Pope Benedict XVI broke a seven hundred years old tradition when abdicated in 2013 with the reference to his old age. A few days passed and the Cardinal conclave elected the Argentinian Jorge Bergoglio to be the next pope. We had seen the movie The Two Popes already before visiting Rome with the two excellent actor Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Price in the main roles. It is hard to judge how realistic the film was but it presented a very special situation with two extraordinary personalities bended with an invisible clam in it.

I had the honour to experience Pope Francis’s immediacy on the audience in the Holy See personally. We have realized only after how fortunate we were as this was almost the only occasion this year, in this covid time when pilgrims had the opportunity to meet him that close.

We had seen the same piece in the form of a play already before our trip to Rome in the Rozsavölgyi Szalon in Budapest with Sandor Lukacs and Tamas Jordan in the main roles. We could understand these two people who feel sin in their own soul even deeper. Benedict feels himself to be guilty for shielding his fellow clergymen in cases when he should not have done so while Francis’s sin had been his unableness to protect his followers from the junta in Argentine.

My piece presents the invisible clam existing between them using a photo made of them and a cross stitch handwork. The handwork shows a pelican feeding her young ones. It was the Apostolic Nuncio in Budapest who spoke us about the pelican as a symbol when he showed us the treasures of the chapel of the Nunciature. It was he who told us that the pelican feeding her young ones with her own blood was always one of the most widely used Christ symbols and this reflects self-abnegation and Devine love. Christian tradition draws a parallel between the pelican’s life-giving blood and Christ’s sacred blood.

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