The Pope who never returned – Argentina mourns its national hero

Twelve years after crowding the streets of Buenos Aires to celebrate Pope Francis’ coronation, Argentines mourned on Monday the death of a national hero who never returned home.

People sombrely gathered outside Argentina’s national cathedral as political leaders entered for mass. Across the same plaza, President Javier Milei ordered flags at half mast atop Casa Rosada and his administration prepared to declare seven days of mourning.

Outside the cathedral, Manuel Dillon wiped away tears as he remembered his former neighbour Jorge Bergoglio, who went on to become Pope Francis. Dillon, 70, says they both lived in the Flores neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, and praised Francis for his humility even as he climbed church ranks.

“He was a Pope who spoke to the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalised,” said Dillon, a lawyer. “He was a very humble guy. He took the bus, he took the subway along with everyone else.”

One famous example of Francis’ everyman attitude was when he personally called his local newspaper stand in Buenos Aires to cancel his subscription after he was coronated and moved to the Vatican.

Francis, who died Monday morning at the age of 88 after a months-long battle with respiratory illnesses, travelled around the world since becoming the Catholic Church’s leader in 2013. Though he visited Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Chile, among others in the region, he never again set foot in his native Argentina.

Even so, he remained omnipresent in the nation, where nearly two-thirds of the population identifies as Catholic and churches are the center piece of many small towns. Murals of him adorn many Buenos Aires neighbourhoods and its outskirts, while it’s hard to miss his name in day-to-day conversations, especially after Sunday Mass.

Francis’ death offered a reprieve from Argentina’s polarised political mood on Monday.

In a social media post Monday, Milei dismissed his once glaring differences with the leader of the Catholic Church, saying that meeting Francis after he won the presidential election “was a true honour.”

“As president, as an Argentine and fundamentally, as a person of faith, I say goodbye to the Holy Father, and I stand with all those who today find ourselves with this sad news,” Milei wrote in a rare unifying tone.

Whether on the left or right, Argentina's presidents never dared cross Pope Francis despite local press reading the tea leaves of his speeches for political criticism at home. Any presidential visit to the Vatican resulted in outsized analysis of Francis’ body language toward leaders on both sides of the aisle.

Even though Francis often favoured the Peronist political party — which campaigned on workers’ rights and more social welfare — he kept his distance at times from its most recent leaders, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Alberto Fernández. He also criticised Milei’s government last September after police pepper sprayed protesters marching against the libertarian’s harsh spending cuts. None of the leaders ever convinced him to return home, though a papal visit was a subject of public speculation during all of their terms.

To Dillon, it made sense.

“If he came here, he’d have to put himself on one side or the other, and that’s what he never wanted to do,” he said. “He didn’t want to come with Cristina, nor Macri, nor Milei, because he’d be used politically.”

Still, some of Francis’ fellow priests from his days in Argentina found his absence puzzling.

“It’s a huge question, given it would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to come. There’s no-one more Argentine than the pope,” said Pedro Baya Casal, a priest in Buenos Aires who was close to Francis. “Maybe he was afraid of coming to Buenos Aires and not wanting to return to Rome.”