"Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?"
"I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner."
"I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner."
Cordoba, Argentina
The room is small and red.
Heavy red curtains, red-tiled floor, red coverlet on the bed. A painting of the Crucifixion is the only adornment.
It looks like a cell: a monk's or a prisoner's.
This is Room No. 5 of the Jesuit residence in Cordoba, Argentina.
Outside this solitary space, on the other side of its thick stone walls, students flock and scatter like birds. Buskers try their hand at American blues. Street vendors hawk homemade pipes.
But in Room No. 5, all you hear is the insistent echo of your own thoughts, your lonely prayers to a faraway God.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the man who would become Pope Francis, spent two years in this room during the 1990s.
It was a dark night for a man now known for his megawatt presence and huge flock of followers. He was 50 years old, forsaken by many fellow Jesuits, left to suffer in silence. It was, he would later say, "a time of great interior crisis."
This is the story of why Jorge Mario Bergoglio was exiled to this room -- and how the painful lessons he learned here are transforming the Catholic Church.
Finding Francis in Cordoba by Rich Brooks, CNN
Cordoba lay in darkness when I arrived late on a July night, save for the dim halo of high streetlamps. My misconceptions about the city became clear by morning.
Cars honked through rush hour. Fashionable shops and fancy restaurants crowded the narrow streets. Dodging downtown traffic, I thought: This is where the Pope was exiled?
It may be 500 miles from Buenos Aires, but Cordoba is no Elba Island. More than 1.3 million people call the city home. It's bigger than Dallas and twice the size of Boston.
By chance, my first day in Cordoba was July 31, the feast day of St. Ignatius, who founded the Jesuits. It was a good day to officially begin my mission here.
Nearly every aspect of Pope Francis' life, from his career as a bouncer to his critiques of capitalism, has been picked apart by the press and a troop of talented biographers.
But as he prepares to make his maiden voyage to the United States, his time in Cordoba -- a dramatic passage for one of world's most famous men -- remains shrouded in mystery. In many timelines of the Pope's life, the years 1990-1992 are an empty, unexplained gap.
THE PEOPLE'S POPE
CNN's Chris Cuomo explores how a humble scholar became a religious rock star. See the people and places that shaped Pope Francis in a CNN special report, "The People's Pope," Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET.
I plowed through biographies, read dozens of articles and combed through every interview I could find, looking for references to his time in Cordoba. I even wrote the Holy Father a letter. A long shot, I know. More a prayer than a petition.
Receiving no reply, I tried another tack. I came to the city of his exile. Here in Cordoba, I planned to walk where he walked, kneel where he prayed, meet the people he met and read the words he wrote.
Since the early days of his papacy, I've suspected that one of Francis' central messages -- that even the worst sinner is deserving of mercy -- is more than a sentiment from the Catholic catechism. It has the ring of real experience.
And so I found myself in Cordoba's cultural heart, the Manzana Jesuitica -- the Jesuit Block -- a 17th-century complex that includes a tall stone church, a small chapel and the cloistered residence where 10 Jesuits live.
I thought it'd be good luck to attend Mass on St. Ignatius' feast day. Students from the nearby colleges packed into every pew of the Iglesia de la Compania, the Jesuits' church. Stuck in the back row, I couldn't hear most of the local bishop's homily, but I did catch the words "Papa Francisco" several times.
Some 57 years ago, the future pope came to Cordoba as a fresh-faced Jesuit novice, his hair and cassock coal-black. He was 21, about the same age as the students sitting beside me at Mass.
In a picture from 1958, the year Bergoglio entered the Society of Jesus, he looks confident and happy. His mother, who had wanted her eldest son to study medicine, appears apprehensive.
