Jorge
Chapter 1- The Girl Who Laughed
Jorge kicked a stone along the gutter, the weight of the afternoon pressing against his back.
The sun was a hard, mean thing overhead.
Dust clung to his legs, sweat stuck his shirt to his ribs, and every stupid part of him hurt in ways he didn’t have names for yet.
The smell of frying empanadas drifted from the corner.
Farther down, a radio spat out a jagged tango, the singer’s voice all hurt and swagger.
Boys fought for the soccer ball in the dirt.
Girls sat on the curb, pretending not to watch them.
She sat cross-legged among them, barefoot, her ankles dusty and brown, a bracelet half-finished and knotted around her fingers.
A scab bloomed across her otherwise perfect knee.
He had been there when she hurt it. She had fallen from her bike. He had helped her up—held her while she cried—noticed her scent. Been aroused by her vulnerability, and as all young boys in this sort of moment, he had been uneasy with his own.
Her dress clung damp to her collarbone.
Her hair tumbled loose down her back, catching little glints of the sunlight like a net made of black silk.
He swallowed.
He saw the way her mouth pulled sideways when she was concentrating, the way her lashes dipped low over her cheeks.
He blushed as he wondered what it might be like to kiss her.
She sat with her friend. He took in the soft, half-smirk she gave her friend when their knees bumped.
The thought — the ache — came sudden and stupid:
What would her hand feel like in his?
what would it feel like if she leaned against him, just for a second, like it was the most natural thing in the world?
It made him dizzy.
The dust, he told himself.
Just the dust and the heat.
He wiped his palms against his shorts and crossed the street.
“You’ve got this,” he whispered to himself. “Keep it together, Cabrón.”
She noticed him when he was almost to her.
She looked up from her string, brow lifted, a smile already ghosting at the corners of her mouth like she knew what he was going to say before he did.
His mouth moved before his brain caught up.
“You’re the only one for me” he blurted. “If you don’t marry me, I swear I’ll become a priest. It’s you or nobody.”
The world tilted. He wondered if he had just said that for real or if he had imagined it. In his mind it had been perfect—the sort of thing that would sweep a girl off her feet and usher the two of them into happily ever after. In reality, it felt stupid, and clumsy, and awkward—and entirely over the top. The opposite of macho. The antithesis of cool.
I smiled. Most people don’t realize how often they make me smile, but at thirteen it’s as enjoyable as watching kittens play.
He watched her eyes to see how she would respond. She seemed stunned. For one stretched, gasping second, she stared at him —
those dark eyes wide, unreadable —
and then she burst out laughing.
Not cruel.
Not sweet.
Wild and loose and bright —
like he had said the funniest, most impossible thing she had ever heard.
The girls shrieked behind their hands.
The boys whooped across the street.
The soccer ball lay forgotten in the gutter.
Jorge felt the blood drain from his face and then come rushing back, hot and furious.
He grinned — the wrong kind of grin, stiff and broken — and threw up his hands like he didn’t care.
Like it hadn’t mattered at all.
He turned on his heel and ran away as fast as his legs would carry him—the dust swirling up in small choking clouds around his ankles.
The heat pressed against his skin like an open palm.
When he stopped running, the girl was no longer in sight. He had turned a corner and shoved his way between two parked cars and let himself lean against the brick wall, head down, heart hammering too fast and too hard. He banged the back of his head softly a few times muttering curses to me under his breath.
So many think I am angry when they curse me. But actually, those are the moments I feel the communication is most honest. To pray to me requires faithfulness. To curse me requires true belief.
The city smelled like sweat and metal and fried grease.
The air buzzed with the laughter he couldn’t outrun.
“If only I were somebody,” he thought.
“Somebody she couldn’t laugh at.”
That night, in the narrow bed he shared with his brother, Jorge lay stiff and hot under the thin sheet, staring up at the cracked ceiling.
The noises of the barrio — dogs barking, a woman shouting, a baby crying — rose and fell like a tide against the walls.
He balled his fists under the pillow, willing himself not to feel the sting still burning behind his ribs.
Not crying.
Just… aching.
Hurting in a place too deep to reach with fists or shrugs or jokes.
I let him hurt.
Because what he wanted — to be seen, to be chosen —
would not come from making grand, foolish offers on dusty streets.
It would come later, slower, after much more was stripped away.
