Francisco, date, joy, memory 04/22/25

Written by Jorge Fernandez Mindez

It was the first time that I knew Jorge Bergulio in the early days of January 1977, when Anna Maria’s mother, my partner at the time, told us, Esther Palstrino de Cariga, about a priest, and the Jesuit County in Buenos Aires, who was her friend.

Esther was a Marxist woman, a fighter who left her hometown of Paraguay as a political. Biochemistry, and upon her arrival at Buenos Aires, was a laboratory of cosmetics. There he started a young man who made friendships with him, a relatively cultured boy, serious, but he liked to read and cinema, football, tango, who was also doubtful between following his religious profession and entering the symposium or following a normal life, studying, and forming a family. Jorge Bergolio was 16 years old.

Esther gave him the recommended authors, proposed activities. It was Esther who convinced him that if the real yearning was the priesthood that he had to follow that call, even if he sacrificed everything else. This was done by the young Bergolio, who kept his friendship with Esther throughout her life, until she kidnapped her, in December 1977, tortured her and killed her from a live plane to the sea during the Argentine military dictatorship.

At the time was the Jesuit County in Buenos Aires, the founder of the mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Before he helped us marry the full confidentiality with Anna Maria, who was only 16 years old and was pregnant: Al -Jasaei was married to us was part of his team. A few weeks later, Anna Maria was kidnapped, was accepted in the detention camp and issued four months after we made it, especially Esther, which moved from Jimmy Carter to Bergolio itself.

We have seen Bergolio again, along with Bibiana and my daughter Anna, who was born in Sweden on the same day that her grandmother Astair was kidnapped and killed, on August 7 in her small apartment in Santa Marta (90 square meters), in Rome, when Pope Francis was already. I was not a believer when we met him in 1977 and I am not now. But then, I was now surprised by simplicity, confrontation, and confrontation with a man with a huge spiritual (and political) power that received us as a grandfather who meets his grandchildren, without any formal, greets us with hand and hugs, and encourages Tuteo. On that day, I wanted to talk about her friend Esther, Jeddah, my daughter Anna, Anna Maria Cariga, and my first wife, who is now a famous psychologist and director of the Institute of Human Rights Studies at Atlantis University.

Once we arrived, we mentioned Francisco how Esther met and tells us that she was the woman who taught him to think, and above all thinking politically.

When many years later, in 2005, the remains of Esther and some other kidnapped mothers were found on December 8, 1977 (they were alive from a plane to the sea and their currents took to the beach, where the settlers were buried in a common grave), Bergujuli was already the cards from Buenos Aires, in an unpublished state. She was kidnapped and as he said, in August, Francisco, where they saw the last time freedom.

The dome of the Argentine Church was sometimes involved and in other than the indifference of repression, death, torture and disappearance. Bergolio, like many other young priests, was very far from that church dome. As a preservation of the Jesuits, disappearance reports, were killed, and they were tortured. At the San Miguel symposium, its headquarters began asylum, to hide the persecuted persons.

On August in Rome, he told us that he learned about the arrest of a young man, a worker, married, and he has two young daughters and that he is sure they took him to barracks close to the Air Force. Request to see him. They told him that there was no. He spoke with the head of the guard who seemed to him, he told us, “a good man”, he told him again that he was sure that the detainee was there and that he knew that this man is now living in hell, but everyone who took him if they did not return will also end in hell. The security guard secretly sought. He told him that on that night at a certain time and place, they will give the detainee. That night from a mobile car he threw, he was injured, tortured but alive. He was accepted in the Italian Hospital and Bergulio asked the consulate from Italy to make him leave the country with his family. When the airports were controlled, they came out on a loading ship towards Italy. Now he lives in northern Rome and visits the Pope regularly.

In August when we received Francisco, it was angry that a group of deputies, near the Vice President of Argentina, Victoria Villarwell, a deprivation of the dictatorship, would have been visiting to visit garbage and torture who were benefiting a permanent chain of crimes against humanity in a low security prison in Iziza, near the Buenos Payers. Among them is Alfredo Estez, the seas that infiltrated the collections of the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, saying that he was looking for his lost sister, who referred to mothers who had to kidnap (including Esther) and two French nuns. Astiz actively participated in their torture and underlined until they were killed.

The Pope told us that he did not understand it. He told us the story of a priest who became a priest of the army and participated in the torture of the detainees. After arresting and condemning the dictatorship. After years, he was released and asked to live in retired priests. Francisco prevented him, that man who described him as terrifying, could not be a man from the church.

I then told him that Borges said that one should not talk about revenge or forgiveness, that forgetfulness is the only revenge and the only celebration, but Milan Condera said that history is a struggle of memory against forgetfulness. Francisco told me that forgetfulness, forgiveness, can be an individual thing, but memory should always remain. We ask him if forgiveness is not the essence of the church. He doubts that, he says that sometimes, but for societies, it is very difficult to forgive, and that this type of fact should always remember not to repeat it.

He told us about the importance of dialogue to end polarization and ignorance. It is estimated, above all, dialogue, exchanging ideas, essential goodness of people. Dialogue is the only thing that can break polarization and that is why it is always important to enhance it.

Today tells us of violence in Mexico and how children grow, these children who have no other than that do not know what love is, tenderness, that when they want to care for a blow, he told us that these children who do not know what tenderness is the place of criminals, and beating, and they need greatly to do this meaning. He was confident in Mexico because, as I said, jokingly, seriously, that in our country they are Catholics and others of the atheists, but they are all Guadalobanos, a trade union base.

We asked that, above all, do not forget joy. Francisco, that Pergolio, whom I met in my first youth, never lost him, did not abandon joy, simplicity, humanity, his feeling of justice and a generous life with everyone. And they have never forgotten the loyalties and condemnation that accompanied him, from those distant bi mence to eternal Rome, where his journey ended.