand of the Lord.”
“During the meetings he always joked with me. We took the jokes seriously,” he continued.
According to the VATICAN AGENCY FIDESthe Cardinal said that “for the 2013 conclave, our flights arrived at the Fiumicino airport (in Rome) with a few minutes of difference. When I saw me he told me: ‘What does this boy do here?’
The cardinal, who was a bishop of Imus and Archbishop of Manila in the Philippines, confessed that he believed that “it was a joke” when Francisco called him to work in the Vatican six years ago, in 2019.
“In the end it was a serious joke. To compensate for all the letters that I did not answer, this time I told him yes. I suppose that in his eyes I continue to be a boy. In my private audiences with him, his first question was always: ‘How are your parents?’
At the end of his homily, Cardinal Tagle reported something that happened on Pope Francis’s trip to the Philippines in 2015. The Mass he celebrated on January 18 at Rizal Park in Manila congregated between 6 and 7 million people, thus becoming the most massive event once chaired by a pontiff.
The cardinal said that Francisco “was surprised to see the millions of people who welcomed him upon his arrival in Manila. Before getting out of the papamobile to enter the apostolic nunciature, he asked me: ‘How much have you paid to those people?’ See Jesus. ‘”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.