For now, I let him lie there, breathing in the sour, warm air of the summer night,
letting the small, stupid dream of her collapse inside him —
the first broken idol of many.
Chapter 2 — The Whisper
The spring air smelled like wet stone and hot pavement, thick with the sour sweetness of blooming jacarandas.
Jorge walked with his hands in his pockets, the cuffs of his school trousers dragging dust. His shoes scuffed the sidewalk with every half-hearted step.
It was September twenty-first —Spring Day in Buenos Aires, and his birthday besides — but he didn’t feel like celebrating.
He was seventeen now.
Seventeen and still waiting for the world to crack open and hand him something that made sense.
Seventeen and still burning with a hunger he couldn’t name.
The city pulsed around him:
vendors shouting over steaming grills, horns blaring, radios coughing up sad love songs and political slogans.
Boys and girls clustered on street corners, exchanging flowers and awkward kisses, the way they did every Spring Day.
He felt the ache of it, sharp and mean under his ribs.
He wasn’t in love anymore.
Not with anyone he could name, anyway.
The girl with the scabbed knee and the black silk hair had long since vanished into the folds of the neighborhood. He couldn’t even recall her name. Maria? Marisella? Maya? Some M name. It didn’t really matter.
But the hollow she had left behind still gaped, hungry.
He didn’t know what he was looking for.
A fight, maybe.
A miracle.
Anything that would make him feel less invisible.
His feet took him toward the city center without asking his permission.
Past the corner bakery with the cracked windows.
Past the butcher’s shop where flies swarmed the hanging meat.
Past the boys whistling at girls who pretended not to hear.
The church door was open.
He hadn’t meant to stop.
Hadn’t meant to go inside.
But the cool dark breathed out against the heat, and before he could think better of it, Jorge found himself slipping into the shadowed interior.
The heavy wooden door groaned as it closed behind him.
Inside, it was another world:
thick with the smell of old wood and melting wax, incense clinging to the crumbling stone walls.
The floor was cold under his soles.
The air tasted of dust and something older — something like memory.
Sunlight cut through the high windows in broken shafts, catching the drifting smoke, painting the empty pews with ghost-light.
He stood there a long moment, blinking.
A few old women knelt near the front, murmuring prayers he couldn’t hear.
The statue of the Virgin looked down at him, her painted mouth caught between sorrow and tenderness.
Jorge swallowed.
He told himself he would just sit a minute.
Catch his breath.
Get out of the heat.
Instead, he slid into a pew halfway back and sat hunched, elbows on knees, the sweat cooling on his spine.
For a while, he said nothing.
Thought nothing.
The silence wrapped around him — not dead, but breathing, alive, a living thing waiting to see what he would do.
His heart thudded against his ribs, too loud.
He could have left then.
Should have.
But something held him there.
An old priest shuffled out from the sacristy, his cassock stained with age and use.
He moved slow, like the heat lived inside his bones.
He didn’t notice Jorge at first.
Jorge wiped his palms against his thighs.
Cleared his throat.
His voice, when it came, was too loud.
“Padre,” he said.
“I… I want to confess.”
The priest peered at him through thick lenses, one eyebrow raised.
But he nodded and pointed to the battered confessional at the side.
Jorge slid into the cramped space, the wood sticky under his palms.
For a moment, all he could hear was his own breathing.
He didn’t know why he was doing this.
He hadn’t prepared anything to say.
He wasn’t even sure he believed in this anymore.
Outside, the city throbbed with life.
Inside, everything narrowed to the small, dark box and the rough shape of a man waiting behind a grille.
Jorge opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, hard enough to see sparks.
“Say something,” he begged himself.
The priest waited.
Finally — almost without his permission — Jorge heard himself speak.
“I’m tired,” he said.
It wasn’t a confession.
Not really.
Not the kind priests usually asked for.
But it was the only truth he had.
“I’m tired of being nobody,” he said, the words rough and low and breaking.
“I’m tired of waiting for something that never comes.
I’m tired of not being enough.”
He wiped at his face before he even realized there were tears there.
Seventeen years old, and he hated himself for crying.
“Be strong,” he hissed at himself.
“Be a man.”
The priest said nothing for a long time.
The quiet between them grew thick, like honey.
Then, finally, the old man spoke, voice cracked and kind.
“You are already loved,” he said.
Just that.
Simple.
Ridiculous.
Impossible.
Jorge shook his head hard enough to make the wood creak.
