of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
After glancing at Cardinal Bergoglio’s photo and briefly reading some of his biography out loud, I told the class I was reasonably certain — as a fellow Jesuit — that this guy would not get elected.
My hopeful student, of course, was not so sure. He asked: “But what if it happens? What if he gets elected anyway?”
I just shrugged.
In my four remaining classes that day, I repeated this whole ritual, showing my freshmen a photo of the Jesuit cardinal and denying he would be elected pope.
According to the Gospels, St. Peter denied Jesus three times on one occasion. In five different class periods, I had denied that the Holy Spirit would ever pick a Jesuit to succeed St. Peter.
By the end of the school day, I felt pretty satisfied. We had covered the basics of papal conclaves, and I had put the “Jesuit pope” silliness to rest. Or so I thought.
A few days later, on March 13, we were watching the white smoke on a live feed in class when God decided not to heed my prediction.
“Habemus papam!”
Twenty-five teenage boys turned to stare at me in shock as Cardinal Bergoglio walked to the edge of a balcony in St. Peter’s Square, dressed in white as the newly elected Pope Francis.
Television cameras from Tampa’s FOX and ABC news affiliates, invited to record our school’s on-the-spot reaction to the announcement of a new pope, captured our joyful surprise in the theology classrooms as students erupted in cheers. They also interviewed our students in the hallway after Francis appeared on the balcony.
Asked his thoughts about having a Latin American pope for the first time in history, one of my students, whose great-uncle was a cardinal in the Dominican Republic, told ABC Action News: “I guess he’s reppin’ for us.”
I was also interviewed by ABC, and I admitted that my own reaction was “utter disbelief.”
I, like nearly every other Jesuit in the world, had been wrong on this one. Pigs were flying on the winds of the Holy Spirit. Hell had frozen over and left me shivering, dressed in short sleeves.
To his credit, the new pope on the balcony looked just as surprised as we did. After waving shyly and saying a few words of greeting, he bowed his head and asked the crowd in St. Peter’s Square to pray for him. It was a profound moment of silence that our students shared with the rest of the world through the classroom projector screens.
As chapel bells rang out across campus, the school president soon announced our first Jesuit pope over the intercom for students and faculty who hadn’t been watching it live. In my classroom, the boys snapped photos of the new pope on screen with their iPhones and sent them to family members.
The next several hours became a blur.
By 10:00 that night, I was out with another Jesuit retrieving liturgical torches and framing a photo of Pope Francis for a solemn Eucharistic benediction in our chapel the next morning.
We found an image of Pope Francis’s first appearance on the Internet and had it blown up into portrait-sized prints at Kinko’s. Then we inserted this image into an old frame, laying it flat over a portrait of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Another copy of the print was soon hanging in my classroom, astounding my students that I had obtained one within hours of the papal election.
Two more television news crews, coming from our local NBC and CBS affiliates, descended in the morning to film our school’s solemn benediction of thanksgiving for the election of Pope Francis. Yellow and white papal bunting hung down from above the chapel doors for benediction, with 750 students and faculty erupting in applause, shouts, and whistles before incense from two thuribles filled the space.
Fr. Richard C. Hermes, S.J., the school president, inspired this ovation with a memorable line before the liturgy. Stepping up to the pulpit, he declared: “Well, I’m not yet fifty, and I’ve seen snow in New Orleans on Christmas day, I’ve ridden on a camel in the deserts of Egypt, and now I’ve seen a Jesuit elected pope!”
Meanwhile, Francis wasn’t holding back from setting the tone of his papacy. He had already signaled that he would be the pope of the marginalized, calling on Catholics by his words and deeds to go out to the peripheries of society as missionaries of God’s love.
The new pontiff delivered this message with an informal and simple personal style. He mingled with ordinary people as he pleased, confusing Vatican security teams. Personally austere, he wore an unadorned white cassock over his clerical black pants and black shoes, confounding papal fashionistas.
Francis also renounced the papal apartments in the Vatican’s apostolic palace, taking up residence in a small room at the Santa Marta guesthouse. Checking out of the room where he had stayed during the conclave, he paid his own bill with a credit card.
Asked later about this decision, he said he knew with one look that he couldn’t stay in the papal apartments by himself. He needed to live around people, because, as he said, it was good for his “physical health.”
International media jumped on every detail of the Argentinian pope’s first appearances, including the selection of St. Francis of Assisi — the saint of the poor — as his namesake. Not only was he the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, but he was also the first to take the name of St. Francis, the medieval playboy-turned-beggar who founded the religious order we know as the Franciscans.
News agencies throughout the world were soon airing a St. Francis-like photo of Cardinal Bergoglio riding the subway in Buenos Aires during his time as archbishop. In this photo he wears a simple black raincoat, closed around the neck, and he looks like everyone else on the train.
Pope Francis further endeared himself to world opinion by displaying a ready sense of humor in his first audience with journalists at the Vatican on March 16, 2013.
Noting that Pope Clement XIV had suppressed his Jesuit order in 1773, plunging the Society of Jesus into near-extinction until its universal restoration in 1814, Francis joked that he had considered taking the papal name “Clement XV.”
“That way you can take revenge on Clement XIV for suppressing the Society of Jesus,” Francis reported one cardinal telling him after the election.
But it wasn’t just Francis’s public persona that won people’s hearts. The world soon discovered that there was substance behind the popular style of this man who, not long before his election as pope, had submitted his age-mandated resignation as archbishop and started planning his retirement.
A Missionary Church
Through bold gestures, Francis soon began to share the weightier message of his papacy, challenging Catholics to greater depths of belief and practice.
Within three months of his election, the new pope finished and published an encyclical letter on faith (Lumen Fidei) started by his predecessor, Benedict XVI. He elevated third-world cardinals to positions of global leadership, launching efforts to reform the Vatican’s bureaucracy. To get feedback on these efforts, he created an advisory commission of cardinals, appointing one of them (Cardinal George Pell of Australia) as his point man to oversee a financial overhaul of the scandal-plagued Vatican Bank.
In a touching gesture of respect, Francis even met with his predecessor at Castel Gandolfo, where
