A quick personal note on Pope Francis.

I was in St. Peter’s Square when the white smoke appeared. The rain that had been going on for days since Pope Benedict left the Vatican subsided — and the umbrellas finally got to go down as the crowd grew — by the time Pope Francis was introduced to the world.

Truth be told, at first I didn’t know who he was — other than his name. I thought he was another Argentinian, who worked for the curia. And I was disappointed.

I ran down the Via della Conciliazione to try to get a signal on my phone — the jamming devices that had been put in place for the conclave, to keep cardinals from spilling the beans during the secret process. I had media lined up for the night, and it would help to know what I was talking about.

The first buzz about the new pope, besides that he was from Latin America and that he took the name of the beloved Francis of Assisi — the latter which the Romans were loving — was, amusingly, in retrospect, a defense he had made of Pope Benedict on an issue involving sexual morality. (It’s too random to get into now.) It all seems amusing and quaint in retrospect, given all we’ve all lived through with him in the time since.

The more I learned about the former Cardinal Bergoglio, the more I loved. He was a Jesuit who had a love for St. Ignatius Loyola’s spiritual exercises — for all the jokes conservatives make about Jesuits, the exercises of their founder are their rigorous best.

That night, media friends had divided up and were translating an interview he did with a rabbi friend of his from Spanish. (Lopez was in intermediate Spanish in college, alas. It wasn’t going to do!)

This is all a long way of saying: I’ve loved the man since the beginning. He didn’t know it, but we spent some intimate time together during Covid — I would stay up or wake up at odd hours to pray morning Mass with him when I couldn’t go to Mass, I would watch him live on my laptop. Just praying with him was such a help in isolation. His sermons touched my heart and guided me. And it wasn’t the first time. In that Ignatian tradition, his morning homilies early on were challenging to me. I know many priests in the Vatican saw them as rants against their clericalism. But I heard a pastor urging us to get serious about being Christians.

As bizarre as it may sound, I felt shocked this morning when I saw that Pope Francis had died. Sure, he had spent all that time in the hospital, but we were pretending he was rallying. Even as he obviously didn’t look like he was when he met with JD Vance yesterday. Also, file this under way-too-honest: I’m totally jealous of Vance for having been with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday. For all the immigration politics and everything, that’s got to have an interior impact.

Pope Francis spent some time here in the U.S. with us. He risked his life visiting Iraq. There’s a lot to remember. I remember a man I loved and who challenged me in the best of ways.