of high school trips, it was a new threshold of exhaustion.
We certainly felt like we were on the margins that week, whether we wanted to be there or not. Tired and hungry, we shared the life of the city and its pilgrims for seven days, but we also shared the life of the slums in a small way. Each morning brought fresh adventures and new encounters with the needy.
From Paraguay to the Slums of Rio
By heading into Rio’s slums to visit the poor that week, it appeared to us that Francis was living out his message: Go to the margins and see whom you find there. Don’t give advice or try to interpret the suffering of others, but place yourself with them in solidarity. Talk and pray with them.
After a weeklong pilgrimage to ruined Jesuit missionary sites in Paraguay, including the magnificent Iguazu Falls and other places depicted in the film The Mission, our little group already felt a bit on the margins by the time we arrived in Rio for World Youth Day.
During the week in Paraguay, daily prayer and faith sharing accompanied our interactions with people. We even prayed before the exposed heart of St. Roque González, a Jesuit missionary known as the “apostle of Paraguay,” in its glass reliquary at a Jesuit high school in the capital of Asunción. In 1628, an Indian witch doctor, jealous of González’s influence over the natives, conspired successfully to kill the priest with an axe.
In Paraguay, the unexpected became routine. At one point, our bus broke down, and we went on a five-mile hike through the subtropical fields and forests, meeting more farm animals than people along the way. Another day, we celebrated Mass in the grassy ruins of an ancient Jesuit mission church.
We met indigenous peoples. Coming to a Guarani Indian village, accessible only by foot paths and bridges through the forest some distance from the nearest active Jesuit mission in San Ingacio Guazu, we spent a day bartering with the chief as our boys kicked a soccer ball around with the village kids. The village consisted of a few dirt paths and thatched-roof huts; the chief wore a soccer jersey.
Our students loved the first week in Paraguay perhaps even more than the second week in Rio. Like Francis, they seemed to enjoy visiting with people more than attending the big public events.
And the parents supported our students. Rather than spending money on a summer vacation to Disney or Cancún, the families of our students paid to send them on a religious pilgrimage to visit Jesuit missions and pray with the Holy Father in South America.
Instead of playing video games and sitting on the couch all summer, our students spent two weeks living in a foreign-language environment, sleeping on trains, and singing songs with young people from other countries. They loved it.
But Pope Francis, then seventy-six years old, seemed to be outpacing all of us.
Using his police escort to full advantage, Francis traveled all over Rio during the week of World Youth Day, appearing to us in fleeting glimpses on news broadcasts and at the beach each night as we crowded to attend the various liturgies he led there.
Despite an exhausting schedule, the Holy Father took his time with each person he met. On the day his plane landed in Rio, admirers mobbed Francis’s car when it took a wrong turn after leaving the airport, alarming security personnel. Smiling, Francis simply rolled down his window and started chatting with people who rushed up to the car. He was in no hurry.
Large crowds greeted him everywhere with a musical chant, delivered in a cadence familiar to World Youth Day veterans: “Papa Francisco!”
In the open motorcade that took Francis to the sanctuary platform at Copacabana Beach each day, he frequently stopped to bless babies and talk with onlookers.
One night, our group watched in surprise as pilgrims scrambled up trees along the beach to get a better look at Francis. Like Zacchaeus the tax collector, a short man who climbed a tree to see Jesus in Luke 19, they were rewarded by frequent stops from the papal motorcade as they waved from the branches.
We could feel the excitement in the air. When Francis stopped unexpectedly right in front of us that night, the screaming crowd around us surged forward with a groan, causing a screaming woman at the front to pass out from excitement. Paramedics loaded her onto a nearby ambulance.
The pope gave several public talks every bit as electrifying as his personal interactions, delivering the exhortations in a form of Spanish so clear that almost anyone could understand him just by listening to the tone of his words and watching his body language.
Go to the margins, Francis kept saying in Spanish, repeating it in his talks and in the closing Mass homily. See whom you find and hear what they have to say. Share the joy of your faith, using words if necessary.
Who was on the margins in Rio? What did they have to say to our group? And what could we possibly offer them in return?
Even as our South American pilgrimage was ending, our journey to God was only beginning.
Waking Up to Poverty
But back to Copacabana Beach, where we slept before the papal Mass. When I awoke on the beach that morning, shivering in my black Jesuit cassock and poncho in the winds of Brazil’s summery winter, something felt wrong. The sky above my head was still dark. I wasn’t supposed to be up yet.
Forcing myself into a sitting position, I suddenly realized the freezing tide of the ocean had washed over half of our group. Another Jesuit was shouting for everyone to wake up and move.
It turned out that our group — like hundreds of others along the shoreline — was sleeping too close to the water’s edge for high tide.
That tide washed away some personal items and all of our boxes of food, but it failed to sweep away any freshmen, despite jokes to that effect from a few upperclassmen. It was sometime after 3:00 a.m., and most of our fellow pilgrims remained fast asleep.
After taking stock of our losses, we moved to the roadside sidewalk at the edge of the beach to dry out and close our eyes for the last few hours of darkness before Pope Francis came for Mass.
Clark Bulleit, a football player who eventually became valedictorian of his class, later described this day as the happiest moment of his life. In his valedictory address at graduation in May 2015, Bulleit said:
So what does make me happy? Long walks on the beach and beautiful sunsets? No. Actually, the time in my life where I was most happy, I was sleeping on the sidewalk, dehydrated and malnourished during my trip to Brazil for World Youth Day. I was happy because, there, I was completely unconcerned with myself, and in full communion with my fellow people and God himself.
Pushed to the edge of his personal limits, Bulleit had somehow realized his longing for God in this moment, and he woke up on the sidewalk in a deep state of consolation.
Not all of us slumbered so peacefully. Despite all of my Jesuit mind tricks, I couldn’t go back to sleep again after we moved from the beach.
Huddled on the sidewalk, I surrendered myself instead to the various thoughts drifting through my mind. Trying to forget the pin pricks in my back caused by sleeping on the sand, I began meditating on the events of our trip.
At sunrise a few hours later, I suddenly recalled the question my student had asked me in March. “What if the next pope is a Jesuit?”
Yeah, right, I remembered thinking. What if pigs could fly? God sure
