It always seemed to me that Pope Francis was a Pittsburgh kind of guy. And it’s appropriate that the first time the public got to view the pope’s body in state was in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, which was designed by Pittsburgh architect Lou Astorino.
The story of how Astorino became the only American architect to design a building in the Vatican has its roots here. It began with the late John Connelly, the legendary Pittsburgh businessman, philanthropist and owner of the Gateway Clipper fleet.
Connelly had been asked by Pope John Paul II to help fund a new residence for visiting bishops and cardinals, Casa Santa Marta. Francis later chose to live there, instead of in the more lavish papal apartments. As Astorino tells it in his book, “A Pencil in God’s Hand,” Connelly agreed to help only if his friend and architect would be included.
Eventually, Astorino was commissioned to design a chapel next to the residence, if he could fit it into a small triangle of land between the new building and a 16th-century section of the Leonine Wall. Triangles were nothing new to a kid who grew up in Brookline and in the shadow of Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, so Astorino went to work.
And triangles — long a symbol of the Holy Trinity — are repeated throughout the chapel, in floor tiles, roof lines, wall angles, light fixtures and windows.
The Chapel of the Holy Spirit was dedicated in 1996. John Paul II prayed there, as did the cardinals in conclave following his death. Benedict XVI prayed there, too. Francis, who continued to live next door until his death, used the chapel for his daily Mass unless he was required at the Basilica. And now it will be used by this conclave to choose his successor.
There was more to connect Francis to Pittsburgh than his favorite little jewel of a chapel that was designed by a Pittsburgher. His family migrated from Italy to Argentina, but it could have been Pittsburgh or any other town like it — towns built by immigrants looking to build better lives.
He lived a regular life, working as a janitor and a bouncer at a club. As a kid he was kind, but the nuns at his school remember him as mischievous and boisterous. “One is not born a saint, one becomes a saint,” one nun there joked.
Young Jorge Bergoglio loved his gritty neighborhood and the local football team. He was drawn to the poor, helping whenever and wherever he could. He loved the tango — the Argentinian dance that originated in the struggling immigrant neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. And he forgot none of that when he became a priest and eventually pope.
Francis was the “People’s Pope,” embracing the poor, the rejected and the disabled. He lived simply — running into Rome to buy eyeglasses, posing for selfies, wearing regular shoes instead of papal slippers. From the moment he chose the name of Francis of Assisi, it was going to be a different papacy.
There were plenty of critics — those who wanted a more conservative church or even a more traditional and more regal papacy. But Francis had that quiet and confident conviction of millworkers and factory workers and laborers who know that we are all children of God.
Longtime Pittsburgh priest Father Lou Vallone, now retired, said Francis was the pope he had waited an eternity for. Francis cared about each person — regardless of their station — and not how each person was described.
