I know very little about the world, but in 2012, when I was 20, I knew even less. For instance, I didn’t know I was about to meet the man who would become Pope Francis.
Another example of my ignorance: I knew very little Spanish. This was a problem, as I was studying abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My high school Spanish classes had consisted of the teacher coming into the room and turning on the TV. Once, we watched Rudy—in English with Spanish subtitles. Realizing that my acquaintance with Indiana college football had done little to prepare me for South America, my host-mom worried about me.
Sometimes she said, “You have to be careful. You don’t speak Spanish well. But your eyes, they say, ‘Rob me. Rob me!’” But even my eyes spoke Spanish so poorly that I ended up being robbed just once.
Whether she was right or wrong to worry, my host-mom worried even more when she found out where I was going at night, for I was going to the Catholic parish down the street. People gathered in the dark there around a table covered in candles (I didn’t know to call it an altar). On top of the table: what I thought was a large, round makeup mirror, though I now know it was a monstrance of distinctly minimalist design. As I said, I knew almost nothing. I just knew I liked the candles. And the silence.
One night my host-mom was coming out of the movies with her boyfriend, just as I was stepping down the parish steps. Again, she was visibly worried. “Are you Catholic?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “just curious.”
“A young man should be going to the clubs at night!” she said. “And not just young men. In Buenos Aires, there is a club for people of every age. Olivia”—the 70-year-old woman who worked in her restaurant—“she goes out three times a week, with a different boyfriend each night. You need to live.” And so, dutifully, my host-brother took me out that Saturday. It was a favorite place of his. People in superhero costumes danced around in cages. They were right, in a way. I did need to learn to live.
Her objections to church attendance were mainly hedonistic, though sometimes at Sunday dinner she loved to tell stories about priests and their foibles—one had been caught at the theater with his mistress! But even with my impaired Spanish, I slowly learned that there were more serious reasons to stay away. The program director took us to a place where, during the military dictatorship, the government had tortured the people it had disappeared.
I remember that place so clearly. I remember being told that the state’s henchmen tortured people in the basement, and this was so odd to me, because across the street there was a billboard featuring a blonde American actress holding up a vial of perfume labeled Basement. Just the English word Basement. In Argentina, I learned, they use English the way Americans use French when they want to feel fancy. My host-mom didn’t call her living room the sala, the way the textbook said she would, but living—as in, “Come into the living.” The basement said just the opposite.
I remember being told, also, that in the torture chamber, there was often a priest standing nearby, urging the tortured to confess. From the basement, the bodies of the disappeared were sometimes taken up into the air and then dropped into the sea. What was the use of going to church with priests like these?
But to be honest, I hardly noticed the priests when I walked to my local parish. Their sermons made no sense to me; the Mass was a tangle of acrobatics I had no idea how to perform. I heard them say Padre and Hijo, they traced the cross on their chests, and that was pretty much all that sunk in as far as the priests were concerned.
Instead, I noticed the people, especially the older women who knelt without complaint on unpadded wooden kneelers. One person still flashes before me. After Mass, she would go to the statue of the Sacred Heart, and she would grab that flaming Heart the way you might grab a man by the throat—so desperate was her prayer, so assured was she that Jesus could take the anger and the sorrow and the full torment of her soul—that Jesus was, in some sense, already bearing whatever violence had crushed her into praying with such barren need of being heard. Only because of some deep and utter and mysterious solidarity could she grab the flaming Heart in this way. She knew that his Heart was her Heart, that he had given it exactly so that it could be laid hold of in this way.
At the time, I did not believe. But I knew that if someday I was going to believe, it would have to be like this.
I know it will sound Victorian, but the problem was this: I was consumed by melancholy. And my youth pastor had told me when I was 13 that if you were sad, it meant you weren’t following God’s will. I was sad no matter what, so I thought that meant God was not for me. My religion grew to look something like this. I walked around in the rain listening to indie rock. I wanted to spend my evenings reading Rainer Maria Rilke, that poet so terrorized by the angels. I was not sure love really existed. Perhaps it all came down to power and manipulation and using certain physical gestures so that people would respond in certain ways. Someone would cry, another person would comfort, and evolution had programmed us to be soothed by another’s touch. That’s all. The world was all beautiful, rain-dripped crust, and then a very deep, bottomless basement. And that was just the way it was.
