Pope Francis is dead at 88, on the day after Easter—an appropriate Lenten epilogue for a pontiff with a keen sense of story.
60 years earlier, Francis was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit seminarian who taught literature and writing at Colegio de la Immaculada Concepciòn, a secondary school for boys in Santa Fé, Argentina. His students called him carucha; babyface.
The boys were in their final two years of school. At their age, Francis had part of his lung removed, contributing to a condition that would last his entire life. Not much older than his pupils, Francis had to be “distant, formal,” with one student noting he “was very polite but never smiled.”
He was supposed to teach them El Cid, a Spanish epic about the Castilian knight Rodrigo Díaz de Viva, but like other teachers, Francis was stuck between curriculum and reality. The boys balked. They wanted to read Federico García Lorca, or more “racy” works like La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas.
Francis made a “risky,” but pedagogically wise, decision. They would read El Cid at home. In class, they would read the writers the boys liked. “By reading these things,” Francis reflected, “they acquired a taste in literature, poetry,” and could then discover other authors. Francis ditched the curriculum for “an unstructured” program, an “order that came naturally by reading these authors.” This spontaneous approach “befitted” him; he met his students, and the world, where they were.
Once the boys read widely, Francis got them writing. He viewed literature as a living art form, a sensibility that would last his entire life. In fact, one of his final major pastoral letters was “On the Role of Literature in Formation”—a letter that was originally intended as part of priestly formation, but was instead directed toward all to affirm “the value of reading novels and poems as part of one’s path to personal maturity.”
Francis sent two of their short stories to a fellow Argentine—Jorge Luis Borges. The young teacher had a connection; Borges’s secretary had been Francis’s piano teacher. Borges admired the work of the young writers so much that he facilitated the publication of stories from the class in a book, Cuentos Originales, for which he wrote the prologue: “This prologue is not just for this book, but also for each one of the as yet undetermined series of possible works that the young people collected here many, in the future, write.”
Pope Francis felt that literature “engages our concrete existence, with its innate tensions, desires and meaningful experiences…”
In 2010, Francis reunited with many of those former pupils, and told them “cuando hable de discípulos y alumnos siempre se va a estar acordando de nosotros”; that he would always think of them as his students.
He remained a teacher throughout his pontificate. His pastoral letter on literature affirms an incarnational vision of storytelling. For Francis, Jesus Christ was not mere abstraction, but a man of flesh: “that flesh made of passions, emotions and feelings, words that challenge and console, hands that touch and heal, looks that liberate and encourage, flesh made of hospitality, forgiveness, indignation, courage, fearlessness; in a word, love.” He ended his letter with the words of Paul Celan: “Those who truly learn to see, draw close to what is unseen.”
It should not be surprising that Pope Francis, who felt that literature “engages our concrete existence, with its innate tensions, desires and meaningful experiences” would stir the hearts of writers—including Toni Morrison. In 2015 the Catholic convert told NPR that “I might be easily seduced to go back to church because I like the controversy as well as the beauty of this particular Pope Francis. He’s very interesting to me.”
Francis was preternaturally Jesuit: scholarly yet pastoral, erudite but egalitarian. He was the first Jesuit pope, a phrase which feels like an impossible, Borgesian occurrence.
Francis was especially fond of “Legend,” one of Borges’s short tales. Cain and Abel encounter each other in a desert afterlife. The brothers sit, start a fire, and eat, although they “sat silently, as weary people do when dusk begins to fall.” When the flame illuminates Abel’s forehead, Cain sees “the mark of the stone.” He drops his bread, and asks for his brother’s forgiveness—but adds a question: “Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?”
Abel says that he could not remember, but “here we are, together, like before.” And Cain responds: “Now I know that you have truly forgiven me, because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget.”
After he wrote the generous prologue for the book by Francis’s students, Borges, then 66 and blind, made the eight hour trek from Buenos Aires to Santa Fé. The writer told Francis that he still said the Lord’s Prayer every night, despite his unbelief, “because he had promised his mother he’d do so.”
One visit, Francis went to the hotel to bring Borges to campus, but the writer asked for help first. Borges asked the young Jesuit to shave him. Francis did, with gentleness and humility that would remain with him until his final day.
