The images of the slight frame of Sister Geneviev, standing in a solemn prayer only on the feet of Pope Francis’ body, were warmed around the world.
The 82-year-old French nun should not have been there, paying tribute to the friend she met when he was seeking justice for the victim of Argentina’s brutal dictatorship.
After Francis’s body was staffed in the Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican, Cardinals was queued to give respect.
The general public was not yet accepted into the basilica, but Geneviev was a broken protocol and got in and stood there for a few minutes, wiping tears.
Francis and Geneviev met 20 years ago after she traveled from Rome to Buenos Aires for the funeral of her aunt Leoni Duket.
At first, she was not impressed by the then bishop of Buenos Aires, but years later they would make a friendship and work together to help the poor and marginalized.
– ‘piercing look’ –
Duquet, also a French nun, was the victim of Argentina’s dictatorship. She was thrown to her death into the sea in one of the scandalous “flights of death” on the night of December 14, 1977 with another French nun, Alice Domon and 10 activists.
The Argentine Right Groups estimate that up to 30,000 people had forcibly disappeared under the Argentine military dictatorship in 1976-83, many of which were tortured and thrown into the sea.
Duquet’s body washed ashore and was buried in a mass grave, but in 2005 it was found and identified. Francis, the then bishop of Buenos Aires, approved his restoration on the site of the city church Santa Cruz, where she was detained.
“I cried almost from the beginning to the end of the liturgy … I couldn’t accept that part of the church was on the part of the dictatorship,” Geneviev said in a video posted on YouTube for his friendship with Francis.
When French President Emanuel Macron went to Argentina for a state visit last November, Geneviev signed a letter asking not to forget the French victims of dictatorship.
Eric Domegue, whose brother Yves disappeared in 1976, before his body was found and identified in 2010, knew Geneviev at the time he was looking for a Catholic funeral for his aunt.
He remembered the “piercing look and the constant smile” of Geneviev.
“Genevieve is always careful, asks for the family members of missing French people and Argentines,” he told AFP.
– out of fear to friendship –
Geneviev wrote a letter to the future Pope Francis in 2005, when he felt misled by the lack of senior church officials present at her aunt’s funeral.
Jorge Bergolo, as he was still known at the time, visited the Synod of Bishops in the Vatican, but he called her immediately.
Geneviev was not convinced of his explanations.
Eight years later, she stood on St. Peter’s Square when Francis came out on the Balcony of the Basilica as the new Pope.
“I put my hands on my head and thought, God, what would happen? I was afraid, that’s the truth,” she said in the video.
But it was won by Francis’s message to the Church for the poor.
Their friendship began to bloom after Francis invited Geneviev to a liturgy at the residence of Santa Martha, where he lived in the Vatican.
Francis even visited a caravan, where Geneviev lives at a fair on the Tyrrhenian coast.
They became closer during the Covid pandemic when Genevieve asked Francis to help workers at the Luna Park Fair, who were left without income, and meet with a group of Latin American trans prostitutes.
After he resumed the public audience after the pandemic, Genevieve will bring a group of people from the LGBTQ community every week to see Francis.
“I’ve always written a little message to him to tell him who’s coming,” Geneviev said.
TJC / JT / MB / BC / JJ