Matthew Stolper, professor of Assyriology, standing in front of the Colossal Bull Sculpture from Persepolis

Eliot Elisofon: Marcel Duchamp descending a staircase, 1952.

Bernardo Bertolucci: Il conformista (1970)

Max Ernst: Silence through the ages, 1968.

Pope Francis and Borges: An Improbable Literary Collaboration

In the late spring of 1965, in a modest classroom in Santa Fe, Argentina, a young Jesuit named Jorge Mario Bergoglio did something quietly radical. He invited Jorge Luis Borges—then the most celebrated writer in the country, and perhaps its most enigmatic figure—to speak to his students. Borges came, blind and sharp-tongued, and asked the boys to write stories.

The moment now reads like a parable—the future pope and the blind seer, together in a room filled with teenagers. One would go on to lead the Catholic Church through a new and turbulent century. The other had already reshaped the landscape of literature, bending time and space with sentences as precise as prayers. What united them, at least for that day, was fiction.

It is a footnote in the grand narrative of Pope Francis' and Jorge Bergoglio’s life, but it deserves more. Before the Vatican balconies and white cassocks, before the weight of global diplomacy and the careful Church reform, Bergoglio was a literature teacher. The result of their encounter was a small book, Cuentos originales, published later that year by the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción. Fourteen short stories by students, shaped under Bergoglio’s guidance and a prologue by Borges himself. “Excelente me parece la idea de reunir e imprimir los 14 relatos,” Borges wrote in his prologue. “Este libro trasciende su originario propósito pedagógico y llega, íntimamente, a la literatura.”

The collaboration was improbable. Borges, an agnostic prone to theological labyrinths, and Bergoglio, a young man of the cloth who already displayed the quiet authority of someone destined for higher roles. But the two shared something essential—a belief in imagination as a form of knowledge. Borges had long wrestled with God in his writing, sometimes mocking Him, sometimes pleading. Bergoglio, for his part, understood that doubt—when handled with care—could serve as a bridge rather than a wall.

They did not become friends in the traditional sense. Borges remained Borges—gracious, elusive, and always veiled in a kind of deliberate enigma. But the moment left an imprint on Bergoglio. Decades later, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he commissioned a second edition of Cuentos originales. The students, now grown men, were tracked down. One of them, Jorge Milia, helped reconstruct the story of the book's genesis, writing that “fue afán de Borges imaginarlos como un libro”—that Borges himself had imagined it as a book.

By then, Bergoglio’s ascent within the Church was well underway—but he never forgot the project. When he became Pope Francis in 2013, Cuentos originales traveled with him to Rome. A year later, an Italian edition appeared, published by La Civiltà Cattolica and Corriere della Sera, complete with a new prologue from the pontiff. In it, Francis recalled the astonishment he had felt at his students’ narrative talents, and how Borges had recommended its publication and wrote the prologue.

It is hard not to read the episode now as emblematic of Francis’s entire papacy. He was always drawn to outsiders and paradoxes, to those who lived on the margins of certainty. In Borges, he encountered a writer who distrusted absolutes, who approached the divine sideways. Borges lent his pen to a collection of teenage stories, and Bergoglio saw in the gesture not mere kindness but genuine recognition—a quiet affirmation of their shared belief in the dignity of creative expression.

After Borges passed, their paths crossed again. In one of her last public gestures before her death, María Kodama—Borges’s widow—traveled to the Vatican to deliver to Pope Francis the Obras Completas. She knew he was an admirer. The meeting was ceremonial but charged. Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the cultural impresario, greeted her with lines of Borges. An initiative followed—a renewed “Atrio de los Gentiles,” the interfaith forum originally conceived under Benedict XVI, now reimagined through the lens of Borges’s mystical and agnostic themes.

Behind these symbolic gestures, something quieter endured—the memory of that classroom in 1965, the rows of young men scribbling stories, the blind man seated at the front, and the young priest nodding in encouragement. It was a moment in which literature was not ornamental but essential—a tool for understanding the world, and each other.

One can imagine, in the afterlife Borges never quite believed in, a small corner of infinite time where the writer and the priest meet again. Perhaps they speak of stories. Perhaps they read each other. Or perhaps they sit in silence, both knowing that fiction, like faith, is always incomplete—and that it is in that incompletion where the soul begins.

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The Witches’ Procession (detail) by Agostino Veneziano, c. 1520.