As Argentines bid farewell to Pope Francis, the grief of the faithful has been deepened by a lingering sorrow, a question that has hung in the Buenos Aires air: Why did their native son never return home?
“I have to be honest, I didn’t like that he never came to Argentina,” Laura Aguirre, 50, a bakery cashier, said after attending a Mass honoring the first Latin American pontiff hours after his death.
Outside the Basílica de San José de Flores, just blocks from Francis’s childhood home in Buenos Aires, and the church where he said he first felt the calling to the priesthood, many speculated that avoiding politics was why Argentina was not among the 68 countries he visited during his 12-year papacy, even though every president and local Catholic leaders extended invitations.
“He didn’t want any president to wrap themselves in his cloak, to say ‘I’m the one who brought the pope’,” said Sebastián Morales, 37.
Francis certainly had a tense relationship with Argentine presidents during his papacy.
As archbishop of Buenos Aires, he clashed with former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner over the legalization of same-sex marriage, though the two reconciled when he became pope. He also disapproved of some right-leaning policies of another former president, Mauricio Macri. And, in 2020, he vehemently opposed the legalization of abortion pushed through Congress by President Alberto Fernández.
Argentina’s current leader, Javier Milei, frequently insulted the pope before being elected president, calling him an “imbecile” because of Francis’s defense of social justice. He later apologized and the two met at the Vatican last year. Mr. Milei plans to attend Francis’s funeral on Saturday.
Mr. Morales, who said he met the future pope nearly 20 years ago while he was homeless and struggling with addiction, recalled how Francis, then Jorge Mario Bergoglio, offered him a cup of tea and convinced him to enter a church-run rehab program.
“As a kid, I told him my pain and he hugged that pain, he hugged my sadness,” Mr. Morales said.
When the topic of returning to Argentina as pontiff was raised in interviews, Francis frequently quipped that “I spent 76 years in Argentina. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
When Francis became pope, his ascension was celebrated as a joyous occasion in the streets of Buenos Aires, but in the years since his star had dimmed. Shortly after becoming pope, 98 percent Argentine Catholics had a positive view of Francis, a number that dropped to 74 percent in 2024, according to the Pew Research Center.
Church officials often emphasized that the pope kept close tabs on Argentina from the Vatican.
“What I’m left with is the certainty that he was always connected to Argentina,” said the Rev. Patricio Ossoinak, an assistant priest at the Basílica de San José. “He couldn’t come in person, but he was always with us — and we know we were always in his heart.”
Still, for many, his absence stung.
Even if Francis was worried that a visit would become a political issue, “he should have been above all that,” said Marcela Giménez, 73, a retired perfume saleswoman, who wiped away tears as she left a memorial mass at the Basílica. “With everything he did here, I really can’t understand it.”
Others took his absence more in stride. “He wasn’t the pope of Argentina, he was the pope of the world,” said Rocío Sánchez, a 19-year-old architecture student. “He didn’t belong to us.”
Cardinal Bergoglio left Argentina in 2013 for the conclave that chose him to succeed Benedict XVI. He never returned, in contrast to his two predecessors. Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in centuries, visited his native Poland less than a year after his election in 1978, while Benedict traveled to his homeland, Germany during his first foreign trip in 2005.
Adding to the frustration of many Argentines was how often Francis came close. He traveled to Argentina’s neighbors, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Bolivia. He also visited other parts of South America, including Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.
“That’s something that really hurts,’’ said Elida Galli, 85. “It pains me that he couldn’t come, that he went to so many nearby countries but not here.”
Guillermo Oliveri, Argentina’s secretary for religious affairs from 2003 to 2015, and again from 2019 to 2023, characterized the pontiff’s bypassing of Argentina for a visit as “the million-dollar question.” After numerous conversations with Francis, he believes the reason lay in the country’s “famous political divide” between the left and the right.
Fortunato Mallimaci, a sociologist and expert on religion who is an emeritus professor at the University of Buenos Aires, said that while domestic affairs may have been a reason Francis avoided visiting early in his papacy, “later on, I think he wanted to be remembered more as Francis than as Bergoglio.”
Some who knew the pope also said he was often troubled by the way his actions as pontiff were often analyzed back home.
Argentina has been gripped by “increasingly deep polarization, and he somehow ended up in the middle of that without seeking it,” said Roberto Carlés, a lawyer who long had close ties to the pope and served as Argentina’s ambassador to Italy from 2020 to 2023. “And he suffered because of that — he suffered, because it represents the exact opposite of what he promoted throughout his life.”
Mr. Carlés said that later in his papacy Francis “felt the desire to return to Argentina. It didn’t work out, but I know he wanted to.”
Mr. Carlés said the pope was frustrated that gestures meant for the global Catholic community were often filtered through Argentina’s political lens. “It bothered him that things he did — which clearly had a broader, universal meaning — were often seen as directed at local politics or the specific reality of our country,” Mr. Carlés said.
Francis explained that a visit to Argentina had been part of a planned trip to Chile in 2017, but was postponed because of scheduling conflicts. Most recently, he publicly expressed interest in visiting last year, but continued to express reservations about how his presence could be interpreted politically.
“There’s no refusal to go. No, not at all. The trip was planned, I’m open to the opportunity,” Francis said during a 2023 interview with an Argentine news website, Infobae.
Some Argentines said Francis should have put aside his trepidation and fulfilled the wishes of so many to welcome him home.
“It’s a shame. It’s painful. Hard to understand,” said Mónica Andrada, 65, at the Buenos Aires Cathedral. She said she had often worked with side by side with Francis while volunteering at a soup kitchen.
Joel Acuña, 34, who is studying to be a teacher, compared a potential papal visit to the euphoria that swept the country when the national soccer team won the 2022 World Cup.
“He would have given the Argentine people something we’re missing,” Mr. Acuña said after attending a mass on Monday in a poor Buenos Aires neighborhood that Francis often visited. “That kind of joy is something we really need.”
Lucía Cholakian Herrera and Natalie Alcoba contributed reporting.
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