The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope

Older residents recalled that the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas had had a quinta there, and how Flores had been the first and only stop on the very first Argentine train journey in 1857.  The station improvised for the occasion was then on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and even in the 1940s, when Jorge was growing up there, it was a long way from the center.  Since the city now has over ten million people, it feels far more central and middle-class than it would have done then: nowadays its streets are lined with pretty casonas adorned with curlicues and ironwork balconies, concealing patios or little gardens.  But back then the houses were simple, just one or two floors, and the dusty streets turned to mud when it rained.

Jorge spent his first twenty years in that little house on calle Membrillar, his life revolving mainly around Flores and Almagro.  Even after he left home, he seldom went far.  During his thirty-three years as a Jesuit, he was mostly in San Miguel, in the province of Buenos Aires, a little more than an hour away; and in his fifties he returned to Flores as an auxiliary bishop.  As archbishop in his sixties he lived in the Plaza de Mayo, half an hour directly east of Flores by bus or subway.  Before he was made Christ's vicar on earth, he planned to live out his remaining years in Flores — specifically in Room 13 on the ground floor of the clergy retirement home on calle Condarco 581, which was being kept for him.

Seven blocks south of the Bergoglio house was their parish church, the impressive Basilica of St. Joseph of Flores, which hosted the funeral of Argentina's first president, Manuel Dorrego.  It was here, at seventeen, that Jorge had an experience in confession that unlocked his vocation, and whenever he returned as archbishop he would kiss the ornate wooden confessional where God had surprised him.

The basilica sits on Rivadavia Avenue, which was in colonial times the "royal road," the camino real, linking Buenos Aires to Upper Peru.  Later it became the main east-west artery, marking the boundary between the wealthy north of Buenos Aires and its poorer southern half.  Along the Rivadavia, underground, runs the subway to the Plaza de Mayo.

A few blocks north of Membrillar Street is the Mercy Sisters' convent, in whose little chapel the Bergoglios often heard Mass.  The convent occupies the whole side of the square named after it, the Plaza de la Misericordia, or Mercy Square.  At kindergarten here, Jorge hated to be inside the classroom, wanting always to be outside.  The nuns nowadays laugh that this was the first indication of what is now the pope's plan for the Church.

A Mercy nun here was one of the three key women in his childhood.  Sister Dolores Tortolo prepared him for his First Communion ("from her I received a catechetical formation that was balanced, optimistic, joyful and responsible," he later recalled) at the age of eight.  She would be a source of strength when, as a young seminarian, he lay close to death, and she was present at his first Mass in 1969.  Whenever he came back to Flores, as Jesuit and later archbishop, he visited her in the convent.  He was there in 2000 when she received an award for a lifetime's teaching, and spoke on that occasion of how she taught with her words and life the value of the interior life and fraternal love.

In the twilight of her life, when she was still mentally alert but physically paralyzed, the then cardinal would carry her to her room.

"So what was I like as a child?" he would tease her as he lifted her.  "Tell the sisters!"

"You were terrible, terrible, as naughty as anything!" Dolores would cry, and the sisters would fall about laughing.  (After he had gone she would tell them, giggling, that that was not true, that Jorgito, "little George," was always a good boy, happy and affectionate.)  When Sister Dolores died in 2006, he spent the night in prayer next to her body in the convent chapel.

The sisters showed Jorge the meaning of God's mercy, and he would always speak of it, taking as his bishop's motto the Venerable Bede's account of Jesus recruiting the tax collector Matthew, miserando atque eligendo, which translates clumsily as "He saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him."  Bergoglio liked the way Latin had "mercy" as a verb, miserando, and so created the Spanish misericordiando — an activity of the divine, something God does to you.  "Dejáte misericordiar," he would tell the guilt-ridden and the scrupulous, "let yourself be 'mercy'd.'" It was typical of the way he idiosyncratically appropriated a word, creating a bergoglismo.

Speaking to journalists on the flight back from Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, Francis would proclaim a new age, a kairos, of mercy, recalling how, in the Gospel, rather than call him to account for the money he had squandered, the Prodigal Son's father instead threw a party.  "He didn't just wait for him; he went out to meet him.  That's mercy, that's kairos."

All his life, Bergoglio has insisted on this quality of God who takes the initiative, who comes out to find us, and surprises us with his forgiveness.  "That is the religious experience: the astonishment of meeting someone who has been waiting for you all along," the cardinal said in 2010.  "Dios te primerea," he added.  "God beats you to it."  Primerear is Buenos Aires slang meaning literally "to first" somebody.  Used of God it is a bergoglismo that makes you smile, for you have a picture of someone dashing ahead, cheekily snatching the place you thought was yours.

The single greatest childhood influence on Jorge Bergoglio was his grandmother Rosa, a formidable woman of deep faith and political skill, with whom he spent most of his first five years.

Back in Turin, Rosa had been heavily involved in Catholic Action, a national movement created by the Italian bishops that in the 1920s sought to defend the Church's in dependence from the all-absorbing state of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.  Rosa was a regular speaker who worked closely with the Catholic Action national women's leaders of her day.  The topics of her talks may not have been incendiary — Jorge kept one of her pamphlets, entitled "Saint Joseph in the Life of the Single Woman, the Widow and the Wife" — but because the fascists saw Catholic Action as a rival to the state, its speakers were constantly harassed and repressed, eventually provoking Pius XI's powerful 1931 antitotalitarian letter, Non Abbiamo Bisogno.  When the fascists closed the venue where she was due to speak, Rosa would stand on a soapbox in the street, defying the henchmen; and one time she took to the pulpit of her church to publicly deplore Mussolini.  The dictatorship was one of the factors behind her decision to emigrate.

"My strongest childhood memory is that life shared between my parents' house and my grandparents' house," Bergoglio recalled.  "The first part of my childhood, from the age of one, I spent with my grandmother."  Rosa began taking in Jorge after his brother Oscar was born, collecting him each morning and dropping him back in the afternoon.  Rosa and Giovanni spoke with each other in Piedmontese, which Jorge learned from them — "I had the privilege of partaking in the language of their memories" — to the extent that today he can recite much of the romantic verse of the great Piedmontese poet, Nino Costa.  Because his parents were anxious to integrate and therefore to downplay their origins, Jorge's grandparents were key to the boy's sense of identity as an Argentine of Italian heritage.  His father, Mario, in contrast, spoke only in Spanish; he was the immigrant moving on, seeking acceptance, never looking back to Piedmont with nostalgia, "which meant he must have felt it," Bergoglio later recalled, "since he denied it for some reason."

Bergoglio has always been convinced of the vital importance of grandparents — and especially the grandmother — as guardians of a precious reserve parents often ignore or reject.  "I was lucky to know my four grandparents," he recalled in 2011.  "The wisdom of the elderly has helped me greatly; that is why I venerate them."  In 2012 he told Father Isasmendi on the community radio of the Villa 21 shantytown:

The grandmother is in the hearth, the grandfather, too, but above all the grandmother; she's like the reserve.  She's the moral, religious, and cultural reserve.  She's the one who passes on the whole story.  Mom and Dad are over there, working, engaged in this and that, they've got a thousand things to do.  The grandmother is in the house more; the grandfather, too.  They tell you things from before.  My grandfather used to tell me stories about the 1914 war, stories they lived through.  They tell you about life as they lived it, not stories from books, but their own stories, of their own lives.  That's what I'd like to say to the grandparents listening.  Tell them things about life, so the kids know what life is.