When Pope Francis was put on laundry duty

CNN) – Every day, millions of Americans perform a task that epitomizes Pope Francis’ leadership style: They do the laundry.

I came to that somewhat surprising conclusion while talking to Jesuit priests who lived with the future Pope, then known as the Rev. Jorge Bergoglio, during the early 1980s. At the time, they were young Jesuit seminarians, and he was their “boss,” the rector of their 100-member community.

“He used to send us to the opera and also have us clean the seminary bathrooms, because he wanted us to be adaptable to all kinds of situations.”

Even though Bergoglio was their superior and carried a heavy administrative and teaching load, he also chipped in, taking the role of community laundry man.

Any seminarians awake at 5:30 in the morning could find him down in the basement, pitching bales of laundry into balky, 1980s-style industrial washing machines.

Continued Here.

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Prof. Leonard Wessell

Nov 18, 2013

This is all good. I live in a country where once we professors could abuse our students, forcing them to do our laundry, buy our food and whatever errand necessary. That was Germany of the 19th Century. I can imagine something similar in the case of religious seminaries.

But, has not the pope rebuked the Virgin-Mary-Meets-Me-in-an-apparition-ers, noting that the encounter with Jesus is more in private. The attempt to instill humility in seminarians is to be praised, if known. O.k., it is certainly known by the seminarians. But by the whole wide world via CNN? Pope Francis has shown a preference for humilty, a preference that the whole wide world should know all about. Perhaps the advice aimed at those seeking public recognition through appearance of the Virgin should be modified a bit and applied to the current pope, whose "humity" is internationally proclaimed or all to praise in amazement.

Pope John Paul II lived his dying and deterioration publically as a sign of the value of life, even with suffering a demeaning path to death. JP II's maginficient behavior contrasts with Hans Küng's wanting euthansaia in Beligium so as to have a "dignified" death(sic) death. The contrast can hardly be greater and JP II's manifesting his confrontation with death was in NO way whatsoever a type of "showing off". Alas, Pope Francis' humilty is so non-humbly shown to the world for admiration that I sometimes hear the not so friendly refrain in my ears: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most humbe in all the land? Me, me, me!" Maybe it is just my prejudice.