Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (72 page)

The vehemence of that condemnation certainly reflects the deep ideological divisions within the Jesuit Order and the Latin American Church more generally in the 1970s and 80s as much as anything Bergoglio may have done or failed to do, but it is also a testimony to the equivocal legacy of his time as Provincial. His redeployment to a series of relatively obscure positions without administrative responsibilities at the end of his stint as Provincial in 1986 can be seen as official recognition of that divisive legacy. But such moves are a routine feature of life in religious communities, and his appointment in 1992 as assistant bishop in Buenos Aires indicates that his great gifts had not gone unnoticed outside the Jesuit Congregation.

Bergoglio’s denial of being a ‘right winger’ rang true. As a young man he had read and been influenced by communist magazines and leftist writers like Leonidas Barletta, and he had many personal and intellectual debts to socialist friends. But his own political attitudes were fundamentally patriotic and Peronist: he believed that both Juan and Evita Peron has been influenced by elements of Catholic Social teaching on the dignity of labour and the value of work, he admired Evita’s charitable Foundation, and he shared the Perons’ low opinion of the landed aristocracy and big business interests. Over and above all that, Bergoglio rejected communism, and feared that some versions of Liberation Theology represented the infiltration of Catholicism by secular ideology. Patriotic, religiously conservative, new to his position, and uneasy about the opinions and activities of his wilder Jesuit brethren, some of whom he may have suspected of keeping Kalashnikovs in their wardrobes, Bergoglio also felt responsible for their safety. For all his conservatism, he was no bigot, and his prime concern as Provincial was to protect the Order and its priests in dangerous times. At least one Jesuit colleague routinely sought Bergoglio’s views on his writings on
Liberation Theology before publication: Bergoglio never sought to censor them, but persuaded his colleague to mail his manuscripts from other regions under assumed names, convinced that the regime monitored all Jesuit mail.
And it was against this background that Bergoglio became involved in the case which years later was destined to throw a question-mark across the beginning of his papacy. In 1976 two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, both of whom had taught Bergoglio in seminary, were working in a squalid shantytown in the Rivadavia quarter of the Bajo Flores district of Buenos Aires. There were many anti-Junta activists in the area, and one of the female catechists working with the priests was subsequently arrested as a guerrilla. Yorio and Jalics themselves held radical theological opinions, though they were probably not actively engaged in ‘subversive’ activity. Bergoglio has acknowledged his own political naivéte in the mid 1970s, and his lack of understanding of the calamity which had befallen Argentinian public life in the wake of the military takeover. But he quickly recognized that Jalics, Yorio and their fellow-workers were intensely vulnerable to the murderous right-wing paranoia which flourished in the wake of the coup, and he ordered them to leave the shantytown and return to the Jesuit Provincial residence. They refused, and their status as Jesuits was in any case equivocal, since they had already formally applied for release from the order to found a new religious movement, more overtly focussed on mission to the poor. Two months into the military regime they were kidnapped, drugged and tortured, though eventually released five months later.
Jalics and Yorio remained bitter for years, convinced that Bergoglio had denounced them to the authorities, or that he had at any rate knowingly withdrawn the mantle of Jesuit protection and thus abandoned them to their fate. When he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, and again when he emerged as
papabile
in the run up to the 2005 Conclave, this case was highlighted as evidence that he had been a Junta collaborator. Defenders pointed out that the accusations emanated from supporters of Argentinian President Néstor Kirchner, who came to regard Bergoglio as the most troublesome of opposition spokesmen. The cardinal himself rejected the accusations, insisting that he had made repeated personal representations to the army chiefs on behalf of the two priests, on one occasion asking the military chaplain due to celebrate mass for the Commander in Chief, General Videla, to plead illness, so that he himself could officiate and snatch a moment to intercede with
pthe General. According to Bergoglio, the eventual release of Jalics and Yorio was a direct outcome of these interventions. Yorio died in 2000, having left the Jesuit order: Jalics made it clear after Bergoglio’s election as pope that he did not now believe him to have had any part in their arrest and torture, though his statements on the subject were terse and notably lacking in warmth.

