The China Mail - 'One isn't born a saint': School nuns remember Pope Francis as a boy

A boisterous child, he played football with his friends in the courtyard, and sprinted up and down the marble stairs.

"They say he was rather mischievous," recounted Teresa Rovira, a teacher at the Nuestra Senora de la Misericordia kindergarten where then-Jorge Bergoglio enrolled in the early 1940s.

"One is not born a saint, one becomes a saint," the nun chortled.

Rovira was also a child at the time, but has heard many stories told by older nuns about the boy who would go on to become one of the most famous men in the world -- ruling the Catholic Church for 12 years until his death Monday aged 88.

Misericordia is in the Argentine capital's Flores neighborhood, where Francis was born and where he found his love of God, the poor, tango and football.

He attended primary and secondary school elsewhere in Buenos Aires, but it is at Misericordia that he had his first communion and later received the sacrament of confirmation -- the first steps in what would become a life of religious devotion.

Contrary to what the humble pontiff would probably have liked, there are homages to him everywhere in Flores, a poor neighborhood that contains one of Buenos Aires's biggest slums.

- 'My roots' -

Mourners flocked Monday to the Flores basilica to pay their tributes to Latin America's first pope.

It is the same church where a young Jorge Bergoglio, 17 at the time, felt the call to become a priest, according to a golden plaque on a wooden kneeler.

The nearby Barrio de Flores Museum holds a collection of papal memorabilia that include a handwritten letter Francis had sent for its 2018 opening.

In it, he describes Flores as "my neighborhood, my roots."

Further south, in Bajo Flores, is the stadium of the San Lorenzo football club, founded by a priest in 1908, of which the Pope was the most famous fan.

Construction is due to begin on the club's new stadium this year, and it will be named after him.

- A 'simple' man -

It was at Misericordia's small stained glass chapel that Bergoglio gave his first mass as a priest, and also one of his last before departing Argentina in 2023 for Rome, where he was elected pope in 2013.

"During the time he was a vicar in Flores, before becoming Archbishop of Buenos Aires, every October 8 he would come to celebrate mass at the school, on the anniversary of the date he took his first communion," Rovira recounted.

Much later, as archbishop, Bergoglio would sometimes visit the school on Sundays to enjoy pasta lunches in the kitchen with the nuns.

Other times, he would sneak into the kitchen for a secret tea with an indulgent cook.

"He would say: 'Porota, don't tell the little nuns that I've arrived yet, let's have tea first, but let me make it'," Rovira said the cook had told her.

Bergoglio would always come by metro or bus from the cathedral on the central Plaza de Mayo -- a symptom of being "stubborn," added the nun.

"Even though he had problems with one knee and sometimes limped, he would never take a taxi," she said.

Long queues formed Monday at the confessional where Francis is said to have felt God's calling. People bowed in silent prayer while outside, where vendors sold plastic flowers on the street.

Twelve years earlier, recounted Rovina, Bergoglio left Argentina "with a small suitcase and just what he was wearing; simple like the man he was."

He never returned.

R.Yeung--ThChM