He opened his mouth to argue.
To laugh.
To leave.
But something stopped him.
A whisper.
Not the priest’s voice.
Not his own.
Something deeper, older, wrapped around his ribs and pressed hot into the marrow of him.
“I see you,” I told him, with my still—small voice.
It wasn’t a thought.
It wasn’t a sound.
It was a knowing, sharp and sudden as a blade.
The breath punched out of him.
He gripped the seat under him like the world had shifted.
He wanted to run. Most do.
He stayed.
I was proud of him. Too many underestimate the courage that takes—to stay put when I speak.
Outside, the bells began to toll, heavy and slow.
The girls outside would be swapping flowers.
The boys would be slipping arms around waists.
Spring was rolling through the city like a drunk at a wedding —
loud and sloppy and full of promises it didn’t intend to keep.
Jorge knelt there in the sticky dark of the confessional, heart hammering, eyes burning,
and for the first time in his life, he didn’t pray for love.
He didn’t pray for fame.
He didn’t pray for strength.
He just listened.
And I —
I smiled.
Not the small smile of watching kittens play.
The other smile — the one I save for the moments when the walls crack, and the light finally begins to seep through.
He would forget this moment a thousand times before he truly understood it.
But I would not forget.
Not ever.
Chapter 3 — The Doorway
The nightclub smelled of stale beer, smoke, Triumph and defeat. It was a place people went to celebrate their victories, to drown their sorrows, and to escape from their reality.
Jorge leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, the sweat sticking his shirt to his back.
The neon sign above him buzzed like a dying fly, bleeding sick green light onto the sidewalk.
Inside, the music thumped low and dirty — not the soaring songs of tango, but something slurred and ugly, dragging its boots across the floorboards.
He hated this place.
He hated the way it pulled at people — made them louder, meaner, smaller—how it degraded them while lying to them about their own grandeur.
But it paid the bills.
And boys like Jorge — twenty now, half-man, half-ache — didn’t get to be choosy about how they survived.
He shifted his weight, eyes scanning the crowd.
A girl in a ripped red dress stumbled through the door, laughing too loudly.
Two men in cheap suits followed, shoving at each other, arguing in low, sharp Spanish.
Jorge stepped forward without thinking, the muscles in his jaw tightening.
One of the men caught sight of him —
took in the hard set of his shoulders, the tired, heavy stare —
and thought better of it.
They slunk inside, still muttering, but quieter now.
The night pressed on.
The sky above the city sagged heavy with clouds.
The gutters stank of rain not yet fallen, of urine and rotting things ground into the concrete.
Someone lit a cigarette nearby.
The sharp tang of it sliced through the muggy air.
Jorge licked his dry lips, tasting the saltiness off too much evaporation and too little water. He walked behind the bar counter and retrieved a highball glass, and filled it with water before gulping it to quench his relentless thirst. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth to dry it, but not in time to stop a single drop from escaping his bottom lip and dripping a trail down his chin and onto his shirt.
A fight broke out inside — not a real fight, just a shoving match, desperate and clumsy.
He could hear the chairs scraping, the slap of fists, the sharp shrieks of women pretending to be scandalized.
He didn’t move.
Not yet.
The manager liked to let them bruise each other a little before sending Jorge in.
“You’re not here to be a priest,” the manager had joked once, slapping him on the back. “You’re a wall. Let them break themselves on you.”
Jorge hadn’t laughed.
He didn’t know how to explain that he felt it — the breaking — under his skin, every night.
The taste of it in the air.
The futility.
The ache of men who drank and cursed and swung their fists because they didn’t know how else to pray.
The first time he had thrown someone out, it had felt clean — a crack of fist on jaw, a hot flood of power.
A small part of him — the part the world had taught to love being seen as strong — had thrilled at it.
Now it only left him sick.
The girl in red staggered back out, her lipstick smeared, her laugh cracked and brittle.
She bumped into Jorge’s chest and blinked up at him, eyes smeared with tears and eyeliner.
She started to fall. Jorge caught her and set her upright.
For a heartbeat, she clutched his shirt, fingers knotting into the fabric.
“You’re sweet,” she slurred. “Sweet for a man of violence.”
He pried her hands off gently.
Said nothing.
Watched her totter into the street, swallowed by the dark.
Inside, the shouting grew louder.
He pushed off the doorframe and headed in, shouldering past the sweaty, staggering bodies.
