These memories were my reaction as a Catholic, as a believer and as an immigrant who made Leo’s journey, though in the opposite direction. I was born in Lima and have spent most of my life in the United States; Leo was born in Chicago and spent much of his life working in Peru. I am a Peruvian who embraced America, and the pope is an American who embraced Peru. It’s a coincidence, nothing more, but seeing the pope on that balcony felt like an odd and unexpected validation for my straddling, my choices, my faith.
John Paul II, the pope of my youth, is my default image for the papacy; not Benedict, not even Francis could displace him. As a kid, I saw John Paul as part pope and part action hero, fighting Communism one day and forgiving his would-be assassin another. It was a point of pride in our family that my great-uncle Alcides Mendoza, who was the youngest bishop at the Second Vatican Council and later became archbishop of Cuzco, helped show John Paul around when he visited Peru. This only cemented the Polish pope’s place in my Vatican cinematic universe.
But there is something distinctive in how I regard Leo, even in these earliest moments. He did not just visit Peru; he lived it and became it, “by choice and by heart,” as Dina Boluarte, Peru’s president, said in a celebratory video. Realizing now that we overlapped there briefly, I imagine him walking our streets, speaking not just Spanish but my kind of Spanish, sharing our joys and our worries, even eating our food. (Already, my mother has forwarded me a hilarious fake image of Leo, in papal whites, digging into a big bowl of ceviche with a bottle of Inca Kola in hand.)
All sorts of people — an ex-girlfriend, old classmates, a colleague traveling in Kenya — have reached out to ask how it feels to have a pope who is both American and Peruvian. All I can say is that it’s a bizarre form of kinship with a person I will probably never meet.
During his first public remarks as the vicar of Christ on Thursday evening, looking onto St. Peter’s Square, Leo briefly stopped speaking in Italian and switched to Spanish. In that moment, his demeanor seemed to change, his solemnity broken by a smile, as if indulging in his own memories, anticipating the impact of his words on a particular community and nation.
