Meditate with Pope Francis (1936-2025)

“I learned to pray with my grandmother. Far from being anecdotal, this confidence of Pope Francis introduces us to the very heart of his spirituality. “Nonna Rosa” took the child under his wing when Jorge Bergoglio’s mother was difficult to get up on her second pregnancy. However, to grow with her grandmother is sometimes to receive treasures for life. Know where you come from, and be the bearer of this memory as a parable to live.

Among the Bergoglio, she speaks in the account of so many migrants from yesterday and today: part of Argentina, the family won with it a piece of its land of origin. At home, in this district of the outskirts of Buenos Aires, we still speak the Italian Piedmont dialect. And it is naturally Nonna Rosa who teaches her to her grandson. A small pentecost experience at home, since the Holy Spirit comes to speak to everyone in their mother tongue.

The importance of being loved

And then, to nourish spiritual life, there is also the treasure of family shared meals. François has spoke about it several times in his homilies. And even in his last encyclical, in 2024, when he wants to explain how our heart can be united. “I am thinking of using the fork to seal the edges of these panzerotti homemade with our mothers or grandmothers. This is this moment of learning (…), where we take responsibility to work to help the other. “These wonderful childhood experiences,” that no algorithm can never take into account “, points out the Pope, offer a mixture of” poetry and love, necessary to save man “.

And François to quote others: “provoke a smile with a joke, make a drawing on the back of a window, (…) take care of a bird falling from the nest. “The memory of these small moments of tenderness allows everyone to build their own identity,” full and luminous way, because every human being was created above all for love, it is done in their deepest fibers to love and be loved “.

“Pray like a son”

Nonna Rosa also transmitted to her grandson the treasure of prayer, starting with devotion to Saint Joseph. The first homily of the brand new Pope Francis on Saint-Pierre square was given on March 19, 2013 for the feast of the one he evoked as the man who knows how to “keep” his own. It was also with this grandmother that Jorge participated in his first religious processions in the streets of Buenos Aires. This woman, finally, marked in her youth by calls for the commitment of Catholic action, the initiation to a faith that takes care of others.

Having become a teenager, the young man wonders about his life choices. At 17, during a confession in his neighborhood church, he has, according to his own words, a “revelation of the mercy of God”. This intense personal experience will deeply mark his pontificate later. Among the masters who formed the young Jesuit who became a priest, Pope Francis often paid tribute to the many writers who helped him better probe the heart of man.

But also to Father Miguel Angel Fiorito, a professor of philosophy who formed a whole generation of young Jesuits in his country, initiating them to the “theology of the people of God”, so faithful to the spirit of the Vatican Council II. “He taught me to pray as a son and not by looking for the sweets of consolation. A discovery that sustainably inspired her.

Having become Pope, François kept his regular prayer habits, faithful to the three morning, afternoon and evening offices. “And then there is the prayer of meditation, when I have a little time: I try to have a little conversation and to ask something from the Lord, but I am afraid that he will answer me …” Without forgetting the prayer of the little and humble: to persevered the Our Father and the Rosary who learn to trust the work of God internally.

“It is also because of this confidence that, at the end of my public interventions, I always ask to pray for me. I need, in this church service, that the community supports me. If the church does not support you by prayer, it is the end of you. Thus, prayer, little by little, opens the heart. To let the Holy Spirit act. “It is he who enters our hearts and changes it. The father is not an anstor, the son does not oint us. It is the Spirit that oint us with its presence and it is the anointing of the Holy Spirit that makes us understand the reality of the Church and the mystery of God ”, insists François.