A man twice Jorge’s age was squaring up to a boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, fists clenched, spit flying from his mouth.
Jorge stepped between them.
The older man swung first — a wide, stupid punch.
Jorge caught it in his palm and twisted, fast and mean, sending the man to his knees with a grunt.
“Enough,” Jorge said, low.
The boy backed away, terror and relief wrestling on his face.
The man on the floor spat curses, promises, threats.
Jorge hauled him to his feet and shoved him out into the night, ignoring the sting in his knuckles.
He stood in the doorway again, breathing hard.
The man staggered off, swearing to come back with friends, with knives, with guns.
Jorge let him go.
The world would chew him up soon enough.
He leaned against the frame, forehead resting against the splintered wood.
“Is this all there is?” he asked the night.
It wasn’t a prayer.
Not really.
But I heard it anyway. I know when something is meant for me.
As to Jorge, he still didn’t know he was speaking to Me. And it had been some time since he had felt me speak.
The ache inside him gnawed deeper.
He thought it was anger.
He thought it was exhaustion.
It was hunger.
The same hunger that had driven him across a dusty street to a girl with a bracelet half-made and a smile like a breaking dam.
The same hunger that had pushed him into the church on Spring Day, breathing in dust and holy silence.
The hunger to be something more.
He didn’t know how to answer it yet.
For now, he fought drunks and liars and fools for a few pesos a night.
For now, he scrubbed the blood from his knuckles in cold water that smelled of rust.
For now, he dreamed of bigger things — of respect, of purpose — but had no name for what he really wanted.
He knew what he didn’t want. He didn’t want to be seen as what that drunk girl had called him—“a man of violence.”
The city buzzed and howled around him, indifferent.
Jorge stood in the doorway, breathing smoke and salt and anger,
and waited for something he couldn’t even imagine yet to find him.
I waited, too.
Not with impatience.
Not with sadness.
With certainty.
The boy who had offered his heart to a laughing girl…
the boy who had stumbled into a church and heard a whisper…
was still here.
Battered.
Tired.
Ashamed.
But still here.
Still Mine.
He had made a promise to a little girl, he no longer knew, and it was time for him to keep it.
Chapter 4 — Scrubbing Floors
The first thing they handed him was a bucket.
Not a Bible.
Not a book.
Not a mission.
Just a dented metal pail that smelled faintly of old soap and worse things, and a bristled brush worn down to the nub.
Jorge stared at it, blinking once, twice.
Incredulous.
He had come to serve. But how could scrubbing the floors of the latrine be of any benefit to Me?
The Jesuit superior — a thin man with a cracked voice and a face like dry bread who had, himself, once been handed a similar bucket—charged with the same task, did not bother telling him the lesson. He only smiled and shrugged.
“The floor won’t clean itself, hermano.”
The tiled bathroom loomed, endlessly grimy, faint lines of dirt, piss, and filth curling in the grout like scars.
Jorge swallowed the lump in his throat and knelt.
The first pass with the brush scraped his knuckles.
The second stripped the skin raw.
He gritted his teeth, breathing slow through his nose, willing himself not to look around, not to see the other novices — some already in cassocks, some already speaking in tones thick with self-importance — stepping carefully past him as if he were furniture.
The stone was cold against his knees.
The soap stung his split skin.
His back ached within minutes.
Good, I thought.
Let it ache. It’s what he most needed at the time.
Let the stone teach him what pride never could.
He was twenty-two now.
Old enough to know the hunger he carried was bigger than the world he had tried to live in.
Young enough to still think he might earn something greater if he proved himself worthy.
He had fancied himself able to comfort the sick, to feed the hungry, to minister to the downtrodden. Finally, he would be somebody!
Scrubbing floors had not factored into that calculation
Neither had cleaning toilets.
Or peeling vegetables until his hands blistered.
Or being assigned the worst bed in the coldest corner of the dormitory.
He did not ask for a different task.
He did not complain. I was proud of him for that.
But he was still proud. Inside of him, the protests bloomed.
“I could be doing more.”
“I could be helping people.”
“I could be making a difference.”
Always that word “I.”
He still strove to make himself important—to matter to a world that needed more to know that I am the one who matters.
So, I let him feel the weight of those thoughts, heavy and bitter as unripe fruit.
The stone did not care about his ambitions.
The soap did not recognize his potential.
