Pope Francis is honoring his northern Italian roots by celebrating a special Mass in his father’s hometown. Thousands of people turned out to greet Francis during his rare personal weekend getaway to the province of Asti, near Turin.
“Today we’d like to think that Asti, the land of your family roots, is the beginning of the world,” Prastaro said as the pope chuckled.
Francis hasn’t returned home to his own birthplace in Buenos Aires since assuming the papacy nearly 10 years ago and he rarely speaks about his family, siblings or childhood. The exception is his frequent reference to the important role his paternal grandmother, Rosa, had in his upbringing and in passing along her Catholic faith.
Francis used some of the Piedmont dialect Rosa taught him in thanking the people of Asti for welcoming him and urged young people in particular to not “stay still thinking about ourselves, wasting our lives and chasing after comfort or the latest fads, but to aim for the heights, get on the move, leaving behind our own fears to take someone in need by the hand.”
Francis’ grandmother, Rosa Vassallo and the pope’s grandfather ran a café in Turin and left Italy to join family members who had settled in Argentina, part of the mass migration of Italians to the Americas at the start of the last century. They and their only son, the pope’s father, Mario Jose Francisco Bergoglio, arrived in Buenos Aires in early 1929.Once there, Mario Bergoglio met another descendant of Italian immigrant stock, Regina Maria Sivori, whom he married in 1935.
The Bergoglio family had originally planned to set sail from Italy at the end of 1927 on the Principessa Mafalda ocean liner, but their departure was delayed as they sold off their home and the Turin cafe. In the end, the Mafalda sank off Bahia, Brazil, on Oct. 25, 1927, killing at least 300 of its more than 1,000 passengers and crew.
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