Buenos Aires bus tour follows Pope Francis’ path

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – You can see the streets where he grew up and played soccer, the church where Jorge Bergoglio prayed as a teenager and the cathedral where the man who would become Pope Francis said Mass. You can even visit the stand where he bought his newspapers every weekend and where he went for a haircut.

With an Argentine on the throne of St. Peter, the South American country’s capital city has launched a series of guided tours to give visitors a glimpse of the places that formed Francis, even if the bus and walking tours are just a modest and, so far, noncommercial first stab at papal tourism.

The tour bus is a single-story cruiser with sealed windows above a huge image on each side of Francis and the words “Pope Circuit” in papal yellow.

For three hours, the bus winds through Buenos Aires twice each Saturday and Sunday and can carry about 40 passengers, rolling past 24 sites linked to the new pope. There’s no charge for the trip, or for more limited walking tours of downtown and neighborhood sites offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The house at 531 Membrillar where the pope and four siblings grew up with his mother and father, Regina Maria Sivori and Mario Bergoglio, in the 1930s and ’40s is gone now, but the bus cruises down the tree-shaded middle-class street past the property, where another dwelling was later built.

Nearby there’s the little plaza where he played soccer as a boy, and the narrow, neo-classical San Jose de Flores church where he worshipped as a teenager and felt called to devote his life to God.

Visitors also see the seminary in the leafy neighborhood of Villa Devoto, where Bergoglio decided to become a Jesuit priest, and the Metropolitan Cathedral, which looks more like a classical Greek temple than a typical Catholic church. Bergoglio eventually presided as the capital’s archbishop in the imposing structure, which also houses the tomb of South American independence hero Jose de San Martin.

The tour ends at the Plaza de Mayo, which is fronted by the cathedral and the office building where Bergoglio lived alone in a humble room, shunning an ornate diocesan mansion in a northern suburb. The church has not provided outsiders with access to this bedroom, despite the curiosity of the faithful.

Across the plaza is the newsstand where Bergoglio bought his La Nacion paper on Saturdays and Sundays.

“He paid me with coins and we chatted about soccer and how things were,” said Nicolas Schandor, who owns the weekend stand.

Schandor’s kiosk is one of the few attractions on the trip that shows any evidence of papal commerce: A plastic key holder with the pope’s image goes for about $1.90 and a calendar costs $2.30.