Jenita Aguilar, a member of the family that Pope Francis visited in 2015, demonstrates the Popes blessing gesture during an interview with AFP at her home in Tacloban City, province of Leyte on April 22, 2025, a day after the Pope's death. (Photo by Jam STA ROSA / AFP)
Tacloban, Philippines: Fourteen months after the deadliest storm in Philippine history, Pope Francis stood on a rain-swept stage to deliver a message of hope to the battered town of Tacloban.
It was desperately needed, mayor Alfred Romualdez told AFP on Tuesday, a day after the pontiff died in Rome.
Already in his late 70s, the pope had insisted on making the January 2015 trip to the central Philippines despite an approaching storm.
"He didn't have to do that. He didn't have to come here in bad weather. He could have waited for three or four more days," said Romualdez.
Just over a year earlier, Super Typhoon Haiyan had left more than 7,000 people dead or missing after it slammed into Leyte province and the surrounding areas.
Jenita Aguilar, a member of the family that Pope Francis visited in 2015, shows a photo of the Pope at her home in Tacloban City, province of Leyte on April 22, 2025, a day after the Pope's death. (Photo by Jam STA ROSA / AFP)
The storm and the massive waves it generated flattened entire coastal communities that were already among the poorest in the Catholic-majority country, leaving mass graves, collapsed homes and dazed survivors in its wake.
"The pope gave us hope," Jenita Aguilar said of his 2015 visit. Her seven-year-old son Junko was among the hundreds of lost children.
The 53-year-old still remembers the moment Haiyan's surging winds and floodwaters ripped her son from his uncle's arms as the family clung to the unfinished rooftop of a store.
They would spend two days walking through Tacloban's villages searching piles of bodies -- human and livestock -- in hopes of finding him.
Sometimes she still imagines him alive, rescued and living safely in someone else's home, his memories of his parents wiped away by trauma.
"I was asking God why it had to happen. Was I a sinner?" she told AFP through tears. "I was asking if I wasn't a good mother."
With grief driving a wedge in her marriage, Aguilar said she went outside to catch a glimpse of the passing Popemobile on the day Pope Francis spoke in Tacloban.
To her surprise, the pontiff reached down and clasped her hand, delivering a blessing.
"It was a sign the Lord still loved me," she said, tightly clutching a rosary the pontiff personally handed her that day.
