I remember the people. Thousands of them, sometimes hundreds of thousands, pressed together in aging stadiums, lining the streets of one place or another.
In the Mexican state of Chiapas, so many people crowded in a local stadium in 2016 that it seemed to heave from the human swarm, everyone craning upward, squinting at the cloudless sky, as a helicopter slowly descended into clouds of dust, bearing Pope Francis.
Earlier, in Morelia, it didn’t matter that Francis was running late. A band played. Nuns waved pompoms. Priests and seminarians formed a conga line, hands on shoulders, knees pumping, punching the air and dancing until Francis appeared.
From the moment he became an unexpected pope on a rainy night in Vatican City in 2013, Francis centered his papacy on what he called “the peripheries,” the places forgotten in a supposedly interconnected, globalized world. He talked about people “on the margins,” about immigrants and the poor, and when he traveled the globe, he always found them, and they found him.
A marching band of Mexican nuns playing their instruments as they spontaneously parade on the eve of Pope Francis’ arrival to Morelia in 2016.Credit…Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
Any pope can draw a crowd, but Francis had something intangible. He wasn’t an especially riveting speaker yet his sheer presence captured people.
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