From his hospital bed in Rome, Pope Francis challenged Christians to “transform evil into goodness and build a fraternal world.” The pope, struggling with a lung infection, said, “Do not be afraid to take risks for love!”
One of the risks that the Argentine Jesuit born Jorge Mario Bergoglio was always willing to take was the risk of friendship with evangelicals.
“He was a person of relations,” Alejandro Rodríguez, president of Youth With A Mission (YWAM) Argentina, told Christianity Today. “He respected the institutions but built bridges on the foundation of relationships.”
Francis died on Monday at the age of 88 after 12 years as head of the Roman Catholic Church. He was at home, in the Saint Martha House, after spending five weeks in the Agostino Gemelli University Hospital in Rome.
Catholics around the world are mourning the loss. And in Argentina, Christian leaders who did not follow Francis and do not recognize papal authority are, nonetheless, mourning too.
“I am not ecumenical; we Christians are not all part of the same group,” Rodríguez said. And yet, he noted, “When we were together, we were not the pope and the pastor. We were Jorge and Alejandro.”
The YWAM director first met Francis more than 20 years ago, when Francis was called Cardinal Bergoglio and served the church as the archbishop of Buenos Aires. At the time, Rodríguez was working with Centro Nacional de Oración (Center for National Prayer), located in front of the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, in Buenos Aires.
The cardinal asked to meet for coffee, and Rodríguez used the opportunity to critique the Catholic church.
“You are always pointing out that the rulers are doing poorly,” he told Bergoglio. “But every leader in this country has always been educated and influenced by the Catholic church.”
Why did Bergoglio think that was?
Rodríguez went ahead and gave him his explanation: “The Catholic church has been the most corrupt institution in Latin American history.”
The cardinal’s answer surprised Rodríguez. Bergoglio said, “You’re right,” and then a few minutes later he asked the evangelical critic of the Catholic church to pray for him.
It was the beginning of a long friendship that continued even after Bergoglio went to Rome in 2013 and became Francis. In his 12 years as head of the Catholic church, he would never return to Argentina. The pontiff would call the YWAM director and ask for his advice on issues involving Latin America, or the war in Ukraine, or Protestants generally. Francis would also confide in him, Rodríguez said, and discuss his struggles dealing with the internal politics of the Vatican.
Francis seemed to enjoy his evangelical Argentinian friends. Marcelo Figueroa, a Presbyterian who headed Argentine Bible Society, told CT that occasionally the pope would ask him his views on something, but much of their relationship was more personal.
“We laughed a lot,” Figueroa said. “He is a good porteño”—a person from Buenos Aires.
The two men originally connected as cohosts, along with rabbi Abraham Skorka, of a weekly TV show called Biblia: Diálogo Vigente. It ran from 2010 to 2013, going off the air when Bergoglio was made pope. It was a professional relationship, but they became friends drinking coffee and chatting on public transportation. They stayed in touch, and in some ways the relationship even grew deeper.
In March 2015, Francis called Figueroa to wish him a happy birthday, and he asked him about his health. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll have a biopsy,’” Figueroa recalled, “‘but it will be no big deal.’”
He was wrong. He was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive type of skin cancer. Figueroa wrote to the pope to tell him and ask for prayer.
“He called me the moment he opened the letter,” Figueroa said. “He also called my wife when I was in surgery. One day he was leaving for an event on Holy Week and said, ‘I don’t want to leave without knowing how you are.’”
Figueroa recovered, to the surprise of his doctors, and Francis appointed him to be editor of the official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, in Argentina. He is the first Protestant in that position.
It may have been Francis’ ecumenical theology that led him to these relationships. While he certainly embraced the traditional Catholic teaching that there is only one church—the catholic, or universal, church—he also looked at Christians who were not in communion at Rome and, in some mysterious way, saw God at work.
“The Holy Spirit creates diversity in the Church,” Francis said a 2014 speech. “But then, the same Holy Spirit creates unity, and this way the Church is one in diversity. And, to use a beautiful word of an Evangelist whom I love very much, a diversity reconciled by the Holy Spirit.”
Or perhaps, more simply, it was Francis’ humility that allowed him, as head of the Catholic church, to be such good friends with evangelicals who did not acknowledge his authority.
Humility was one of the hallmarks of his papacy. In his first public words after he became pope, Francis made a joke about how unlikely it was to have a pope from Argentina. “You know that the duty of the conclave was to give a bishop to Rome,” he said. “It seems that my brother cardinals went almost to the end of the world to get him.”
Then he asked people to pray for him. Usually, the pope is the one who prays for the crowd, not the one who requests the prayers of regular people. Vatican observers said the change was “unprecedented and shocking.”
Francis also just valued friendship. In his apostolic exhortation Christus Vivit, he argued that friendship is a gift from God and serves to sanctify us.
“Through our friends,” he wrote, “the Lord refines us and leads us to maturity.”
In another exhortation, Querida Amazonia (Beloved Amazon), he called on Catholics to be “open to the multiplicity of gifts that the Holy Spirit bestows on every one.”
Francis’ friendly interactions with evangelicals occasionally caused some consternation among his fellow Catholics. In 2014, for example, just a year after his consecration, Francis said he wanted to go to Chiesa Evangelica Della Riconciliazione (Evangelical Church of the Reconciliation), in Caserta, Italy. He knew the pastor, Giovanni Traettino, from a religious dialogue a dozen years before in Argentina. They were friends—and besides, it would be the first time a pope had ever visited a Pentecostal church.
The local bishop objected. The day of the planned visit, he noted, was the feast day of Caserta’s patron saints, Joachim and Anne. It would cause a scandal if the pope visited on the special day only to go see the Protestants.
Francis conceded the point, visiting the Catholics in Caserta and going to see the Pentecostals a few days later. When he met with Traettino and 350 evangelicals, though, he also asked for their forgiveness for the Catholics who had condemned them over the years.
His humility won the praise of international evangelist Luis Palau, who called him a friend and “a very Jesus Christ-centered man.”
Since the pope’s passing, millions around the world have echoed that sentiment, remembering Francis as a model Christian and a shepherd to his flock. It reminded Rodríguez, the YWAM director, of a conversation they had years ago. He told the future pope that real shepherds live with their sheep and that they’re around them so much they have the same smell as their flock.
“A pastor,” Rodríguez remembers saying, “must have the odor of the sheep.”
Francis was so touched by the metaphor that he would repeat it years later in a homily in his first Chrism Mass.
“This tells a lot about his humility,” Rodríguez said.
Francis thought of himself as a shepherd with his sheep, not set above them. And he believed in taking risks to reach people—even evangelicals.
