The poor and Pope Francis: “We have lost a friend”

“A simple person for simple people. We have lost a friend, but we have won a father.” Thus says goodbye to Pope Francis Ricardo Barajas, a Spanish man who was dedicated to living in the street and could sports with the pontiff for more than three hours.

Ricardo receives ACI Press in a residence located in Alcalá de Henares, in Madrid (Spain), where he has lived for a year. Before this, life led him to live in the streets, until the Lázaro Foundation in Spain offered him a home.

Everyone knows in the residence that Ricardo is “known” for having been with Pope Francis in 2020, in full pandemic. This is what Karla knows, one of the workers in the center at the door of the residence, while we wait to meet him.

From that meeting with the pontiff, Ricardo highlights several aspects.

“The first thing, which entered, closed the door and we were eight people with him. That day I was alone with us. That gives a lot to think about him,” recalls Ricardo, who emphasizes that in other private audiences with presidents or kings “he always has behind people.”

The second impression is that they offered Pope Francis to use a button that emitted a sound if he did not want to answer any issue: “He did not touch it once,” in a sample of openness to respond to everything.

And, the third, his last gesture of humanity. For agenda reasons, the Pontiff had to go out with something in a hurry of the meeting. “It seems that he forgot that he was going to say goodbye to us,” explains Ricardo. The time of the dinner at Casa Santa Marta arrived, Ricardo was quietly sitting in front of his dish, when he noticed a close presence: “I turn and see the Holy Father towards me, heading with her extended hand”, to formally say goodbye.

“I was stunned,” Ricardo acknowledges, who emphasizes that “he was down with others, like the poor, with whom we have no house, with whom they are starving.”

They were more than three hours, in which, together with other people from the Lázaro Foundation, they transferred the Argentine Pope questions from the poor world From the poor to the Pope, from the Pope to the world.

“Come, here we have wifi,” said Pope Francis

In the surroundings of the Plaza de San Pedro, Bernabé Villalba, head of Communication of the Lázaro Foundation in Spain, the details of that meeting and the way in which the idea was born.

The university professor arrived in Rome from Spain to attend, along with hundreds of thousands of teenagers, to the Canonization of Carlo Acutis, scheduled for Sunday, April 27 but was postponed due to the death of Pope Francis.

The young man explained that the Lázaro Foundation was born to create bridges “between rich and poor.” Specifically, it specifies that the name of the Foundation is due to the fact that, in the Gospel, the name of Lázaro refers to a poor man who asked for alms at the doors of the house of a rich man and also the friend of Jesus, whom he resurrected.

“We believe that through friendship there can be a resurrection of homeless people, so that those chasms that separate us here, that do not separate us then when we have already dead,” he adds.

These “bridges” between entrepreneurs and homeless, according to Bernabé, are erected to eliminate that abyss. “One can be economically rich but, in my case, I consider myself rich for having a united family or parents just as faith have transmitted to me. That is also a wealth and Lazarus is mainly dedicated to creating homes to share,” he emphasizes.

In 2020, at the tenth anniversary of the Foundation in France, a meeting of the 200 members of Lázaro households in the world with Pope Francis had been scheduled. Due to the pandemic, it was suspended, but not canceled.

“If the Pope did not cancel him, we didn’t say either.” So they proposed a meeting through the Internet, with a few present in Rome on behalf. Pope Francis’s response, in writing, was clear: “Yes, there is no problem, come, that we have wifi here.”

The meeting was so good that in Lázaro homes they considered taking the Pope Francis questions of poor, homeless people and disinherited from all over the world. They gathered hundreds and proposed to Pope Francis an encounter to consider them.

It happened in 2020, but there were so many questions that did not give time to make them all.

Thus, Sibylle de Malet, responsible for the European Development of Lázaro Households, dared to ask if the Pontiff would accept a new meeting.

“How long do you need?” Asked the Pope. “Like three hours,” they replied and the Pope, he accepted. When Sybile de Malet transferred the idea to the Pontifical Secretary, he exclaimed “You are a joke. The Pope does not give anyone three hours.” But after consulting, again, he came back “Oh, my mother, how am I going to find a three -hour hole for you now?” Recalls Bernabé.

In the end there were more than three hours, in which Ricardo considered a friend.

A change of protocol at the funeral

After the death of Pope Francis, the conversation with Ricardo takes place last Saturday in Spain, on a sunny spring afternoon shortly after the celebration of the funeral held in the Plaza de San Pedro and the funeral in the Basilica of Santa María La Mayor.

How have you felt to see the funeral? We ask Ricardo, who responds directly: “Bad.” Not only because of the appreciation of Pope Francis, whom he considers a friend, but because he would reconfigure the protocol established to place the leaders elsewhere: “Those important people would have put them at the end and in front would have put the people he wanted.”

“We will not be as invisible as we were before”

Thinking about the legacy of the Argentine Pope, Ricardo considers that “what has most influenced us with everything is simplicity, because he was a simple man for simple people,” and adds that his message, his way of governing Pedro’s boat “has penetrated more people than it seems.”

In his particular case, Ricardo shares how the relationship with Pope Francis and his message of mercy has transformed his heart: “Before he was not very believer. I am not yet much, but I think that little by little he will grow within me.”

On a more practical plane, he adds: “I did not see people as I see them now. Before, theoretically, I was a bit selfish and watched more for me than for others. From that day I look more for people than for me.” In fact, despite not living in Lázaro homes, he continues to collaborate with this foundation: “Now they hardly have to ask me, it is I who offer me people.”

Looking at humanity and with respect to the attitude towards the disinherited, those who inhabit the streets and remain so many times at the mercy of the discard culture that the pontiff denounced insistently, Ricardo shares a conviction: “From now on we will not be as invisible as we were before.”