The legend of the Gray Angel of Flores ensures that, as time passes, dreams will be longer and vigils shorter […] Sensitive Men will dream that an Angel caresses them with its wings, and Legend Refuters will dream that they are awake and that angels do not exist.
[…] the sensitive men of Flores […] [son] spirits so prone to metaphysical bullying had a sound and constant notion of help in the world of dreams. Alejandro Dolina
The Flores neighborhood is one of the most important in the Federal Capital and with a powerful history that goes back to 1790 when the lands of that neighborhood passed into the hands of Juan Diego Flores, and he became the owner of most of the place. Ramón Francisco Flores, his son and his heir, would start the birth of what became known as “the lands of Flores”.
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This land that was prolific for the inspiration of writers specialized in the “macaneo” of the national picaresque such as Roberto Arlt, Alejandro Dolina or César Aira, shows the world his favorite son who, behind the goodness of the neighborhood and the innocent mischief of the inhabitants of Flores, barely reveals the ability and determination of a leader who is willing to leave his mark to “take care of the common home”, as he told him in the encyclical “Laudato si” of 2015, so often cited.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the son of the Flores neighborhood, 86-year-old Argentine Jesuit, former Archbishop of Buenos Aires until March 13, 2013 when the conclave held following the resignation of Benedict XVI elected him as the highest authority of the church. Bergoglio was the first of the popes to choose named following Francis in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi who in life was a renowned religious and mystic who, following a revelation, abandoned his comfortable life as the son of a wealthy merchant to opt for a life of religious service that would lead him to found an order that still upholds the values of poverty, virtue and penance. San Francisco said that material detachment gave him immense spiritual freedom.
The papal name of Bergoglio was not random since he was already recognized in Buenos Aires for being a simple leader. But above all for being a great pastor, very close to the people who lived in a common apartment on the third floor of the Curia building next to the Metropolitan Cathedral even when he held the highest hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the country. Until he left for Rome, never to return, he visited the popular neighborhoods, he traveled by public transport and dressed as a simple priest and in winter he wore a black overcoat.
Although he did not flaunt his cardinal attributes, everyone recognized that he was a priest with a great personality who showed great talent for leadership and politics. He was always a political priest who, ordained in 1963, became provincial superior of the Order of San Ignacio de Loyola at the age of 10, between 1973 and 1979. This position of power in the midst of a military dictatorship earned him various references that highlight some aspects positive and some negative
Above all regarding his activity during the dictatorship, his attitude of little commitment is questioned in the case of two priests from his congregation, the Jesuits. These Jesuits were Franz Jalics (of Hungarian origin) and Orlando Yorio, who on May 23, 1976, were kidnapped in a mega-operation in Villa 1.11.14 in Bajo Flores while they were catechizing. Both were kept kidnapped and tortured for 5 months.
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Back then, and for a while, the kidnapped priests believed that Bergoglio had ratted them out. However, by the year 2000, Jalics had retracted his accusations and had reconciled in a meeting with Bergoglio. By 2013, following the election of Pope Francis, he received the priest who then lived in Germany at the Vatican. He died on February 13, 2021 in his native Hungary in peace and with his relationship with Pope Francis restored. According to Jalics, the first was a highly significant meeting. It was a moment of definitive clarification of the facts that was ratified later when Bergoglio was already Francisco. Papal life served to save the world from that confusing and complex situation definitively when Jalics had the opportunity to make public that he flatly denied that Jorge Bergoglio had denounced him before the military junta. He stated then that he felt almost compelled “to correct the comments that were circulating.”
Bergoglio recounted his close collaborators, that when leaving for Italy he had a certain feeling that it might be an alternative but he was not certain, although as always when the conclave met, he was ready and prepared to accept the call of the Church.
After reaching the papacy, he began to work on the difficult tasks that were pending to be resolved, already at the beginning he gave signs of a different action that would inaugurate a new stage of the papacy, among the progressives, conservatives, and corrupt.
