The Pilgrimage of Tomás and Father Jorge Bergoglio

Monastery at Roncevalles

With the passing of Pope Francis on Easter Monday this week, I took time to look back through my pilgrimage journal of my trek on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in 2016. I was hoping to find anything I wrote about a fellow pilgrim whose first name was Tomás and who came from Argentina. It was from Tomás that I learned the most about the Pope, who’d declared 2016 a Jubilee Year - a year dedicated to grace and forgiveness in the Catholic Church.

As I paged through my journal, revisiting those wonderful experiences - some of them quite hard and trying - I found a few pages of notes on the conversations between Tomás and I. We’d met in St Jean Pied de Port in France and walked over the great rise of the Pyrenes together. We celebrated his 63rd birthday at the height of the mountain with a toast of canned soda and hard boiled eggs. A group of us followed Tomás down to the mountain monastery at Roncevalles where we found lodging and a meal and a beautiful mass for pilgrims waiting for us.

At the monastery that night, Tomás began to tell his story which was the story of Argentina as he lived it through an awful military dictatorship through its transition to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s. We felt it was the first time Tomás had shared his story with anyone, and we, a group of strangers turned friends, were spellbound and humbled by what he told us. In the darkened bunkroom we all shared, well past the “All Quiet” hour, we listened to Tomás tell his own story of growing up a gay teen in the Church he dearly loved but which did not love him. He shared his story of arrest and beating for participating in a demonstration to bring attention to the families of the disappeared, victims of the military junta. He explained how this experience led him to studying law and the legal system and how, one early morning on a train to university in Buenos Aries, he learned about Father Jorge Bergoglio, then a “spare bishop” (auxiliary) who was working for the rights of the poor and how Tomás very much wanted to meet this man.

For the next two weeks I walked on and off with Tomás and learned not only of his own law career in human rights but how that meeting with Father Jorge Bergoglio in a Buenos Aires slum was arranged by his tutor and later great friend of Pope Francis, Alicia de Oliveira. In my notes, written down after a long day’s walk and sometimes entirely illegible with exhaustion, I misspelled her name as “Alic Oli -” The meeting with the future pope changed Tomás life.

“I felt that Father Bergoglio was struggling even then with how to position his own faith and work with the poor. He loved his work as a teacher with students in classrooms and chemistry labs, but he was being pulled far from that life into a life that was at once political, religious, and activist. He urged me to continue to work in the field of social justice. He blessed me and offered me simple words of courage to keep going when things got tough: ‘You will never lose your way on the path of Light.’ So, this is why I walk.”

By the time we all arrived in Pamplona I was ready for a rest day. Jorge walked ahead and I lost him. We met once more, however, five weeks later sitting in mass at the Cathedral of St James. It was a happy reunion!

“I have wanted all this time to tell you this,” Tomás said, (and according to my poorly written notes) “Our Pope Francis has been on his own pilgrimage all this time. We have walked only a few hundred miles. He has been making his own journey over his whole life. He will only be done when he is called Home. And it have been a very good but very challenging pilgrimage.”

When I heard of the Pope’s passing this past Monday the first words that popped into my mind were “A good pilgrimage, indeed.”

Be for us our companion on the walk, Our guide at the crossroads, Our breath in our weariness, Our protection in danger, Our home on the Camino, Our shade in the heat, Our light in the darkness, Our consolation in our discouragements, And our strength in our intentions. So that with your guidance we may arrive safe and sound at the end of the road and enriched with grace and virtue we return safely to our homes filled with joy.

A prayer for pilgrims, Monastery at Roncesvalles, 2016