The cracked floor he scrubbed would not remember the boy who bled on it.
Some lessons have to be learned low to the ground. And I am a patient god. I had chosen Jorge on the day of his birth. I had molded him carefully—given him the tools for greatness but the obstacles it would take to teach him that to be great, one must first learn service to that which is both bigger than himself and which he does not entirely understand but trusts. This is the essence of faith.
Too many have thought good fortune my reward. Too many have thought difficulty my curse.
The others called him “Hermano Jorge” now — Brother Jorge — but few of them used the title with warmth.
There was something about him that unsettled them —
the way he held himself too upright,
the way his silences sometimes sounded louder than their speeches,
the way he worked without complaint but carried the air of a man wrestling something invisible.
Humility was easier to fake when no one noticed you.
Harder when you burned to be seen and still chose to kneel anyway.
The days blurred: Mass before dawn, studies, chores, silent meals, more chores, more prayers.
The ache in his hands became familiar.
The knot between his shoulders hardened into something permanent.
One night, after scrubbing until his hands shook, Jorge slipped into the chapel alone.
The place smelled of wood polish and cold wax.
The flickering red of the sanctuary lamp threw long shadows across the empty pews.
He knelt at the back, pressing his bruised palms together, and said nothing.
No grand prayer.
No fiery vow.
Just silence.
I heard it.
The best prayers often sound like nothing from the outside.
He sat there a long time, the night pressing against the windows, the hollow ache inside him deepening into something quieter, steadier.
A letting go.
Not of the hunger.
That would never leave him.
But of the belief that he could fill it by climbing higher.
He would still stumble.
Still forget.
Still crave applause sometimes.
But tonight — tonight he scrubbed away the first layer of himself, and underneath, for the first time, he glimpsed the beginning of the man he was meant to be.
I smiled.
Not the small smile for kittens.
Not even the proud smile for cracked hearts beginning to listen.
A different smile.
The one I keep for the sons who learn to kneel before they are asked.
He was there to pray. And he did—as honestly as he could—until he fell peacefully asleep.
His superior admonished him the next day for it, but Jorge smiled. “I think perhaps, it pleases God that I would fall asleep in his presence—cradled like a child in the arms of his father,” he said.
And he was right. In this one, I was well-pleased.
Chapter 5 — The Shadow and the Light
The knock came at midnight.
Three sharp raps against the heavy wooden door of the Jesuit residence, too quick, too harsh to be anything but bad news.
Jorge lifted his head from the papers spread across his desk.
The lamplight threw his shadow long against the wall — hunched, hollow-eyed, older than his thirty-eight years.
The city outside was silent in the way only terror could make it.
Buenos Aires slept with one eye open now — listening for the shriek of tires, the crash of boots, the knock that never meant mercy.
He crossed the room quietly.
The floorboards groaned under his bare feet.
He opened the door just a crack.
A boy stood there — no older than the ones Jorge used to break apart fights between.
Sweat slicked his forehead.
His clothes hung off him in loose folds, as if he had outrun his own body to get here.
“They’re coming,” the boy gasped. “Tonight.”
Jorge didn’t ask who.
There was no need.
The regime’s men.
The ones who made people disappear without names, without graves.
He nodded once.
Tight.
Sharp.
“How many?”
“Two.”
The boy’s voice cracked.
“Maybe three. Priests. They’re hiding.”
The names slid into Jorge’s mind like blades.
Friends.
Brothers.
Targets.
He closed the door softly and turned back into the dark.
The choice was already made.
Had been, long before tonight.
Back when he scrubbed floors no one noticed.
Back when he learned to kneel without asking why.
He pulled on his worn black coat, the fabric thin at the elbows.
The boy watched him, wide-eyed.
“You’ll get caught,” the boy whispered.
“Maybe worse.”
Jorge smiled faintly, the way a man smiles at a storm he already knows will take him.
“If I don’t go,” he said, “they will.”
The boy said nothing more.
He understood.
In the city’s bones, in its broken teeth and shuttered windows, every living thing understood.
Jorge stepped out into the night.
The air was thick with the smell of gasoline and wet concrete.
Far down the avenue, he could hear a radio playing — the notes of an old tango curling up into the sky like smoke.
He moved quickly, head down.
Not running.
Not sneaking.
Simply walking as if the hour and the fear belonged to him.
At the safe house, the door swung open before he knocked.
