“Argentina will go down in history with a capital letter, and its name will remain among the names of the towns forever and ever, among other things, for having brought a holy man to the world,” a taxi driver from Buenos Aires told me, at the rhythm two by four One of the saints next door, I added. He asked me: “How so?” I answered him: “yes, one of the saints from next door, one of many of us, a neighbor of Flores, an ordinary worker, a man with old shoes, a lawful porteño, a successful entrepreneur and failures, a man with mercy, one who knew loyalty as well as betrayal, a fan of San Lorenzo, a reader of Borges, a taster of empanadas…, one of us, one of the peripheries of the world, one of those from here sitting there, in the chair of San Pedro, with all the memory of a Latin American people behind and with all the dreams of humanity ahead”.
I got out of the taxi and said to myself: “… and yes, he is right because: who would remember old Macedonia today if it were not for Alexander the Great.
Sometimes the imaginaries that emerge from the stories we are told do not allow us to appreciate the value of things. On the contrary, they lower the price. God willing that the “remembrance” -as the master Osvaldo Pugliese would say-, does not lead us one day to say, lost in the distance: “Oh, how sad it is to remember, after so much loving, that happiness that happened…
But we are on time. It is never too late. Let’s not spoil the party. Let’s turn water into wine now, while we still can. It is our party, the party of all Argentines. The party is also part of the evangelical dynamic.
Is fulfilled a decade of a pontificate. Perhaps we do not appreciate it because we are not aware of the dimension that this acquires in light of the history of humanity. But I want to insist: that does not happen many times in history; even less in the history of a town on the periphery.
Seventy-six of 266 pontificates – that is, only a little more than a quarter – have reached the goal of completing a decade. Some of those pontiffs are household names: Gregory I, Leo I, Innocent III, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius XII, Paul VI, John Paul II, and, of course, Saint Peter himself. But many of them are obscure and forgotten.
Some left as a legacy works of architecture, others encyclicals, some scandals, and others disputes with earthly rulers or with an entire era.
At the close of the X year of his pontificate, the Argentine pontiff has bequeathed to history: in value of voices from the peripheries as sovereign subjectsas just consciences; a curial reform that puts personal conversion at the center to heal suffering flesh with words and gestures; the Revitalization of the Second Vatican Council initiating a synod on synodality where everyone, tutti, has the right to be heard and to discern; and a renewed social magisterium that, taken as a corpus, constitutes a new theology that, from the pastoral, emerges as a “gospel-flavored lifestyle” (FT 1).
Perhaps the legacy that I have just listed does not represent much for a world that reads quantities. But if I say that almost 7 million people came to see Francis in a single day, perhaps that may be more significant in the age of accumulation. It happened in Luneta, Philippines. Few know that it was the largest pontifical event in history, more than the youth world cup in the same place in 1995. This scenario was repeated in Africa, North America and Latin America.
Because?
Simply because in a world traversed by many wars, The sovereign word of Francisco does not allow itself to run to the right, nor to the left. He does not allow himself to be framed by the media agenda trusted by partisan interests, nor by the indiestrist agenda of the distrustful.
for Francisas for each one of us, no war is more important than another, no confrontation is more dignified than another, no death is more legitimate than another. That is why we are saints, because we are victims of the evil that is expressed daily in a world war to pieces, as the Pope says. A war that manifests itself in the armed conflict as well as in human trafficking, migration, extractivism, abuse, structural unemployment, the bankruptcy of national companies or foreign indebtedness.
Those who trust Francisco are many, they are millions. Ten years after his pontificate, his socio-environmental ecological teaching is the subject of study in almost all disciplines at all universities in the world; it is part of the public policies of almost all western states; and it is an agenda shared with all religions.
The noise will not be able to cover the voice, it will remain in time because it is the continuity of other voices, which in turn are the continuity of the Word. Let us hope that the song of the sirens does not separate us from the laurels that we were able to achieve.
Francisco is national pride. If not, let’s ask the great Argentine people, and they will answer: cheers!
*Theologian