A testimony about Pope Francis from Maria Rosa Barbaran de Scarano and Romulo Alejandro Scarano, husband and wife from Argentina, speakers at the World Meeting in Milan.
«It’s very difficult to find the words to express the variety of feelings and experiences that the election of our Cardinal Bergoglio as Pope Francis have aroused in us and in our community: incredulity... surprise... joy... a certain fear with respect to the complexity of circumstances faced by the successor of Peter, and finally a feeling of gratitude and trust in the Holy Spirit who guides the Church.
The election of Pope Francis has generated throughout in the community in Argentina —and not only among Catholics and believers— a sense of communion and hope, which is unprecedented in our recent history. A Baptist pastor told us that for the first time he prayed for a Pope. The political circles, characterized by intolerance and irreconcilable confrontation, had gestures of respect and even of self-criticism. In recent decades, Cardinal Bergoglio represented —well beyond the pastoral ministry— a moral reference point for the whole community in Argentina. He comes from a generation of young Latin American priests marked by the great ideals of religious and social renewal, those of the 60s and 70s, illuminated by Vatican II in the integration of the Gospel and in man’s integral development.
The Argentine people has not forgotten his strength and consistency in tough economic, political and moral crisis of December 2001 that led to the collapse of the national government and of the entire system of consumerist debt imposed in our country, in the neoliberal 90s. A people hurt and disconcerted by the spectacle of the migration of thousands of young people searching for a chance in life, received the words and gestures of Archbishop Bergoglio, like those of a father who restrains and corrects, announces and warns. His image was a light of hope in the midst of the cataclysm. The courage and clarity of the homily (on the parable of the Good Samaritan) he delivered on 25 May 2003, in the presence of the country’s highest political authorities, remains in Argentina’s memory.
“...The bandits on the road’ had as allies those who passed by, looking the other way. The circle is closing between those who use and deceive our society to rob and those who are supposed to conserve the purity of their critical function but instead live of this system and our resources to take advantage of them or maintain the possibility of chaos in order to acquire their own terrain. We must not deceive ourselves, the backside of the impunity of the crime, the use of community-based institutions for personal or corporate profit and other ills that we can’t eradicate, is misinformation and permanent disqualification of all, the constant seed of suspicion that spreads mistrust and perplexity. The response to the ruse that “everything is bad” is: “No one can solve this situation.” And, in this way, it feeds disenchantment and despair. By drowning people in discouragement a perverse circle is closed: the invisible dictatorship of the true interests, those hidden interests that have taken hold of the resources and of our ability to opine and thinking”.
We are very moved as we assimilate this incredible time of Grace. Father Bergoglio has always asked and continues to ask us to pray for him, and we are thousands who have taken this humble commitment to support him with prayer. It’s a debt of gratitude for all that he is for us and a challenge to hope for better times in the future for the whole Church. Francis animates with each of his gestures the dream of a Church that is poor and united, in the service of the threatened life, whose glory and strength emanate from the cross. The love him very much! And we feel very committed to the whole Church through his ministry. Thank you».
