I remember the people. Thousands of them, sometimes hundreds of thousands, pressed together in aging stadiums, lining the streets of one place or another.
In the Mexican state of Chiapas, so many people crowded in a local stadium in 2016 that it seemed to heave from the human swarm, everyone craning upward, squinting at the cloudless sky, as a helicopter slowly descended into clouds of dust, bearing Pope Francis.
Earlier, in Morelia, it didn’t matter that Francis was running late. A band played. Nuns waved pompoms. Priests and seminarians formed a conga line, hands on shoulders, knees pumping, punching the air and dancing until Francis appeared.
From the moment he became an unexpected pope on a rainy night in Vatican City in 2013, Francis centered his papacy on what he called “the peripheries,” the places forgotten in a supposedly interconnected, globalized world. He talked about people “on the margins,” about immigrants and the poor, and when he traveled the globe, he always found them, and they found him.
Any pope can draw a crowd, but Francis had something intangible. He wasn’t an especially riveting speaker yet his sheer presence captured people.
In Paraguay in 2015, thousands of poor people waved homemade signs as the papal motorcade pushed through the capital of Asunción toward yet another teeming outdoor Mass. There was none of the gilded opulence of the Vatican. A local artist had decorated the altar with 32,000 corncobs and 200,000 baby coconuts, pumpkins, gourds and seeds. (Vatican radio described it as a vegetable masterpiece.)
I covered the early years of Francis’ papacy, including his first trips to Latin America, Greece, the United States and the Caucasus, and on that expectant first night in Vatican City, I stood in the rain with two Roman priests. A funnel of white smoke had sent the Rev. Adriano Furgoni and the Rev. Maurizio Piscola into the gathering crowds beneath St. Peter’s Basilica, everyone waiting to see who emerged onto the balcony as pope.
The two priests were rooting for Christoph Schönborn, a progressive Austrian cardinal, and when the announcement of the new pontiff finally came, it was instead an Argentine named Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He was taking the name of Francis. You could hear a gasp in the great square, then a confused silence.
“We don’t know him,” Father Piscola told me.
Father Furgoni said, “He has a reputation as a very tough man.”
Francis stepped through red curtains onto the balcony and looked out on the crowd. He was silent for a moment, maybe a little startled, then greeted his new followers with a simple “buona sera,” or good evening. He told a joke about how his fellow cardinals had gone to the end of the world to find a new pope. And then he asked everyone to pray for him.
His quiet informality seemed to carry an electric current, charging the wet air with an unexpected alchemy. People began singing and swaying.
“Viva il papa!” a man in the crowd shouted. Others began cheering, “Francesco! Francesco!”
My two skeptical priests were among the converted. An unknown pope had used a few simple words and gestures to win them over. They had not gotten the pope they hoped for, but now said they had the pope they wanted.
“I expect big changes,” Father Furgoni said. “I’m really moved.”
There is already much discussion and debate about Francis’ legacy. His death comes as his political worldview is under siege. His enemies thought he tried to change the Roman Catholic Church too much; some of his supporters thought he did too little. He was never just the gentle grandfatherly man who charmed the world on that rainy first night; he could be steely and ruthless, too.
But as the cardinals return to the Vatican in the coming weeks to pick his successor, Francis will always be remembered for that alchemy that could charge the wet air. He made it a point to always go to the forgotten places, to find the forgotten people, so that they could find him.