Vatican City, Mar 3, 2018 / 03:15 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When pilgrims in the Eternal City hope to get an up-close view of the pope, or even shake his hand, they are usually advised to arrive at the Vatican early, to sit next to the barrier and, most importantly, to find a baby.
Brian and Kelle Smith, whose youngest son Bobby recently made his debut on the Pope’s Instagram account, only needed the first two suggestions. They’d come prepared with the baby.
Like many pilgrims who visit Rome, on Wednesday morning they woke up early, gathered their six children and braved the rain and long security lines before making in into the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall for Pope Francis’ Feb. 28 general audience.
Almost as soon as he entered the hall, Francis saw the family and made a beeline to the kids, giving each of them a blessing and patting Bobby, 2, on the cheeks. The toddler, perched on the barrier, has his eyes fixed on the Pope’s pectoral cross.
Instead of continuing down the line, Francis paused when he saw Bobby pointing to his chest, and stepped closer, allowing the boy to trace his finger along the chain holding his pectoral cross.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”><a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/PopeFrancis?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#PopeFrancis</a> greets a young child at today’s audience who wants to get a better look at the Cross he wears. <a href=”https://t.co/vXH0u7UHqv”>pic.twitter.com/vXH0u7UHqv</a></p>— Mary Shovlain (@maryshovlain) <a href=”https://twitter.com/maryshovlain/status/968773182936289280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>February 28, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Video footage of the encounter shows the Pope flashing a big smile and giving Bobby a final pat on the cheek before moving down the line of pilgrims.
Clips of the interaction immediately went up on Twitter, and later that day a close-up of the Bobby touching Francis’ cross went up on the Pope’s Instagram account, Franciscus.
In a March 2 interview with CNA, Brian Smith, the boy’s father, said it was a special moment for the family, “and Pope Francis was great, he was engaging with [Bobby].”
Smith said his son had been waving at the Pope as he walked in, “and he’s got the curly blonde hair, so I guess he caught Pope Francis’ eye.”
Francis, he said, “was very warm, and he spent a lot of time with the kids, really engaging with my youngest son.”
Though the interaction only lasted about 20 seconds, Smith was moved by the amount of time Pope Francis spent with them. “He’s the Pope, he’s the leader of our Church, of a billion Catholics, and he came and spent that amount of time with us when thousands of people were there to see him.”
During the brief encounter both the Pope and Bobby were talking with each other, Francis spoke in Italian and Bobby in baby-babble. However, with the noise and the excitement of the moment, Smith said he couldn’t make out what either was trying to say.
“It all seemed to happen so fast,” he said, noting that Francis “came and touched all six of the kids’ heads and gave them all a blessing, which was great.”
The family left Rome Thursday night and returned to Germany, where Smith is stationed with the U.S. military. They didn’t know about the Pope’s Instagram post until the next day, when a friend sent them a link to the post on Facebook.
“It was a pretty neat photo, the photographer did a great job capturing it,” he said. “It was pretty meaningful.”
<blockquote class=”instagram-media” data-instgrm-captioned data-instgrm-permalink=”https://www.instagram.com/p/Bfvu1NMDWx-/” data-instgrm-version=”8″ style=” background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:658px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% – 2px); width:calc(100% – 2px);”><div style=”padding:8px;”> <div style=” background:#F8F8F8; line-height:0; margin-top:40px; padding:50.0% 0; text-align:center; width:100%;”> <div style=” background:url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACwAAAAsCAMAAAApWqozAAAABGdBTUEAALGPC/xhBQAAAAFzUkdCAK7OHOkAAAAMUExURczMzPf399fX1+bm5mzY9AMAAADiSURBVDjLvZXbEsMgCES5/P8/t9FuRVCRmU73JWlzosgSIIZURCjo/ad+EQJJB4Hv8BFt+IDpQoCx1wjOSBFhh2XssxEIYn3ulI/6MNReE07UIWJEv8UEOWDS88LY97kqyTliJKKtuYBbruAyVh5wOHiXmpi5we58Ek028czwyuQdLKPG1Bkb4NnM+VeAnfHqn1k4+GPT6uGQcvu2h2OVuIf/gWUFyy8OWEpdyZSa3aVCqpVoVvzZZ2VTnn2wU8qzVjDDetO90GSy9mVLqtgYSy231MxrY6I2gGqjrTY0L8fxCxfCBbhWrsYYAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); display:block; height:44px; margin:0 auto -44px; position:relative; top:-22px; width:44px;”></div></div> <p style=” margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;”> <a href=”https://www.instagram.com/p/Bfvu1NMDWx-/” style=” color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;” target=”_blank”>#GeneralAudience</a></p> <p style=” color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;”>A post shared by <a href=”https://www.instagram.com/franciscus/” style=” color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px;” target=”_blank”> Pope Francis</a> (@franciscus) on <time style=” font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;” datetime=”2018-02-28T15:42:59+00:00″>Feb 28, 2018 at 7:42am PST</time></p></div></blockquote> <script async defer src=”//www.instagram.com/embed.js”></script>
After living in Germany for two years, the family is set to return to the United States in six months, and had wanted to visit Rome one last time before going back.
