By Natalia Kidd |
Buenos Aires (EFE) of a wounded society and those who seek to respond from an incarnated faith.
In 2013, when Bergoglio began his pontificate, Gabriel Toranzo Calderón, an electronic engineer, took his first steps as coordinator of Cáritas in Santa María, a parish in the Almagro neighborhood, where he currently leads a dozen volunteers who deliver food to some 130 people two times per week.
A Church for the poor
The “poor Church for the poor” that Francis expressed as a wish at the beginning of his Petrine ministry has become a daily “challenge” for him, which he shares with the thousands of volunteers who work in the 348 Catholic social charity institutions that exist. in Buenos Aires.
Francisco’s hometown has 3 million inhabitants and another three who visit it daily from its periphery, a conglomerate where four out of ten people are poor and 10% do not even cover their food needs.
“Here we learned that many are in a very difficult situation, abandoned, that seem hopeless. But when you treat them as what they are, children of God, they appreciate it. Poverty is not only economic, but also feeling excluded, despised, abandoned, and what we try to give them every Tuesday and Friday is pampering, a caress,” he told EFE.
He has engraved in his memory the shocking moment when the Pope, in the harshest and darkest part of the pandemic, went out to Saint Peter’s Square, in complete solitude, to pray. That image helps him, every time he feels tired or that nothing makes sense, to take up the cross and go forward, to meet those who he needs most, with concrete gestures of closeness, compassion and tenderness.
It is a tangible way of being the “Church on the way out” that Francis proposes, one that does not remain sluggish, closed in on itself, but walks, without fear of getting muddy, towards the “existential peripheries”.
And those peripheries, says Toranzo, are at the doors of the dining room.
“The borders are very close. Most of those who come here come from the greater Buenos Aires, looking for the daily ‘mango’ (money), and they pass through here to receive that pampering and continue. So the periphery is a lot closer than it seems,” she asserts.
From Lampedusa to Caballito
Eusebio Hernández Greco has known Bergoglio for years. He closely accompanied him in his vocational process. The then-archbishop of Buenos Aires, whom he considers his “spiritual father,” ordained him as a priest.
This 49-year-old priest was impacted by the decision of Francisco -descendant of Italians- to choose Lampedusa, the irregular gateway to Europe for thousands of Africans and Asians, as the first pastoral travel destination, a visit that he placed at the center of the scene the drama of forced migrations.
At that time, he was unaware that a few years later he would be assigned as parish priest to Nuestra Señora de Caacupé, a church in the Caballito neighborhood, then frequented by Paraguayan immigrants and which has now become “the spiritual embassy of the Venezuelan people” in Argentina, where immigrants they receive food, assistance for immigration procedures and spiritual help; In addition, they have been actively integrated as servers in the community.
“The Pope speaks in his encyclical ‘Fratelli tutti’ about how the communities of emigrants have enriched those communities that have known how to welcome them. That is a very concrete and palpable experience in Caacupé”, he assures EFE.
Personally, he feels stimulated by the words of the Pope who proclaimed that “mercy must be proclaimed to the man of today, so wounded and burdened”, and that the Church should be “like a field hospital, with open doors”. where people arrive injured and where “they are accompanied” so that they “feel at home”.
So far and so close
These days, Caacupé, one of the 186 parishes in Buenos Aires, has been shocked by the crime of Juan Francisco Fernández Acosta, a Venezuelan immigrant who was murdered to steal his mobile.
Hernández shared the pain with the huge Venezuelan community in Buenos Aires and also consoled the young man’s parents from a distance, who live in Venezuela, a closeness of “father and pastor” in which he had Francisco as an example, whom he has visited three times in these ten years.
If Francisco has not returned to Argentina, he maintains, it is because the Supreme Pontiff sees it as a “priority of the Church” to visit other places. “But in my daily walk, I feel close to him. He loves Argentina ”, he affirms.