Images of Sister Genevieve’s slight frame, standing in solemn prayer just feet from Pope Francis’s body, were beamed around the world.
The 82-year-old French nun was not supposed to be there, paying tribute to the friend she met when seeking justice for a victim of Argentina’s brutal dictatorship.
After Francis’s body was laid in state in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, cardinals queued up to pay their respects.
The general public had yet to be admitted to the basilica, but Genevieve had broken protocol and slipped in and stood there for several minutes, wiping away tears.
Francis and Genevieve met 20 years ago after she had travelled from Rome to Buenos Aires for the burial of her aunt, Leonie Duquet.
At first she was unimpressed by the then-bishop of Buenos Aires, but years later they would strike up a friendship and work together to help the poor and marginalised.
Duquet, also a French nun, was a victim of Argentina’s dictatorship. She was thrown to her death into the sea in one of the infamous “death flights” on the night of December 14, 1977 alongside another French nun, Alice Domon and 10 activists.
Argentine rights groups estimate that up to 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared under the 1976-83 Argentine military dictatorship, with many of them 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 her re-burial on the grounds of the city’s Santa Cruz church, where she had been detained.
“I cried almost from the start to the end of the mass… I couldn’t accept that a part of the church was on the dictatorship’s side,” Genevieve said in a video posted on YouTube about her friendship with Francis.
When French President Emmanuel Macron went to Argentina on a state visit last November, Genevieve signed a letter asking him not to forget the French victims of the dictatorship.
Eric Domergue, whose brother Yves disappeared in 1976 before his body was found and identified in 2010, knew Genevieve at the time she was seeking a Catholic burial for her aunt.
He remembered Genevieve’s “piercing stare and permanent smile”.
“Genevieve is always attentive, asking about the family members of disappeared French people, and Argentines too,” he told AFP.
Genevieve wrote a letter to the future Pope Francis in 2005 when she felt let down by the lack of top church officials attending her aunt’s funeral.
Jorge Bergoglio, as he was still known then, was attending a synod of bishops at the Vatican, but he called her immediately.
Genevieve was not convinced by his explanations.
Eight years later, she stood in St Peter’s Square when Francis emerged on the basilica’s balcony as the new pope.
“I put my hands to my head and thought, my God, what will happen? I was afraid, that’s the truth,” she said in the video.
But she was won around by Francis’s message about a church for the poor.
Their friendship started to blossom after Francis invited Genevieve to a mass at the Santa Marta residence where he lived in the Vatican.
Francis even visited the caravan where Genevieve lives at a fairground on the Tyrrhenian coast.
They became closer still during the Covid pandemic when Genevieve asked Francis to help the Luna Park fairground workers who were left with no income, and to meet a group of Latin American trans prostitutes.
Once he resumed public audiences after the pandemic, every week Genevieve would bring a group of people from the LGBTQ community to see Francis.
“I always wrote to him a little message to tell him who was coming,” Genevieve said.
AFP
