It is July 9, 2004 when a call resonates in a house in Buenos Aires.
– “I am calling them for an hour, what happens?”
– “Father, I’m sorry. I left the phone badly … my house is a party.”
– “Congratulations, congratulations! Let me see the agenda to know when we can baptize it. Where do we baptize it? Do you think in your parish as a child Jesus of Lugano?”
On one side of the line was Jorge Mario Bergogliothen archbishop of the Argentine capital and a key piece for Marcelo Pivato, who attended the call, and his wife, finally fulfilled the dream of being parents by adopting little Jose Luis, then nine months.
The death of Pope Francis, on April 21, hurt especially in that home. “I was a friend that God wanted it to be a potato”, Pivato A Commerce.
To remember the time they met, it is necessary to go back until 1996, when Pivato presided over the Rotary Club of Villa Lugano, the second largest neighborhood in Buenos Aires.
“The then Archbishop Coadjtor Jorge Mario Bergoglio went to a little chapel from there, where they provided a workshop for protected mothers at the San Cayetano Community Center. There we had a first encounter, but there was no greater anecdote of that”, He says.
It would be only in 1999, when Pivato was appointed General Director of Education of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, which would begin friendship. It should be noted that 51% of Buenos Aires students go to public schools managed by private, most of them belonging to the Catholic Church.
While the archbishopric had a Vicar of Education, Bergoglio always made sure to have a personal report on the situation. “So it was that the first time we met and where we had the opportunity to chat was in the center of the city during the feast of Our Lady of Montserrat, in April 1999“, remember.
On the left, Marcelo Pivato. On the right, Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The friendship between the two began in 1999 for his work for education in Buenos Aires.
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The friendship between the two was growing when Pivato became Undersecretary of Public Education of Private Management of the Ministry of Education. After the fall of the government of Fernando de la Rúa, he made the decision to resign from office but before that he went to Bergoglio to thank him for the accompaniment. The archbishop told him that he understood but that “I knew I kept counting on him”
And this was demonstrated two years later.
“We continue to visit him with my wife and family. Before Christmas 2003 I told him that we had made the decision to adopt and he ended up testifying to the justice of who we were. Regardless of what we did the procedures like any neighbor’s son, his testimony helped us to adopt our son”, Remember excited.
It was then that the call with which we started this story happened. The baptism ended on October 23, 2004 in the parish of its neighborhood. Bergoglio officiated the Mass but did not attend the later party. “I knew that it was not because I did not love us but you will not find a photo of yours at a social party, but did not reject a locro or noodles that offered him in Villa 31″
– Solid convictions –
“There are guidelines that enhanced being a potato, but that carried them from their lives. Austerity, humility, simplicity”Pivato highlights before starting to recite a series of episodes that demonstrate its point.
With a view to Corpus Christi of June 3, 1999, the first one he would celebrate as archbishop of the city, Bergoglio was consulted on the clothing he would wear in the celebration. “He asked for a budget and when he saw what he was worth he refused to do it. He asked to use the clothes that his deceased predecessor, Antonio Quarracino.”, Laughs pivato when he remembers it.
Expert on the group of groups and schedules of the subway, two media that was handled throughout the city, Bergoglio used to reject the offers to transfer it in official vehicles and with a driver. “I was ashamed because I was in an official car and with a driver to Mass Oa the onomastics of Catholic schools, while he came in a collective. When we went out, he offered to take him, but he replied that no, ‘here I take the 15 that leaves me in Rivadavia,’ he said”
Pivato ensures that all these qualities were enhanced when he was anointed as the vicar of Christ. “In Buenos Aires his language was more encrypted. I do not mean that here he hid his positions, but he had battles with political leaders and even with some sectors of the Church. If you make a photo collection in Buenos Aires, it had more adustos gestures than it had as Pope. He was a man with a lot of social awareness, never made a staging of his approach to the poor, to the vulnerable, he really lived it. The same concern that he had when he appeared through the window and see that in Rivadavia the angry people gathered to claim the government for 10 days from the Plaza de Mayo later had it for the great tragedies of the world, so I say that the papacy enhanced him”
His political positions led him to become an uncomfortable character for the governments on duty in Argentina, so when in 2005 he traveled to Rome to participate in the conclave in which Benedict XVI would later be chosen as the new Pope, Pivato called him.
– “Father, he will return to Buenos Aires, right?”
– “Yes, Pivato, I return. Stay calm that I come back”
This was already done by his return to talk. “One of the first things he told me was that before going to a luxury library of the Vatican, he preferred to be a parish priest of San Pantaleón, a parish located in the southern part of Buenos Aires, very humble and the one that he was going every month to officiate Mass. The collective left him a few blocks, greeted the merchants, took a mate in one of the llanteries and from there he went to the parish”, Tells.
“He was called to sympathize with Peronism, I don’t know if it was or not but what I know is that he was critical of Peronist governments, he was not complicit or associated. Then, in Rome, he also fought battles with the most conservative sectors. He said with grace that what the communists were taken by the communists on the one hand and those on the right”, He adds.
During his last meeting, Pivato asked Francisco if it was true that Benedict abdicated because he felt no more. “He told me it wasn’t true,” he says.
– Bergoglio is Pope –
On March 13, 2013, Pivato’s mother called him crying. “Bergoglio is Pope, he is the Pope!”, He managed to say.“Bergoglio is Pope!“His wife shouted seconds later from his office. After the cries of joy, Marcelo Pivato would go to a priest friend to send him a letter that the new Pope would respond with an email greeting them.
“On November 26 of that year my son made his first communion in the same parish where he was baptized, I warned the Pope and expressed that we wanted to go see him. ‘When do you travel?’ After two days we travel to take the second communion in the house of Santa Marta, in the Vatican“, remember.
In November 2013, Pivato’s son received his second communion in the house of Santa Marta, in the Vatican.
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“One sees him enter and sees the Pope, but he always had the peculiarity that in two minutes you saw him as the usual friend. In all the mails he began with dear brother and ended with a blessing, fraternally Francisco. Fraternity was not a word for him, he showed him in the face to face”, He explains.
Throughout his papacy Pivato visited Francisco nine times at the Holy See. He was going twice a year and was only absent in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic. In addition, they exchanged emails and manuscripts that today treasures as who has managed to lose a brother.
“In March of last year I visited him and returned very badly because I saw him quite deterioration. That time he attended me in his department and apologized for not being able to get up. I felt my friend was losing your health. We said goodbye with a big hug. On June 24 I travel again and already attended me, with the cane, in the saloncito of the ground floor and telling me that I prepared the trip for Oceania. There we talk about the possibility of coming to Argentina”Pivato says.
Pivato visited Francisco nine times during his papacy.
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During his twelve years as Pope, Francisco did not step on Argentine soil. The conversation with Pivato would reveal that he wanted to do it, especially to visit his sister María Elena, but that politics always stopped him.
“He wanted to come. He told me that perhaps in December 2024, but he had to do with two things: how he was and how everything was in the country. He did not want to come in an election year so as not to be used by any political faction. He was a man who lived according to his religious convictions and showed that he didn’t care about luxury. Now there are many politicians who regret how they behaved with him”, He says.
The last communication held by Pivato and Bergoglio was on January 6 of this year, when the mother of the first died at home. “I wrote to two or three hours that my mother died and two hours answered. He was no longer fine but I gave me comfort, his prayers and quoted St. Augustine to remind me that ‘the mother’s death is the first pain of life that one faces alone.’ Then I wrote him twice more but his assistant replied because he was admitted to the Gemelli Hospital”