– July 8, 2013 to assume his first trip as Pope, where he criticizes the “globalization of indifference”. chooses the Italian island of Lampedusa, a major gateway to Europe for immigrants, July 11, 2013: Launches a reform of the Vatican penal code to fight child sexual abuse and corruption within the Church. In July of the same year, returning from Brazil, “if someone is gay and is seeking the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”
– December 22, 2014: Before cardinals, he lists the “15 diseases” that plague the Roman Curia, the central government of the Church.
– 2015: publishes the second encyclical“Laudato Si'”, dedicated to ecology.
– 2016: holds a historic meeting with the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill, following the schism between the Eastern Church and Rome.
– 2018: Francisco acknowledges “serious errors” in his handling of child sexual abuse cases in Chile and apologizes. And he announces the first agreement between China and the Holy See on the appointment of bishops.
– 2019: In the same line that had been raised, he expels ex-US cardinal Theodore McCarrick from the priesthood, whom the Vatican found guilty of sexual abuse once morest minors and adults. And then Francis convenes a Vatican summit on the sexual abuse of minors by clergy.
– 2020: He flatly rules out a proposal for married men as priests and women deaconesses in the Amazon.
– That same year Francis accepted the resignation of the powerful Italian cardinal Angelo Becciu, accused of embezzlement from the Vatican in 2013 that resulted in losses of millions of euros. He also publishes “Fratelli tutti”, regarding fraternity and social friendship that is particularly critical of “neoliberal dogma” and to the surprise of many, also that year in a documentary, Francisco says that he is in favor of civil unions between people of the same sex. Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God and have the right to a family. No one should be expelled or feel miserable regarding it.”
– 2021: Francisco undergoes successful colon surgery and leaves the hospital following 10 days. And he also limits the Latin Mass, drawing the ire of conservative Catholics.
– Regarding the war in 2022: Following the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, Francis makes a rare visit to the Russian embassy to the Holy See to express his concerns regarding the war to the ambassador.
– 2022: begins decentralization of the church with the new Apostolic Constitution to end with the reorganization of the Curia and also travels to Canada to personally apologize to indigenous survivors of abuses in Church-run schools from the late 19th century to the 1990s .
His ailments do not prevent him from keeping up to date with the multiple occupations that the papacy demands of him or with his beloved San Lorenzo and he always takes a moment to answer, personally, in his own handwriting, letters to friends and to those who come close to him. with gifts or worries as footnotes.
He continues with a particular character that manages to unite the strength of the definition with the sympathy of a good shepherd. He continues to mistrust some of those he keeps more out of duty than anything else in the Vatican structure.
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He is very busy lately because he wants to finish his work to leave a legacy. It is aware that the restructuring that began must continue and remain on trackHe speeds up time because he knows that at some point the end will come and his enormous pride would not allow him to leave something unresolved.
Today he is the most influential Argentine in the world and shows that he went out like the Gray Angel from Flores to the world to go around doing good with a touch of healthy mischief and neighborly solidarity “like the old days.”
The internal political controversies that are woven from gestures or words that he says are very small outside the country before such a figure. Also, as he taught us, we are not the ones to judge each other’s actions. We need to review his performance in order to be aware of the important change that he is generating in his Father Bergoglio way with simplicity and the stridency of someone who travels on the subway like any other priest, but with the forcefulness of that bishop of Buenos Aires who it went from the humblest neighborhoods to the most exalted.
That bishop whose pulse did not tremble to fight economic and moral corruption within the Church, but also outside, without fear of confronting whoever he should, although concerned to maintain his warmth as a pastor by not offending or angering out of the ordinary. necessary.
Whoever judges puts himself in the place of God and by doing this he is heading towards a certain defeat in life. And he will live in confusion, exchanging the speck in his brother’s eye for the beam that obstructs his view. (Francisco Pope proudly Argentine).
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