By COLLEEN BARRY and GIANFRANCO STARA
PORTACOMARO, Itatly (AP) — Pope Francis returns to his father’s birthplace in northern Italy on Saturday for the primary time since ascending the papacy to rejoice the ninetieth birthday of a second cousin who long knew him as simply “Giorgio.”
The visit to Francis’ ancestral homeland to renew ties with family touches on keystones of Francis’ papacy, including the importance of honoring the elderly and the human toll of migration. Francis’ private visit Saturday will probably be followed by public one Sunday to rejoice Mass for the local faithful, where he could well reflect on his family’s own experience migrating to Argentina.
The pope’s father, Mario Jose Francisco Bergoglio, and his paternal grandparents arrived in Buenos Aires on Jan. 25, 1929 to achieve other relatives on the tail end of a mass decades-long emigration from Italy that the pope has honored with two recent saints: St. Giovanni Batista Scalabrini and St. Artedime Zatti.
The longer term pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was born nearly eight years later in Buenos Aires, after the elder Bergoglio met and married Regina Maria Sivori, whose family was also of Italian immigrant stock, hailing from the Liguria region. Francis grew up speaking the Piedmont dialect of his paternal grandmother Rosa, who cared for him most days.
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The elder Bergoglio was born within the town of Portacomaro, 10 kilometers (six miles) east of Asti, an agricultural town that lost population not only to emigration abroad but additionally to nearby Turin because it became an industrial center. Today, the town has 2,000 residents, nevertheless it numbered greater than 2,700 a century ago, and dropped as little as 1,680 within the Nineteen Eighties.
The pope’s family emigrated after the height, which saw 14 million Italians leave from 1876 to 1915 — a movement that made Italy the largest voluntary diaspora on the planet, in response to Lauren Braun-Strumfels, an associate professor of history at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Often citing his circle of relatives story, Francis has made the welcoming and integration of migrants an indicator of his papacy, often facing criticism as Europe basically, and Italy specifically, are consumed with the controversy over easy methods to manage today’s migrations.
The pope has recognized the historic significance of the emigrant experience with the recent canonizations of St. Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, an Italian bishop who founded an order to assist Italian emigrants at the tip of the nineteenth century, and Artemide Zatti, an Italian who emigrated to Argentina in the identical period and dedicated his work to helping the sick. He again used the occasion to denounce Europe’s indifference toward migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea for a greater life.
Francis is to have lunch in the house of a cousin, Carla Rabezzana, who has told local media that she and the pope kept up their connections over time.
“We’ve got known one another without end,’’ Rabezzana told the Corriere della Sera newspaper. “Once I lived in Turin, Giorgio — I at all times called him that — got here to remain because I had an additional room. That’s how we maintained our relationship.
“We at all times would joke. When he told me would come to rejoice my ninetieth birthday, I said it made my heart race. And in response I used to be told: ‘Try to not die.’ We burst out laughing.’’
The pope has many more third and fourth cousins still in the realm.
“It was a big family, and in the realm there are still many distant cousins,’’ said Carlo Cerrato a former mayor of Portacomoro. He said it was a “big surprise” for everybody within the town when Francis was elected pope nearly a decade ago.
“Everyone knew there was a prelate who had change into the cardinal of Buenos Aires, nevertheless it was something that the relatives knew, not everyone on the town,’’ Cerrato said.
While Francis is returning to the family’s ancestral homestead in northern Italy, he has yet to return to his own birthplace in Argentina after nearly 10 years as pope. Francis, 85, hasn’t really explained his reasons for staying away, but he recently confirmed that if he were to resign as pope, he would not return to Buenos Aires to live but would remain in Rome.
Barry reported from Milan.
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