Pope Francis Vocation Story
Pope
Francis was 16 years old and in love. It was 1953 and he had met the
young woman he hoped would agree to be his wife. The day of September 21
dawned and he was summoning the nerve to ask his sweetheart to marry
him at an al fresco lunch that his school held every year. Walking to
the event, he passed his local church and felt compelled to drop in for a
visit.
On
entering the church, Jorge noticed a priest he had never seen before.
It was Fr Duarte, a cleric who was very ill and slowly approaching death
but who still exuded an infectious holiness. He asked him to hear his
Confession. It was to be a moment that his life changed forever.
As
he spoke to Fr Duarte his soul was filled with a yearning to offer his
life to the Church. He would renounce his sweetheart and give all his
love to the Church. In his 2010 book-length interview with Sergio Rubin,
the then Cardinal Bergoglio reflected: “In that Confession, something
very rare happened to me ... It was a surprise, the astonishment of an
encounter. I realised that God was waiting for me.”
At
first he hid his vocation to the priesthood, telling his mother that he
wanted to study medicine. Impressed that her son had such noble
ambitions she did a clear-out of the attic and transformed it into his
study. Instead of dancing the tango or playing football, which were two
of his favourite hobbies, he gave his time to long hours of swotting up –
but not on medicine: he was reading theological books.
His
mother was shocked when she went to tidy the attic and found no medical
textbooks. Extremely agitated, she confronted her son. His answer
contained a hint of the Jesuit rhetorical skills he would later fully
develop: “I’m studying medicine, but medicine of the soul,” he said.
As
he settled into seminary life in the late 1950s he was certain of his
choice. But that certainty was challenged when he met a dazzling young
woman at a family wedding. On returning to the seminary, thoughts of the
young woman interrupted his prayers. “I could not pray during the
following week because when I went to pray, the girl appeared in my
mind,” he later said. It was a struggle to decide between pursuing the
young woman and remaining in seminary.
But
he re-committed himself to being a man of the cloth and was ordained on
December 13 1969, just four days before he turned 33.
During
his early years as a Jesuit, Fr Jorge grew in popularity and his
superiors held him up as their golden boy. In 1973, just months after
making his perpetual vows, he was made provincial superior, the leader
of all the Jesuits in Argentina.
An
enormous responsibility was placed on the shoulders of one so young and
he would be sorely tested, not only because of the Dirty War that raged
from 1976 to 1983 but also because the Jesuit order was splitting into
two blocs: liberal and conservative. What was happening inside the
Society of Jesus in the 1970s has come to characterise the worldwide
Church. Fr Bergoglio had to hold two sides of an order together.
Now
he has to hold the worldwide Church together. He is doing so not merely
by challenging progressives to be more loyal to the Magisterium or by
castigating conservatives for being closed-minded. He is also focusing
our minds on concrete charity and the need to be more self-giving.
To
understand Francis it is essential to grasp his strong devotion to St
Thérèse of Lisieux. When he was a cardinal he could be seen praying
before her statue. Pope Francis has adopted the Little Way into his
papacy. Just as the Little Flower was mocked by her fellow nuns, there
are those who jeer at the importance that Pope Francis places on taking
small steps to being more generous while combining piety with good
works.
When
Francis does a small act of kindness it seizes the imagination of a
global audience and encourages people to try to do similar things. Young
people who may feel the stirrings of a religious vocation have a good
role model in our Pope, who gave up at least two love interests and had
the intelligence to be a medical doctor but chose to be a doctor of the
soul, persevering through testing times in the 1970s that ultimately
prepared his nerves for holding the Office of Peter.
The
way the Pope is influencing young people was made real for me recently
when a young man told me that when he embarks on a priestly vocation he
would like to combine Pope Francis’s example with that of Fr Ray Blake,
the parish priest of St Mary Magdalen in Brighton. Like Francis, he
wants to encourage a young woman to continue her pregnancy. Like Fr
Blake, he wants celebrate the Extraordinary Form Mass and run a soup
kitchen.
When
people give a little they may get into a habit of giving more and more
and eventually give all of their self to the Church in the form of a
vocation to the religious life. In the Francis era it’s not merely about
what the Church can do for you, but also what you can do for the
Catholic Church.
