Thirteen years ago, on a fateful March 13th in the year of Our Lord 2013, Jorge Bergoglio was elected the 266th Pope, taking the name Francis, until then never chosen as a pontifical name. And this pontificate has been a series of ‘firsts’, not all of them felicitous ones.
There’s three thirteens in this anniversary, but we Catholics don’t believe in triskaidekaphobia. In fact, thirteen is a providential number, the date Our Lady chose each month to appear to the children at Fatima.
And just as Our Lady exhorted, we pray for the Pope, as we wrote in a previous post, that God’s holy and perfect will be done in and through him. A tall order, perhaps, but the Almighty is quite capable of miracles.