In the photo, the names of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Oscar Bergoglio can be seen on page 84 of the register.
“I was moved by the photocopy of the book on nocturnal adoration,” the pope said in the handwritten letter.
He explained that those there for adoration would take turns before the Blessed Sacrament while others slept on cots in a room connected to the church. They would wake each other for their turn in adoration by saying “venite adoremus,” the Latin phrase for “come, let us adore.”
Pope Francis has mentioned before his close connection to Fr. Aristi, a Sacramentine priest, who was his confessor for many years.
In 2014, the pope explained to priests in Rome that “Aristi was a famous confessor in Buenos Aires. Almost all the clergy confessed to him. He was a provincial of his order, a professor ... but always a confessor, and there was always a line at the church of the Blessed Sacrament.”
Aristi died in 1996, when Pope Francis was an auxiliary bishop and vicar general of Buenos Aires. Before Aristi’s funeral, Bishop Bergoglio visited his body in the crypt of the basilica.
Pope Francis revealed that during that visit, while arranging flowers in the priest’s coffin, he had a sudden urge and quickly pulled off the small cross on Fr. Aristi’s rosary and put it in his pocket.
“At that very moment I looked at him and I said to him: ‘Give me half of your mercy,’” Francis recalled.
He said he still carried the cross with him as pope. “Whenever I have a bad thought about someone, I always place my hand here. And I feel the grace! I feel it doing me good. The example of a merciful priest, of a priest who is close when there is suffering does so much good…” he said.
The only eyewitness to the future pope taking the cross was Fr. Andrés Taborda, an Argentinian Sacramentine priest who was also in the crypt.
