July 4, 2023, 4:00 AM UTC

The Argentine Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio used to tell a story about inviting the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to speak to his class about literature. Bergoglio, who is now Pope Francis, said that the famously agnostic Borges confided that he had promised his very Catholic mother that he’d say the Lord’s Prayer every night.

When I was assigned to write Time magazine’s Person of the Year story about Francis, I decided to check the veracity of the anecdote. After all, Bergoglio told the tale before he was infallible. Borges wasn’t around to verify it — he died in 1986. So, when I was in Buenos Aires in November 2013, I arranged to have tea with the only other person who could certify the story. That was Maria Kodama, Borges’s widow and the guardian not only of his artistic legacy but his copyrights.