The story of Bergoglio’s lobbying of Videla on behalf of Jalics and Yorio seems very revealing. There is no reasonable doubt that Bergoglio was innocent of direct collusion with the Junta, and there is plenty of evidence that he quietly shielded and actively assisted many of its victims and opponents. Despite his opposition to Jalics and Yorio, he turned the Jesuit House of Studies into a refuge for a succession of fugitives from the Junta, several of whom have come forward to testify that Bergoglio helped save their lives. And within its limits, his ‘apolitical’ policy was an undoubted success: no Argentinian Jesuit was killed during his Provincialate. But it is equally clear that he sought to ameliorate rather than to challenge the atrocities of the regime. He has since observed ‘the Church always prefers to lobby than to make public declarations’.
⁵⁷
This falls a long way short of acknowledging the fawning acquiescence that characterized the public stance of most Argentinian bishops during the rule of the Generals, and he probably feels this himself. Reflecting on that period, he acknowledged, ‘I had to learn from my errors along the way, because, to tell you the truth, I made hundreds of errors, errors and sins’.
⁵⁸
Bergoglio, never far from the folk Catholicism of his childhood, believes in a personal force of evil, the Devil. ‘Sin’ is therefore not a term he uses lightly. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires and Chairman of the Argentinian Episcopal Conference, he led the Hierarchy in a penitential acknowledgment of their collective failures under the Junta, and in 1999 Bergoglio personally presided at the reburial of the relics of Fr Carlos Mugica, the first of the heroic slum-priests murdered by right-wing terrorists in 1974. During the ceremony, Bergoglio prayed ‘for Fr Mugica and all those involved in his death – for his actual killers, for those who were the ideologues of his death, for the complicit silences of most of society, and for the times that, as members of the Church, we did not have the courage to denounce his assassination: Lord have mercy’.
⁵⁹
The personal fervour and penitence in that prayer were unmistakable. And on becoming pope his repeated indications that he proposed soon to beatify Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered in 1980 for his opposition to right-wing tyranny in El Salvador, are an indication that he has come to
see Romero’s courageous stand against tyranny as a more Christian way than the policy he himself pursued as Provincial.

Bergoglio himself admitted his failings as Provincial in a widely publicised interview six months after his election as pope, attributing them to his youth and inexperience, the fraught circumstances of the time, and above all his own failure to consult and take advice – ‘I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.’
⁶⁰

Bergoglio’s personal failures as Provincial, if such they were, were therefore not wasted, for the experience of failure, penitence and forgiveness has since become central to his understanding of Christian leadership. He has repeatedly made clear his detestation of clergy who ‘play Tarzan’, confident of their own importance and superior insight.
⁶¹
The greatest religious leaders, he thinks, ‘were men who left room for doubt’. The bad leader is ‘excessively prescriptive because of his self assurance’. The priest who ‘nullifies the decision-making of his disciples is not a good priest, he is a good dictator’.
⁶²
When someone thinks he has all the answers ‘it is proof that God is not with him’. The experience of reaching one’s own limits is the truest and best school of leadership, and he feels drawn to ‘the theology of failure’, to a style of authority which he has learned through failure to consult, and to ‘travel with patience’.
⁶³

These attitudes informed Bergoglio’s ministry as Archbishop, and seemed to many a hopeful indicator of the style of papacy he would favour. But there was nothing tentative or uncertain about his sense of what the priorities of the Church itself should be. For him the Church is a missionary movement or it is nothing, and it is a movement which must be oriented towards the poor. His earlier unease about the language of Liberation Theology fell away as he confronted the massive social injustices within his diocese, and his outlook and priorities shifted decisively, away from mere charity to a call for justice and reform. In the pre-Conclave consultations he made a single electrifying intervention, with a speech which was probably the clinching factor in his subsequent election. As the cardinals fretted about financial and sexual scandals, about a dysfunctional Curia and the need for internal reform, Bergoglio had recalled his brethren to a sense of deeper priorities, the call to bring the light of the Gospel to bear on the darkest places in human experience. The Church, he told the cardinals, ‘is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not only geographically, but also the existential peripheries: the mystery of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance and
indifference to religion, of intellectual currents, and of all misery’. When she fails to do this, and instead becomes preoccupied with her own concerns and problems, ‘she becomes self-referential and then gets sick. The evils that, over time, happen in ecclesial institutions have their root in self-referentiality and a kind of theological narcissism’. And, he concluded, this need to turn away from the Church’s own narrow concerns to the need to announce the Gospel to the world ‘should shed light on the possible changes and reforms which must be done for the salvation of souls’.
⁶⁴