The woman with the Heart—how do I put it? She made me doubt my religion. She made me doubt that I knew what I was talking about.
My religion was to receive one more fatal blow before I left Argentina. It was the last weekend, near the end of November, which meant it was warm and beautiful, and I decided to take the subte down to the Cathedral, its neoclassical façade from the 1860s featuring a depiction of Jacob reuniting with Joesph, a disappeared son if ever there was one. Although it was Sunday, almost no one was attending Mass. There were maybe 50 of us in this giant vaulted space, while around the side aisles tourists ducked in and out to take pictures of the tombs in which the nation’s founding fathers had their earthly rest.
The man celebrating the Mass—no one could mistake him for an apostle of joy. Sure, he was a bishop, but he seemed exhausted and sorrowful, worn down perhaps by a life that apparently ended here, celebrating sacraments that no one had the time to notice. I remember his response when he ascended into the pulpit while a couple chased each other down the side aisle, laughing, cameras slung behind their shoulders. “My dear friends,” he said, “do you not realize that this is the temple of God and not a museum?”
It was strange. It was perhaps as close to the miracle of Pentecost as I will ever get, for I understood every word he spoke as I had understood nothing else during my entire time in Buenos Aires. And the words kept soaking into me.
“I really mean it. The Church is not a museum, though that is how we treat it. Or worse, we think it is a mausoleum, just full of dead things. But no, my friends, the Church is a living thing, the Church is alive. Why else would we have a Church year? One that shifts from this color to that, from this aspect to that, from one emotion to another; it’s all a journey. Do you not understand this?—that the Church is there to walk with you through your entire life. There is the joy of Easter, and there is the sorrow of Lent, and there are sometimes long stretches where nothing seems to happen; Ordinary Time, we call it, when we are simply learning how to live, how to be disciples. But the Church is big enough for all of it, for all of life, for our life. We must remember this.”
And the truth is that I have tried to remember it. I remembered it when I left the cathedral and walked out into the sun, and I thought about the sad, crushed little man speaking these beautiful words—I even liked that he was sad, for it proved what was so incredible to me: that God did not turn from our sadness, but rather turned toward it, encountered it fully, used it to speak a beautiful truth that comforted and healed. How did that sad man know these things? Today, I’d say he knew these things because he had tried to walk beside a God who was not afraid to descend into basements and into tombs. The bishop knew that it was incredible, but it was true: you could look for the living among the dead, because God had gone to be with the dead and disappeared, and he was not going to come up unless he brought them all with him.
And of course, I remembered these words once I was back in the United States, and suddenly that bishop was everywhere—on book covers and screens. People still sometimes bought a newspaper back then.
And I remember his words today, right now, now that he has himself been placed in a tomb during the week when the light of Resurrection scorches us through and through.
The truth is that he was never my Pope. It’s just a fact: I did not follow him into Roman Catholicism. An entirely different story could be told about why I didn’t, though for now I’ll just say this: the problem was never that Rome looked too much like Pope Francis. And as for me? I resemble him too little. And now that I am no longer a melancholic Victorian but a hopelessly Victorian Anglo-Catholic, I will likely spend the rest of my priesthood trying to resemble him more: his insistence that priests need always to go out of themselves to dwell with the people, his solicitude for the oppressed, his desire to wash feet, and even, in a strange way, his reverence: his desire for you to look at the Church and see not a museum but a living temple. Come into the living, I hear my host-mom say. You need to live.
So, it’s true. Despite all the things I do not know, I know this. He wasn’t my Pope. But he was my bishop, my first bishop. And perhaps that was enough.
The Rev. Christopher Poore is a doctoral student at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
