Autobiography. The Childhood and Youth of Francisco

The grandparents and father of Jorge Bergoglio, Mario, were Italians who headed for Buenos Aires in the early 1930s during the consulate of Benito Mussolini.

There they faced the harsh recession, which would throw them to misery were not the providential help of an Italian priest, Enrique Pozzoli, who put them in contact with those who lent them the money needed to start a business. “Almacén Bergoglio would sell food genres of all kinds, from flour to beans, from oil to wine. Also retail products, as long as customers could take containers and bottles from home,” Francisco remembered in Hope – The Autobiography (Ed. Nascent).

It was also thanks to this priest that Jorge Mario’s father and mother met, having married on December 12, 1935. The firstborn would be born a year and five days later, on December 17, 1936. Then the family grew, until five brothers were told. « Like the fingers of a hand, we brothers have always been very united. »

From two years to 21 he always lived in the same house for about 20 years until 21 has always recurred in the same ground floor, with three bedrooms and a bathroom. “A simple housing in a simple neighborhood, all low houses; there was a quiet and peaceful air, a climate of trust in others as in the future,” he said. The grandparents’ house was two steps, as did the yard where he and other kids played soccer. Jorge Mario was not a Maradona – who would come to know – not a Messi. Still, he had fun with a rag ball: “I always liked to play the ball and I didn’t mind not being a big deal,” he says, “in Buenos Aires called paw to those who were like me. Which means having two left feet. But played. It was often the goalkeeper; This role is also good: it teaches how to look at reality in the face, to face problems; You may not know where that ball broke out, but you should try to grasp it anyway. As it happens in life. ”

And continues: « Playing is a right, and there is the sacrosanto right not to be champions. Behind every ball that rolls there is always a boy that his dreams and his aspirations, his body and his spirit. »

Interestingly, in small Jorge did not want to be a professional soccer player (much less priest). Your first vocation was another.

“There are often shopping to the street market with grandmother and mom, and among all newsstands, I was fascinated that of the man of the butcher: with the white apron tied in the back and the sharp cleaver in the big pocket that, like a kangaroo, had in the womb, in which he stuck the money. Time, I responded to those who asked me what I would like to do when it was great to be carried out!

On Sunday they went to family mass and returned to the house for a great meal “with five and their dishes” – although they always stress that they did not live wide.

Family Faith

“It was a serene childhood. It seemed to happen extremely naturally, the joke, the school, the study, as well as religious education. The teachings of faith were also learned with the same natural simplicity: it was like a language. He learned to speak and learned to believe that the transmission of faith is done in dialect, not with school or free, but in the way he communicates in a family.”

This first childhood idyll ended when his father was 14, he announced that he would work for two months of vacation, cleaning in a sock factory. Studies followed at a technical school in chemical industries.

September 21, 1953, the Spring Day In Argentina, something « big » happened to him. “You wrote somewhere you were going to declare me to a girlfriend,” he says. He also had his crush, as he assumes, « but it wasn’t that. » What was important to him was the encounter with Father Carlos Duarte Ibarra, who somehow secretly convinced him that he had to become a priest. He didn’t tell him anyone, the mother thought he was going to be a doctor.

In early 1956 he joined the Immaculate Diocesan Seminary of Villa Devoto, where he narrowly died with a flu. Two years later, he began the novitiate in the Jesuits, having obtained the diploma in philosophy in 1963.