Pope Francis Celebrates 86th Birthday
By Church News
Pope Francis marked his 86th birthday on the 17th of December by rewarding three people involved in charity work, including a homeless man who gives other street dwellers part of the alms he receives.
The pope gave the three people the ‘Mother Teresa Prize’ as recognition of their different forms of charity. The nun, who died in 1997, worked among the poorest people in India and founded the Missionaries of Charity.
The homeless man was identified by the Vatican only by his first name, Gian Piero and his street name, Wué.
The other two honoured were Franciscan priest Hanna Jallouf, a Syrian who works in his country, and Italian industrialist Silvano Pedrollo for his work in building schools and bringing clean drinking water to the poor in developing countries.
Pope Francis gave them the prize, a small globe of the world in a cube-shaped frame with an image of Mother Teresa holding a child, at a ceremony in the Vatican.
At the ceremony, the pope kissed the homeless man’s hand and one of the nuns of the order founded by Mother Teresa put a flower garland around the pope’s neck.
At a separate audience, Rome seminarians presented him with cake. No other particular birthday celebrations were planned.
During his first birthday as pontiff in 2013, Pope Francis celebrated his usual early morning Mass, and afterwards, he greeted four homeless men and women who live in the Vatican area.
His 78th birthday in 2014 fell on a Wednesday when he usually holds his weekly audience with the public. The general audience in St. Peter’s Square went on without much additional fanfare, though he did stop to blow out the candles on a cake given to him by a group of seminarians.
In 2016, Pope Francis kicked off his 80th birthday by having breakfast with a group of homeless men and women in the dining room of his residence, and in 2017, he threw a pizza party for sick children.
Pope Francis’ 2018 celebration was also with children: he held a party and ate birthday cake with kids being treated at a free health clinic inside the Vatican.
The pope never lets his birthday get in the way of regular business, though in both 2019 and 2020, the day passed in an uneventful way, except for a donation of four ventilators to a children’s hospital in Venezuela on his 84th birthday.