Within weeks of taking office, the new pope showed himself master of the speaking gesture, and many of those gestures suggested a dramatic divergence from the preoccupations and emphases of his predecessor’s pontificate. When Papa Ratzinger returned from his sojourn in Castel Gandolfo at the beginning of May 2013, he was installed in a former convent building in the Vatican grounds, specially converted for him at a cost of 800,000 euro, attended by Archbishop Ganswein, and accompanied by four nuns to cater for their domestic needs: the contrast with the new pope’s spartan arrangements in the Casa Santa Marta was eloquent. But other signs have been more deliberate. The traditionalist ‘reform of the reform’ which Benedict promoted in liturgical matters seems unlikely to flourish under Pope Francis. In the Sistine Chapel, he abandoned at once the celebration of Mass ‘ad orientem’, with the celebrant’s back to the congregation, which Benedict had reintroduced. His own liturgical preferences, it became clear, were for simple, short, interactive services, and in some matters his liturgical practice was subversive. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he routinely used the Maundy Thursday ceremony of the
Mandatum
or washing of the feet as an expression of the Church’s concern for the vulnerable and those at the ‘peripheries’. Year on year he washed the feet of poor men and women, prisoners, Aids victims, pregnant mothers, new-born babies. On the Maundy Thursday after his election as pope he celebrated the liturgy not in the Lateran basilica but at a Roman detention centre for juvenile offenders, where he washed and kissed the feet of twelve young prisoners, including those of two women, one of whom was a Serbian Muslim. Canon Law prohibits the inclusion of women in the
Mandatum
rite, (a prohibition widely ignored) and previous popes had confined the washing of the feet to twelve priests or seminarians. Scandalised conservative liturgical commentators struggled to reconcile the view that the
Mandatum
rite was a symbolic expression of Christ’s institution of an all male priesthood,
with the new pope’s inconveniently inclusive practice. The theme of the periphery was taken up in a quieter way by the new pope’s practice of travelling to slum parishes on the outskirts of Rome to celebrate mass there and meet the more ‘marginal’ members of his diocese.

The Conclave of March 2013, then, had manifestly placed a warmhearted and humble priest with a passionate concern for the poor on the throne of Peter. In the weeks and months after his election, the numbers attending the weekly audiences in St Peter’s square rocketed to 200,000 a time. The new pope began to drive round the square for three quarters of an hour before the audiences began, touching, blessing, greeting, and the crowds responded to Francis’s gentle personality with an enthusiasm his austerely professorial predecessor had never commanded. On a visit to Assisi he insisted on lunching at a local soup-kitchen for street-people, and he celebrated his seventy-seventh birthday by inviting a group of homeless men to breakfast with him in the Casa Santa Marta. The secular press began to notice the ‘Francis effect ‘:
Time
magazine nominated him as ‘Person of the Year’ for 2013, and in Britain the far from pro-Catholic
Guardian
newspaper hailed him as a new icon for the liberal left.

The anomaly of two popes in the Vatican was piquantly highlighted with the publication of Francis’s first encyclical on the feast of Sts Peter and Paul 2013. Papa Ratzinger had included some material left by John Paul II into his first encyclical, but
Lumen Fidei
was explicitly acknowledged as almost entirely the ‘fine work’ of Benedict XVI, which, as Papa Bergoglio explained with characteristic self-deprecation, he had ‘taken up … and added a few contributions of my own’. The encyclical is in fact a thoroughly Ratzingerian utterance, an eloquent exploration of the biblical concept of faith, rich in allusions from Benedict’s wide reading, from St Augustine and medieval theologians like William of St-Thierry to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and T. S. Eliot. Faith in Christ is presented in the encyclical not only as the one true source of religious salvation, but also as the only satisfactory basis for and enabler of a fully humane society, without which truly human values cannot be sustained, and in comparison with which other forms of truth degenerate into mere subjectivity, or, in the case of the truths of science, into mere technological manipulation.
⁶⁵
Though far more positively expressed, this is unmistakably the voice of the author of
Dominus Iesus
, the CDF’s 2000 declaration on the unique salvific value of the Incarnation and the ultimate inadequacy of all other human value systems and religions. Papa Bergoglio no doubt endorsed the encyclical’s central theological claims,
but his own religious instincts, intuitions and gestures were manifestly more open-ended and inclusive.