CLOSE-UP
at the heart of our need

THE REPERCUSSION
“He doesn’t speak
to the crowd, but to me”
Not everybody is like Patti Smith, but everyone shared the desire sparked in her that March 13th to know more about the man who came out onto the Loggia of Blessings and greeted everyone with his unexpected, “Good evening.” Many other “far-off” people thought they had definitively distanced themselves from the Church, but instead were touched by the surprise of Pope Francis. It is a phenomenon whose dimensions cannot be measured and that cannot be caged in by sociological frameworks, because it involves absolutely normal people.

by Giuseppe Frangi

“The evening of March 13th...” This phenomenon of the “far off” coming closer perhaps best documents the newness of Pope Francis. Patti Smith was in Rome for a concert and wanted to slip in with the crowd at the Wednesday General Audience to see him close up. In one of her hit songs she sang, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” She defined herself as “not Catholic” because she is impatient with dogmas, but she said she felt happy in the midst of the crowd at Saint Peter’s, “in a gathering full of love and life, even there, where there were people who were suffering or disabled.” And the Pope? “Seeing him so close up is illuminating; you understand that his relationship with the people is true, that he loves the children and the mothers, that he has a word and attention for everyone. He reminded me of Jesus, when He said, ‘Let the little children come to me.’”
A Pope who speaks to the far off. He speaks, for example, to Susanna, 48, married, with a 17-year-old daughter, and author of radio and television programs. She burned her bridges with the Church when she was 12, and over time the chasm widened. That evening of March 13th she was at work. Her colleagues insisted on watching the live coverage of the “Habemus Papam,” but if it had been up to her, she wouldn’t even have turned on the TV. “It didn’t interest me. I continued working as if nothing had happened, until I heard that ‘Good evening.’ I raised my head right away. It was something unexpected, immediately familiar, that in an instant made me set aside years of distrust. Then there was his request to receive our blessing, and I saw in it the admission of a sense of limitedness that struck me.” Susanna confesses that after that moment she sought to follow Pope Francis’ movements whenever possible. “He strikes me, because when he speaks he doesn’t seem to be talking to a crowd, but to you.” After many years, she also felt the need to cross the threshold of a church once again and attend Mass. “Yes, at Sant’Anna, near the Vatican, which is on my street,” she recounts. “It happens that I go in there to say a prayer.”
Chiara also works in television. She is 38 and her Catholic formation is by now a mere flicker of a memory. She certainly would never have imagined being in the square on Palm Sunday to listen to the Pope’s Angelus. “His human friendliness won me over,” she recounts. As an observer of humanity she adds, “He’s someone who establishes relationships of complicity with everyone, starting with the children.” And there has also been a great return to Confession. “It is the most complicated sacrament for those who have been so far from the Church. They don’t know what to do. I see this in myself. But Bergoglio is someone who opens a breach in the individual person, so there’s always a surprise in store.”

It could happen. Susanna continues, “I understand the return to Confession, because the sensation with Pope Francis is of someone who listens to each person. As far as I’m concerned, I won’t say no. I say it could happen. A month ago, this hypothesis was light years away.” Chiara says, “I have to admit that the Pope was a shock. I can’t foresee what will change in people’s lives, starting with mine.”
We leave the Roman television studio. At the bar, Enrico is waiting for us. A 45-year-old journalist with two children, he has a healthy, unshaken secular faith. He’s not the type for yielding to sentiment, but the firmness with which the Pope insists on the question of the poor struck him. “I’ve never heard anyone like this. I wondered what was different about his way of speaking about the poor. The only answer I could give myself is that he not only defends them, but above all knows them and loves them.” Like many of his journalist colleagues, Enrico is used to seeing things of the Church by peeping through the keyhole. “But Francis blew us away, because it’s as if he lived with his doors open. He’s someone who hides nothing, not even that encounter with his predecessor. I’ll say more: he’s a Pope who doesn’t seem to have walls around him separating him from the world. He’s a man who doesn’t view anyone as an enemy.”
We are joined at the table by Lucio, another journalist, but also a Catholic. In fact, he is even a friend of Pope Bergoglio. Obviously, he is happy to be able to report the words of such a Pope. He says he receives scores of letters and e-mails every day from people who ask him to help them see Francis, something that has never happened to him before. “Each person writes about his or her need, but all of them have the same trust that a word from the Pope would bring peace where today there is pain or dissention. For example, a couple on the verge of divorce wrote that they were sure that the Pope would be able to bring reconciliation to their home.”
Lucio relates a recent episode. An experienced TV cameraman, who has nothing to do with the Church and has already been divorced twice, came back to the studio, as usual, to download his footage of the Audience for editing. Watching the images, when he came to the frames where the Pope stopped the jeep and gave a seemingly interminable embrace and kiss to a handicapped boy, the cameraman burst into tears. “Seeing that big man in tears was a truly unexpected experience. It reminded me of the words the Pope had spoken a few days before, ‘In our life, the eyeglasses for seeing Jesus are our tears.’”