A 92-year-old parishioner from the parish of San Lucas, in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires, entrusted her priest, Guillermo Marcó, with a special assignment. She had to deliver a message to the Pope. “Tell him that I no longer pray for him,” he asked. If someone loves you, they come to visit you, and since they don’t want to come, I don’t pray for them anymore.”
Marcó is not just any priest from Buenos Aires. He is the president of the Argentine Institute of Interreligious Dialogue and the director of the University Pastoral Service. But above all, he is best known for having been Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s spokesman when he was cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires, with whom he became friends over the years. So the parishioner’s message reached the Pontiff’s ears directly.
Francis, the first Latin American pope, has flown extensively to his home continent. In the more than eleven years of his pontificate, he has visited nearby countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay and Bolivia, but until now he has refused to visit Argentina because he feared that this trip would be politicized and do more harm than good to his country. land. As archbishop, the Kirchners liked his critical homilies so little that when Cristina Fernández was president, in 2013, instead of being happy that a compatriot was elected pontiff, when he found out he started shouting “irreproducible things” –according to someone in his family. entourage told Marcó – in his office at the Casa Rosada. Last year, Bergoglio himself explained to some Jesuits he visited in Hungary that that executive gave orders to three judges to condemn him for his role during the dictatorship, when he interceded for two kidnapped priests before the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. “Some in Cristina Kirchner’s government wanted to cut off my head,” he said then.
Later, the president realized that it was advisable to maintain good relations with the head of the Catholic Church, she went to have lunch with him at the Vatican and everything was forgotten. The same clean slate happened with the current Argentine leader, the far-right Javier Milei. Although before winning the elections he called him “representative of evil on Earth” or “left-handed son of a bitch who goes around preaching communism”, he changed his mind when the Pope surprised him with a call, after which he invited him to visit Argentina and even asked him for a hug when he met him on a trip to the Holy See in February.
“This rarefied climate is difficult to understand. Messi, the best player in the world, was destroyed here until he won the World Cup. Borges, our literary genius, wanted to be buried in Geneva. Saint Martin, the hero of independence, was exiled to die in France. And the Pope has already chosen the place where he wants to rest in Rome,” explains his former spokesperson, referring to the Basilica of Santa María Maggiore.
For the first time, more than a decade after leaving Argentina, the Pope has set a date for this long-awaited trip. In an interview on Italian television in January he assured that he planned to visit Polynesia in August and then, if he could, he would visit his homeland in the second half of 2024. “I want to go,” he reiterated. The problem now would no longer be a lack of will, but rather his fragile state of health at 87 years old, which forces him to use a wheelchair and avoid some acts, such as in the last Via Crucis on Good Friday.
“I am very sorry that he did not come, and I believe that, although he now says he wants to come, he will not do so due to health problems. She should have come earlier, regardless of the politics,” reproaches Marta Brusoni, a woman leaving the Easter Sunday mass in the parish of San Lucas. Her friend goes further: “Let him come, but don’t let anything happen, please. Let it be without violence.”
Very far from there, in the slums of Buenos Aires, they are also looking forward to him. In the midst of the electoral campaign in Argentina this fall, Marcó wrote a column denouncing the partisan politicization of ecclesiastical thought. He did it after the so-called villero priests, the priests of these neighborhoods, the poorest and most complicated in the Argentine capital, celebrated a massive mass condemning Milei for the insults he had uttered against Bergoglio. “Pope Francis often says that the Church belongs to everyone. I don’t think he said that about everyone except Milei,” Marcó reproaches them.
One of those who organized this mass was Lorenzo De Vedia, although there he is simply Father Toto. 24 years ago he arrived at the Virgen de los Milagros de Caacupé parish, located in village 21-24 in the Barracas neighborhood, the place where the Eucharist against the far-rightist was held. He denounces that since he has been here, more and more people in these precarious housing settlements need to order from the soup kitchens.
Everyone greets the priest, even though he is not dressed in a cassock, but rather in a simple turquoise T-shirt and a fanny pack. About 300,000 people live in the villages, many of them immigrants from nearby countries such as Paraguay. The church is decorated with a photograph of Carlos Mugica, the priest murdered at the hands of a far-right paramilitary force, known for his defense of the rights of the excluded. “Mugica’s death left a taste of little support from the ecclesiastical hierarchy and over time the church here became distant. During his time as archbishop, the Pope did a lot to bring people closer to the villages,” says Father Toto, who defends the urban integration of neighborhoods in which sewers and power lines are missing. Except in a few buildings, such as the health center or the school, there is no gas either.
It is a place with high rates of violence due to being drug trafficking points. Beto Romero, the school’s director, remembers how Cardinal Bergoglio used to come here on the bus from downtown, like anyone else, to drink mate with the neighbors. “He looked like a doctor, with his black wallet,” he notes. Virginia has a special affection for him because he was the one who baptized her son in the same parish. “I hope he comes back soon, if he feels strong,” he says. Here in the town we love him very much. “No one defends the poor like him.”
