Pope Francis: San Lorenzo Club Member 88235 – A Lasting Legacy in Buenos Aires
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A report by CNN
Buenos Aires, Argentina — Pope Francis never returned to his native Argentina after he became head of the Roman Catholic Church. But some of the faithful here believe he sent a final message home, in the unlikeliest but perhaps most appropriate of ways.
According to a report by CNN, Francis was a lifelong soccer fan — and occasional youth goalkeeper — and a card-carrying member of his favorite club, San Lorenzo. And it’s the number on that card that’s become the talk of Buenos Aires. The number that’s causing the stir is assigned to “regular member” Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Pope’s birth name: 88235.
As CNN reports, Ramiro Rodríguez, a 23-year-old San Lorenzo fan, said, “It has to be destiny.” Rodríguez arrived wearing a rosary over his team shirt at a small chapel that’s the spiritual birthplace of the club, for a Mass to celebrate the life of Francis. He added, “I went to the Vatican in 2019 and I wore my San Lorenzo (jersey), of course. I didn’t see him, but I knew he was there with all his energy and healing the world and that’s very significant to me.”
The CNN report also noted that person after person has pointed out that Francis was 88 when he died, at 2:35 a.m. Argentina time on Easter Monday. For Rodríguez, it was another otherworldly, even divine, connection.
In a preface the late Pope contributed for an upcoming book by Cardinal Angelo Scola, he left an eloquent message about ageing and dying. “Death is not the end of everything, but the beginning of something,” he wrote.
CNN spoke to Omar Abboud, a prominent Muslim leader in Argentina, who formed The Institute of Interreligious Dialogue with then-Cardinal Bergoglio and Rabbi Daniel Goldman in 2002. Abboud said he last visited the Pope in January, when the two spoke of artificial intelligence and how it could be regulated. He said he learned much from his friend Jorge and their discussions about literature and sacred texts.
As CNN reports, Abboud knew how quick-witted his friend he still knew as Jorge was and how much he enjoyed a joke, but never at anyone else’s expense. “He has a different kind of humor,” Abboud said of the Pope, “a kind of joke that was with the people, not over the people. He has an intelligent, smart humor.”
The CNN report also highlighted that flowers and messages are left in tribute at his childhood home, a square where he once played kickabout with other kids, and the church where he heard the call from God to join the priesthood. That church, the Basílica de San José de Flores, has an engraving marking the date when Francis received his vocation, while in the confessional — September 21, 1953.
Seven days of official mourning were declared to honor Francis in Argentina, but they won’t all be filled with sadness. The Mass held at San Lorenzo’s chapel ended more as a pep rally and there will be another crowd for the soccer team’s next match on Saturday, a few hours after Francis is laid to rest in Rome.
The team will wear commemorative jerseys to honor the late pontiff, and there is talk a new stadium will bear the name “Papa Francisco.” In a sign of his humility, Francis once wrote he didn’t much like that idea.
Francis said his love for sport was not only for the competition — and San Lorenzo is only one of several teams in soccer-mad Buenos Aires, the capital of soccer-mad Argentina, whose men are the current World Cup champions — but for the participation.
He believed sports, especially team games, get young people away from their screens and shuttered virtual lives and teach them to be out in the world.
The club may have lost Regular Member 88235 but Buenos Aires will remember him.
A homemade flag at the cathedral linked Francis and San Lorenzo with a simple phrase that seems to apply to Buenos Aires today: “Mis Dos Amores,” my two loves.
Francis reciprocated that love, writing in his book “Hope:” “My homeland, for which I continue to feel just the same great, profound love. The people for whom I pray every day, who formed me, who trained and then offered me to others. My people.”
In Flores, the working-class neighborhood where Francis lived and worked, a woman left a note outside his childhood home. It read: “You were one of us — an Argentine — and a gift to the world.”
Source: Buenos Aires, Argentina CNN
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