Two young priests, pale with fear, pulled him inside.
“They’re watching,” one whispered.
“I saw them. Across the street.”
“Good,” Jorge said.
“Then we won’t waste time.”
He stripped off his coat, thrust it at the younger of the two.
“You’ll wear this. Keep your head down.”
He pointed to the side alley, mapped in his mind from a hundred careless walks.
“You’ll go out the back. Follow the gutters. Don’t stop until you reach the old bakery. There’s a car waiting.”
The younger man nodded, trembling.
The other hesitated.
“And you?” he asked.
Jorge smiled again, and this time there was a crack in it, a tenderness he couldn’t hide.
“I’ll keep the door open,” he said.
The priests slipped out the back, shadows in the deeper shadow.
Jorge sat down at the small kitchen table.
Folded his hands.
Waited.
It did not take long.
The boots came first — heavy, deliberate.
Then the fists — pounding the door like war drums.
He rose, slow and easy, and opened it.
Three soldiers.
Black uniforms.
Eyes flat and glittering.
One stepped forward, rifle slung low.
“Name?”
Jorge gave it.
“Are you alone?”
He nodded.
The soldier stared at him a long time.
The house was small.
Easy to search.
Easier still to imagine they had simply missed something.
Finally, with a grunt, the leader jerked his chin.
Two soldiers pushed past him, rifling through drawers, kicking over chairs, shouting at nothing.
Jorge stood in the doorway, a single figure framed against the night.
He prayed without words.
Prayed with his stance.
With his stillness.
With his refusal to betray even a flicker of fear.
They would not find what they came for.
Not tonight.
Not on his watch.
After a while, the soldiers emerged, angry and empty-handed.
The leader gave him one last hard look.
“You’ll regret it,” he said softly.
Jorge said nothing.
There are moments when words shrink.
When only silence can answer evil.
They left him there, alone.
The night closed back around him.
He sagged against the frame of the door, the weight of the moment pulling at his bones.
His hands shook, just a little.
Good, I thought.
It meant the cost had been real.
He did not feel brave.
He did not feel victorious.
He only felt… tired.
But deep beneath the tiredness, deeper even than the fear, something steadier stirred.
A thread pulled taut and sure inside his chest.
He had not saved the world tonight.
He had not stopped the darkness.
But he had kept a promise.
Not to the girl with the laughing mouth.
Not to the world that never quite saw him.
To Me.
To the whisper that had once told him:
“I see you.”
And now, as he prayed, he smiled and remembered that day in the confessional so many years before. “I see you too,” he murmured as he fell gently asleep.
And in this moment I knew he was nearly ready—that someday, he was the rock to whom I could entrust my church.
Epilogue:
The air was warm with spring and alive with the sound of chirping birds when they found Jorge, many years later, having died, at last, in his sleep. Precious few know that he died in my arms as he prayed and I carried him home myself. The men entering the room followed their sacred tradition.
“Jorge!” the man charged with the task, said loudly, using a name Jorge had not used for nearly twelve years.
There was no answer.
“Jorge,” he said again with more force.
Tears began to fall from the eyes of the others in the room.
“Jorge,” the man repeated a third time.
It was finished.
He bowed his head as did the others present. “Into your hands, Father,” he began, speaking to
Me, “We commend your servant Jorge. Amen.”
He opened his eyes, and reached down to Jorge’s hand to remove a ring from Jorge’s finger. He handed it to the captain of the Vatican Swiss Guard for safe keeping until it could be properly destroyed.
“Seal the room,” he said. “It’s is time to inform the Cardinals that his Holiness, the Pope, is dead.”
Author’s Note
It’s easy to get caught into the solemnity of ritual — to nearly deify a pontiff. In the end, though, Popes are just men — with real lives and real humanity lived in full before they ever reach the papacy.
The preceding was a dramatization of true events from the life of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who the world came to know as “Pope Francis.” When he died, he had less than 100 dollars to his name. He had chosen a vow of poverty, and he kept that vow. He is remembered as a man full of smiles, of compassion, of humility, and of authentic decency.
Regardless of one’s faith or lack thereof, it is hard to argue against the truth that the boy who once valued his own significance, who grew to desire only God’s significance, unwittingly did both. I chose God’s voice for this story for the sake of good storytelling. I do not claim to speak for God — or to make any assertions regarding His existence, His role in human lives, or His character.
Wow
Well said.