The 10 years of papacy are also the 15 of a prophetic event in the mission of Francis

No one knows if he dad francisco one day he will return to the country where he was born. He tenth year of his pontificate it will be accomplished in Rome and perhaps he will die in the land of the mission, Italy, like his Jesuit predecessors who left Europe for the unknown lands of the East and died there without going back on their not. The fact is that the tenth anniversary which is about to be fulfilled coincides with an event which will not only give him the opportunity to see his compatriots again, but will also highlight a dimension of his pontificate which finds its origin precisely in Argentina. I am referring to this attention to the marginalized which could be summarized in a few words such as “drugs”, “trafficking”, “prostitution”, “emigration” and for which others such as “slums”, “poverty” and “exclusion” would serve as indicators of the contexts where the former are mainly found. He is not free to retain these traits from the discourse of Bergoglio bishop who later continued in that of dad francisco. And also not a particular moment which, ten years after of his departure from Buenos Aires to Rome with only a small suitcase as luggage, takes on particular importance in this sense.

Many in Argentina remember that Holy Thursday March 2008, when the Bishop Bergoglio bent down to wash the feet of seven young people who were starting a drug treatment program in a crowded district of the capital, “village 21”, as it is usually abbreviated to distinguish it from all the others that are springing up in the Argentine capital and its surroundings. The basin of water was carried from one foot to the other by a 46-year-old priest, Jose Maria di Paolawhich in time would be known as “Father Pepper”. That day, as one of those present at the ceremony still remembers, Cardinal Bergoglio took a very young girl by the hand and an old woman by the other, and said that between these two hands, one smooth and soft, the other wrinkled and brown, past “the path of life, from its beginning to its end”. Later, he cut the ribbon placed at the entrance of the first house of christwhich, in Bergoglio’s words, would be “the house of jesus where, with his mother María and his father José, one learns to love and to be loved, to laugh and to cry, to thank and to ask, to celebrate and to suffer”. Where “one always feels understood, listened to and valued, where love and tenderness are never denied, where one learns to love poverty, humility, work and effort, honesty, consistency, patience and the knowledge of tolerating injustice, knowing how to wait for God’s timing.” A whole program, as we can see, of what the Foyers will try to be over time and throughout their development.

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The recovery center, the first, bore the name of a Chilean saint, San Alberto Hurtado and, like those founded by the Jesuit canonized in 2005 by Benedict XVIIt was called “the house”. It was the start of a process, as he said Bergoglio, a path that has never been interrupted since then, a route that has multiplied the number of houses to reach two hundred and even more today. Because this preoccupation of the time with freeing the victims of drug slavery intercepted a serious and widespread problem in Argentine society, especially in urban pockets of poverty and marginalization. Houses, hostels, have sprouted up everywhere, and thousands of young people frequent them. Over time, they have developed a method of progressive steps, a combination of specialists and strong links with the community of the neighborhoods and villages where they are located.

These houses – those who entered them broken and came out whole, the thousands of young people who saw the light at the end of the tunnel that wanted to swallow them – make a pilgrimage through Argentina that will end on the eve of March 13 in the Basilica of Luján, religious and popular heart of the country. So far, they have traveled four thousand kilometers, touched fifteen provinces, reaching even in the most extreme – Tierra del Fuego – nearly forty cities, seven shrines, prisons, schools, popular neighborhoods, aboriginal communities and hospitals, and occupied squares to convey a message that was more visual than reasoned: that it is possible to get out of the clutches of drugs. As heard at the 2007 Latin American Church summit in Aparecida, Brazil, which many commentators say catapulted Bergoglio. There was something prophetic at that moment that would later mark his entire pontificate: the centrality of poverty in the mission of the Church. And once again these words from the beginning return: trafficking, prostitution, emigration, drugs. To the latter, to its dissemination, to its consumption, to the drama of drug addiction, the Latin American bishops gathered in the Brazilian sanctuary recognized the nature of a pandemic, like the one that struck the continent fifteen years later. A pandemic which, like covid, is “an oil stain that invades everything”, according to point 422 of the final document, which “It recognizes no borders, neither geographical nor human, and attacks rich and poor countries, children, young people, adults and old people, men and women.”

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