Cordoba, Argentina
The room is small and red.
Heavy red curtains, red-tiled floor, red coverlet on the bed. A painting of the Crucifixion is the only adornment.
It looks like a cell: a monk's or a prisoner's.
This is Room No. 5 of the Jesuit residence in Cordoba, Argentina.
Outside this solitary space, on the other side of its thick stone walls, students flock and scatter like birds. Buskers try their hand at American blues. Street vendors hawk homemade pipes.
But in Room No. 5, all you hear is the insistent echo of your own thoughts, your lonely prayers to a faraway God.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the man who would become Pope Francis, spent two years in this room during the 1990s.
It was a dark night for a man now known for his megawatt presence and huge flock of followers. He was 50 years old, forsaken by many fellow Jesuits, left to suffer in silence. It was, he would later say, "a time of great interior crisis."
This is the story of why Jorge Mario Bergoglio was exiled to this room -- and how the painful lessons he learned here are transforming the Catholic Church.
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