Reflections on Pope Francis and his sinister sense of humour

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE – At 9 000m, you see a different side of Pope Francis.

It’s not just the proximity of travelling on the papal plane or tucking into the same creamy lasagna and beef fillet that is clearly a papal favourite on the Alitalia charter that ferries him around the globe. It’s seeing Francis relaxed, surrounded by a handful of his closest aides, embarking on a new adventure or returning home from one, exhausted.

For starters, he has an almost sinister sense of humour. When a Spanish colleague asked the 78-year-old pope after a particularly gruelling three-nation trip how he managed to have enough energy to get through the day, Francis chuckled: “He meant to ask, ‘What drug is he on?’”

He can be candid to a fault. When a German journalist asked why, in all his talk about the rich and the poor, he had neglected to ever mention the tax-paying middle class, Francis thanked him for the “correction”, said it was a “mistake” on his part, and promised to address it after thinking it through.

Francis also has a bit of street thug in him, remnants perhaps of an immigrant upbringing in working-class Buenos Aires and ministry later in life in its slums. Asked once by a French journalist about the attack by Islamic extremists on France’s Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper, Francis threw a pretend punch at a Vatican official and explained that if someone insults his mother, or his faith he can expect to get socked in return.

I discovered an altogether different side of Francis when I met him for the first time during his first foreign trip.

I had rehearsed in my head the brief words I wanted to say when Francis greeted each of the 75 or so journalists who were travelling with him to Rio de Janeiro for the Catholic Church’s 2013 World Youth Day.

Like the rest of the world, I had witnessed how in a few short months, Francis had turned the papacy upside down and electrified crowds in a way his grandfatherly but stiff predecessor, Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, had never managed to do in eight years.

What I wanted to tell him was that as a mother, I particularly enjoyed watching him interact with children: From the gentle kisses he readily bestowed on the heads of new-borns to the playful way he’d muss the hair of teens who got within arms’ reach.

And so when it came time to introduce myself, I shook his hand and started reciting what I had rehearsed: That I was a mother of three young children and … He immediately cut me off.

“What are their names?” he asked.

Flustered, I thanked him for asking and recited the names and ages of each of the children.

“Ahh,” he said, satisfied. “I always like to ask a mother about her children because she always smiles.” And so I learned, in that very first encounter, that Francis also has something of a charmer in him, an easy way of engaging a complete stranger that was surprising, and yet completely normal. – Nampa-AP

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