Former mid-day staffer remembers an inspiring encounter with the spiritual leader who carried with him a love for humanity
Pope Francis interacts with filmmaker Martin Scorsese in Vatican City, in May 2023. The writer, Jane Borges, is seated exactly behind Scorsese. PIC/Vatican Media
Two years ago, when I was floundering as an author, struggling to string even a decent sentence together, and still only resting on the laurels of my previous books, I met Pope Francis.
Personally, it was a time of great self-doubt. It had been over four years since the release of my debut novel, Bombay Balchão, set in a Catholic neighbourhood in South Mumbai. And while the book had found its readers, I feared I didn’t have another story inside me. I would sometimes pick up the novel, read a few lines, and tell myself, ‘That writer is not coming back’. To make it worse, my health wasn’t keeping up, and I found myself inundated with prescriptions. The only thing going for me back then was my job as a journalist.
It’s under these circumstances that I received an unexpected email from Fr Mark Bosco, a Jesuit professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, who wanted me to participate in a conference in Rome, titled The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Literary Imagination. The conference was bringing together poets, writers, artistes and filmmakers from North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and East and South Asia whose works drew from their Catholic experience.
It was, however, the second email, which came closer to the conference, that took me by greater surprise. Pope Francis, the Holy Father, wanted to meet all of us at the Vatican.
I was curious about the Pope’s interest in us and our work. My own writing had barely stemmed from a place of making a case for my religion. I wanted to instead make room for the community of Indian Catholics who’d either been misrepresented and reduced to stereotypes or invisiblised in popular literature and cinema. I wanted their experiences to be felt, heard and seen. In that, yes, my faith did influence my writing. But not enough to secure an audience with the Pope.
Despite my hesitation, I remember walking wide-eyed into the large chamber decorated by massive frescoes in the maze that was the Vatican, on that warm Saturday morning in May. Seated ahead of me was filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who’d come there with his family and who was going to be speaking at the conference later that day.
The Pope arrived a few minutes later, taking slow steps with the help of a crutch. Not one for protocol, he immediately walked towards our side to greet Scorsese. This was two weeks before he was going in for an abdominal surgery, but despite not keeping well, he had chosen against calling off the engagement.
Taking a seat on a chair in front of the fireplace, Pope Francis addressed us for the first time. He told us about his life as a young teacher of literature at the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción of Santa Fe in Argentina.
“I have loved many poets and writers in my life, among whom I think especially of Dante, Dostoevsky and others still…,” he said. “The words of those authors helped me to understand myself, the world and my people, but also to understand more profoundly the human heart...” Recognising the power of imagination, he called our work most vital. “You are eyes that see and dream. We human beings yearn for a new world that we will probably never see fully with our eyes, yet we desire it, we seek it, we dream of it.” So, “continue to dream, to be restless,” he said, “to conjure up words and visions.”
Those words come back to me now as we bid farewell to a Pope who carried with him not just a love for his faith, but also for humanity. He relentlessly spoke for the poor, for peace, for inclusion, for kindness, for imagination. He believed in dreams, and he asked us to believe in them too. I remember queuing up to meet the Pope, and when my chance came, I nervously brought my hands forward for a blessing. He instead shook my hands, and encouraged me to speak, listening to me intently and smiling through it all.
As I sit here now, writing this piece in the quiet town of Stirling in Scotland, nearing the end of my second novel, a book I thought I would never write, I am thinking of the Holy Father and his words, to me and everyone else in the audience that day: “Persevere, then, tirelessly and with creativity and courage.”
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