Washington Post
Three days after white smoke billowed
from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel in March 2013, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires greeted the international press inside a cavernous Vatican audience hall. As he rose from a richly upholstered armchair, a pair of well-worn black shoes peeked out from underneath his new papal robes. He rejected the lavish red slippers of his office.
Previous pontiffs had traveled in the majestic comfort of a black limousine and lived in an opulent 10-room apartment overlooking St. Peter’s Square. Francis hitched rides on a Holy See minibus to his chosen quarters, a boardinghouse plunked behind a gas station. It remained his home.
On a trip to the Philippines in 2015, he discarded prepared remarks and spontaneously embraced a young girl who had asked him why God allows children to suffer the neglect of parents or the ills of drug abuse and prostitution. “She is the only one who has put a question for which there is no answer, and she wasn’t even able to express it in words but in tears,” he told the crowd.
From a desert stage on the plain of Ur, said to be the birthplace of Abraham — the Hebrew patriarch also revered by Christians and Muslims — he told a multi-faith crowd, “We need one another.”
In the document,
derisively dubbed “The Joy of Sex” in at least one conservative blog, Francis told married couples that they should not fear “a healthy sexual desire” and suggested that they start their days with a “morning kiss.”
In 2001, Argentina suffered a profound economic collapse that unleashed hunger and malnutrition
in what had been Latin America’s wealthiest nation. It was, perhaps, one of (then known as) Cardinal Bergoglio’s finest hours. He launched church-backed relief operations that offered food, medicine, job training and shelter to the needy.
Asked about gay priests by a journalist on a flight back to Italy from
Brazil in 2013 — early in Francis’s papacy — the pope memorably replied, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”
“May the church be a place of God’s mercy and hope, where all feel welcomed, loved, forgiven and encouraged to live according to the good life of the
Gospel, and to make others feel welcomed, loved, forgiven and encouraged, the church must be with doors wide open so that all may enter.”
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