“We basically just went to Rome to see the Pope,” Smith said, explaining that they had initially planned to attend the general audience in January while visiting a friend in Italy, but had to cancel the Rome portion of the trip because the Pope was in South America.
However, it wasn’t their first time meeting the Vicar of Christ. Though it was their first interaction with Pope Francis, Brian, Kelle and their three oldest children met Benedict XVI during his Mass for Pentecost in 2010.
“One thing about both of them is that popes love babies,” he said, recalling that as soon as Benedict entered St. Peter’s Basilica “he saw the children and he just ignored everybody else and came for the kids and blessed them.”
“So my older three kids don’t have an excuse,” he joked, “because they’ve been blessed by two popes.”
Smith said that while he is excited to return to his home in Texas for a few years, he has enjoyed living in Europe, where, despite a general decline in the practice of the Christian faith, “there’s still so many great sites…Pretty much all of modern Europe is based on 1,000 years of the Church being here. So it’s great.”
Highlights of their time in Europe have included visits to Fatima, Orvieto and Lourdes, where Smith participated in the annual military pilgrimage to the shrine, as well as many other places where saints are buried.
However, Smith said perhaps the biggest highlight was having his son Bobby – who is named after Jesuit St. Robert Bellarmine – baptized by a Jesuit priest he knows during Mass celebrated at the saint’s tomb in Rome.
“This has been a great posting for us,” he said, “because you hear about things but America is not really a Catholic country, so it’s great to be able to see all of these pilgrimage places, it’s a great blessing.”
[…]
Should we suppose that photo-ops with Fr. James Martin, SJ, will reverse the trend?
My sense is James Martin SJ seems his preferred model for the new, refreshened, devil may care, Tutti Fratelli Jesuit of the future. Although, the devil does care and would be delighted.
The Jesuits are a disaster and should have been suppressed by JPII. I say this as a graduate of a Jesuit prep school whose great-uncle was a founder of the California province. I can only pray that it does not take another 50 years for the remain 15,000 to disappear. To claim that modern-day Jesuits have anything to do with St. Ignatius Loyola or St. Francis Xavier is like claiming that Madonna has something to do with the Blessed Virgin.
I guess that’s one way of looking at it.
I was trained by real Jesuit, long before the snowflakes/deviants took control… Little wonder they’ve fallen: most don’t believe in God, let alone the Catholic Faith.
My comment above referred to Pope Francis’s diagnosis of the problem.
For my money, I’ll go with Frs. James Schall and Paul Mankowski. Jesuits worthy of the name.
I agree with Pope Francis on this.
The fact that the Jesuiticals are in steep decline makes me smile too.
The fall of the once proud Jesuit Order is a lesson that the embrace of modernism, heterodoxy, Liberation Theology and political correctness by many of it’s members has been utterly toxic and destructive. Get Woke, go Broke.
To recover, the Jesuits need more priests like the late Fathers John Hardon and James Schall, and expel all those who adhere to heterodoxy, Marxism and relativism (a certain homosexualist Jesuit priest from New York comes to mind).
“What does the Lord mean by this? Humble yourself, humble yourself! I don’t know if I have explained myself,” said Francis, the first Jesuit pope. “We have to get used to humiliation.”
I, we, yourself, myself – six times.
Lord – single occurrence.
That’s all.
Waiting for you to hear my song
Waiting for you to come along
Waiting for you to tell me what went wrong
This is the strangest life I’ve ever known
Can’t you feel it
Now that springtime for the Church has come
The ‘deeper truth’ as to why there are so many fewer Jesuits today: Could it just possibly be that it is so because the present-day Jesuits are nothing like their predecessors?
This question from a graduate of Loyola H.S. more than 60 years ago.
Jesuits are not alone here. Benedict XVI said that the Church would become small and poor, but it would be a Church of the meek, a Church of faith. Hopefully, it would then become a beacon of light for a world struggling in the dark.
Inseparability and equality in quantity and quality of consecrated celibacy vowed to man and consecrated marriage vowed to God cf. Fratelli Tutti, 3 Oct 20 put into action from 10 June 2021 at Secretariat of State and Italian Parliament
It seems since 2013 that the Jesuits were the sole religious order in the Catholic church and it seems that only Jesuits are promoted and esteemed by this regime! Good riddance to them since they have become more associated as a cult than anything that it’s holy founder wished it to be. It has become anathema to what its original purpose was to be!