Pope Francis is dead at 88, on the day after Easter—an appropriate Lenten epilogue for a pontiff with a keen sense of story.
60 years earlier, Francis was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit seminarian who taught literature and writing at Colegio de la Immaculada Concepciòn, a secondary school for boys in Santa Fé, Argentina. His students called him carucha; babyface.
The boys were in their final two years of school. At their age, Francis had part of his lung removed, contributing to a condition that would last his entire life. Not much older than his pupils, Francis had to be “distant, formal,” with one student noting he “was very polite but never smiled.”
He was supposed to teach them El Cid, a Spanish epic about the Castilian knight Rodrigo Díaz de Viva, but like other teachers, Francis was stuck between curriculum and reality. The boys balked. They wanted to read Federico García Lorca, or more “racy” works like La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas.
Francis made a “risky,” but pedagogically wise, decision. They would read El Cid at home. In class, they would read the writers the boys liked. “By reading these things,” Francis reflected, “they acquired a taste in literature, poetry,” and could then discover other authors. Francis ditched the curriculum for “an unstructured” program, an “order that came naturally by reading these authors.” This spontaneous approach “befitted” him; he met his students, and the world, where they were.
