Photo: EPA
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Before becoming Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio won the hearts of the slum people ministering to the poor and sick.
THE
INDEPENDENT
FRIDAY 15 MARCH 2013
FRIDAY 15 MARCH 2013
It’s a long walk down the teeming streets of Villa 31, one of several shanty-town slums within the bounds of Buenos Aires, to the “Home of Christ” sanctuary of Father Guillermo Torre. Flea-bitten dogs and children share the gutters and motorway flyovers replace the sky for the breeze-block homes jumbled beneath them.
Father Guillermo, a
stocky man with a dog collar undone and askew, escorts his visitors around his
domain – a church under corrugated iron, a day centre for runaways and drug
addicts and, finally, the burial site of Father Carlos Mugica, a priest killed by
right-wing assassins in 1974 because of his work for the poor. It isn’t Mugica
we are here to celebrate today, but rather the man who until last week was
merely Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
“He built of all of
this,” Father Guillermo says of his friend who is now Pope Francis. While the
leader of the church in this city, he helped find the money and provided the
encouragement to build this and similar centres in the other slums – or Villas
Miserias – in Buenos Aires. All are called “Home of Christ” and Bergoglio
visited them as often as he could as part of his very public commitment to
ministering to the poor.
Nowhere, not even in the
other slums, is the reverence for Bergoglio more strong than here, however.
It was back in 1999 –
soon after he became Archbishop of the city – that he arranged for the remains
of the still iconic Father Mugica to be exhumed from the cemetery in the nearby
middle class neighbourhood of Recoleta, where Evita is entombed, to this place
for reburial, amongst the people he had cared and died for.
It was
a day that Saul Sanchez, 48, a small grocery shop owner on what might be the
main street of Villa 31, will never forget.
Today,
he briefly abandoned his counter to run home for photographs showing him among
a team of the younger men carrying the casket of Mugica to his burial ground.
It was 9 October 1999. But if Mugica remains revered as the Slum Priest of
Argentina, then to people here Bergoglio can surely be called the Slum Pope.
“He is
a very simple man,” he says of Bergoglio, who used to come at least once a year
to Villa 31 to give communion at a small brick shrine a few doors down from his
shop and to confirm the young. “You know it because he liked to come here and
just be with us. He is just a normal person, who would eat meat and stew with
us and would even drink mate.” He was referring to the traditional “tea” of
Argentina, an infusion of hot water and leaves often drunk from a dried
vegetable gourd through a metal straw. As everyone here knows only one person
was allowed to brew the mate when Bergoglio was coming. That would be Maria
Picallo, who is 85, who lives at Casa 7 on Evita Street. She was preparing
dinners for the poor at the small chapel a few blocks from Mr Sanchez’s shop
when she heard the news of the new pope on Wednesday. It made her dance, she
said last night. The new Pope loved her for her mate, she says. He would always
take bitter, no sugar.
She is
also one of the lucky ones of the slum who can say she knows Bergoglio, at
least a little. Dressed in layers of cardigans with a necklace of white plastic
hearts and a cross, she is moved when speaking of him.
“He is
always smiling,” she said. “When he speaks total silence falls. Even the flies
here stop when Bergoglio is talking.”
Back at
the sanctuary, Father Guillermo recalls that Bergoglio also often visited all
the other main slums, particularly Villa 21-24, perhaps the most dangerous in
the city and not a place most outsiders would dare enter alone. It was there on
Easter each year that the archbishop would wash and kiss the feet of the most
afflicted, including those with Aids.
But
call Francis the Slum Pope and Guillermo winces. “I would say he is something
bigger than that,” he says. “He is not just for the slums, he is for all the
poor people.” And not just in this city now, but for the Catholic faithful
around the world.
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