A Guest at the Feast, page 15
Just after Bergoglio was elected pope, the superior general of the Jesuits wrote a letter to the members of the order worldwide in which he said that this was a time ‘not to allow ourselves to be swept away by distractions of the past’. The superior general knew, Ivereigh writes, ‘that there were Jesuits of a certain vintage – both inside Argentina and elsewhere – who mistrusted Bergoglio, saw him as a retrograde, divisive figure, and he knew that this toxicity could damage the Jesuits’ relationship with the new pope’. The doubts had started early. In 1977 an English Jesuit, Michael Campbell-Johnston, sent to Argentina to report on the order there, wrote that he was appalled that ‘our institute in Buenos Aires was able to function freely because it never criticized or opposed the government’, and, according to Ivereigh, ‘he berated Bergoglio . . . for being “out of step with our other social institutes in the continent”.’ Between 1988 and 1990, tensions grew within the Argentine Jesuits. Despite the fact that he said little, ‘Bergoglio was increasingly blamed for stirring this up,’ Ivereigh writes. In April 1990, Bergoglio was removed from his teaching job and asked to hand over his room key. Those who appeared to be closest to him were sent abroad. He himself was transferred to Córdoba, Argentina’s second city, where he spent two years. The new provincial of the Jesuits had been one of his harshest critics. This was a time, Bergoglio later said, ‘of great interior crisis’. It is where his story as a Catholic leader might easily have ended.
In notes he wrote during this exile, there are oblique justifications for what he had done during the Dirty War. He believed that some crises had no human solutions, and that ‘visceral impotence’ imposed ‘the grace of silence’. In a section called ‘God’s War’, he observed that there were often times when, in Ivereigh’s paraphrase, ‘God went into battle with the enemy of humankind, and it was a mistake to get involved.’ In order to return to power, Bergoglio hitched his wagon to the star of Antonio Quarracino, who was appointed archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1990. Quarracino, like Bergoglio a Peronist, disliked the government of Alfonsín, who, as Jimmy Burns writes, was ‘the first democratically elected Argentine president seriously to challenge the Peronist political dominance and power of the military since 1930’. Quarracino opposed moves to liberalize the divorce laws, and in 1994 declared on television that lesbians and gay men should be ‘locked up in a ghetto’ – homosexuality was ‘a deviation of human nature, like bestiality’. Burns writes that ‘there is no record of Bergoglio having said a word against him. As his auxiliary bishop, Bergoglio professed total loyalty to Quarracino.’
By becoming an auxiliary bishop under Quarracino, in 1992, Bergoglio was moving further away from the Jesuits. His vow of obedience to his Jesuit superiors no longer applied. On visits to Rome, he never once stayed in the Jesuit house on Borgo Santo Spirito but found his own lodgings. Once elected pope, Bergoglio wanted the world to know that he was, or had been, sinful. ‘I don’t want to mislead anyone – the truth is that I’m a sinner,’ he told interviewers.
From a young age, life pushed me into leadership roles – as soon as I was ordained as a priest, I was designated as a master of novices, and two and a half years later, leader of the province – and I had to learn from my errors along the way, because, to tell the truth, I made hundreds of errors. Errors and sins.
There is no evidence that Bergoglio, as one of the six auxiliary bishops, was ‘pushed’ into any role. He remained close to Quarracino, who was immensely loquacious and liked luxury, by remaining silent and himself eschewing the trappings associated with a prince of the church. ‘After a short time as a bishop Bergoglio began to distinguish himself from the rest,’ Guillermo Marcó noted. ‘He didn’t use a chauffeur-driven car, he walked and travelled on public transport . . . He would go and visit individual priests.’
Quarracino had many enemies in the church, not least the future archbishop of La Plata, who had powerful friends in the Vatican. But Quarracino had his own associate in the Vatican, a former papal nuncio who was close to John Paul II. A battle began to choose who would replace Quarracino as archbishop and cardinal, with Bergoglio supported by Quarracino alone. According to one version of what happened – a version supported by both Vallely and Ivereigh – the Curia in the Vatican refused to support Bergoglio’s appointment, and blocked Quarracino’s access to the pope to make the case for him. ‘But the wily old cardinal,’ Vallely writes, ‘who had been born in Italy, was not defeated. He then wrote a letter of appointment for the pope to sign and went to see the Argentinian ambassador to the Holy See, Francisco Eduardo Trusso, who was an old friend.’ Trusso, in his next audience, it is alleged, handed the letter to the pope, who duly signed it. Whatever the story, Bergoglio wouldn’t have become archbishop of Buenos Aires on Quarracino’s death in 1998 had he not had his predecessor’s full support (and, possibly, that of Carlos Menem, Argentina’s president between 1989 and 1999, to whom Quarracino had made himself an ally).
Bergoglio didn’t move into the archbishop’s palace, choosing to live in more spartan quarters. On his first Maundy Thursday, instead of going to the cathedral for the washing of the feet, he went to a hospital and washed the feet of AIDS patients. A year later, he caught a bus to wash the feet of prisoners. He allowed these annual foot-washing ceremonies to be photographed. Having kept a low public profile until now, he began to meet an increasing number of journalists – he even invited them for Christmas drinks. In October 1999, at a ceremony to mark the reinterment of a priest murdered for his left-wing views, Bergoglio apologized for the church’s position during the dictatorship: ‘Let us pray for Fr Carlos’s assassins, and the ideologues who lay behind it, but also for the complicit silence of most of society and of the church.’
This use of apology and aura of humility that he carried with him to Rome was not something noted previously in Bergoglio, whose meekness, Vallely writes, ‘was not some natural modesty, bashfulness or self-effacement’. It was, rather, an act of will in the spirit of Jesuit self-discipline. ‘In Pope Francis humility is an intellectual stance and a religious decision. It is a virtue which his will must seek to impose on a personality which has its share of pride and a propensity to dogmatic and domineering behaviour.’ Slowly, the man who had remained silent during the dictatorship began to ‘speak out’, as Burns writes, ‘and act in defence of the common good . . . Bergoglio’s political as well as spiritual manifesto became that of the Beatitudes, with the poor in spirit, the merciful, those who thirst after justice, the pure in conscience and the peacemakers deserving of blessing or conversion.’ On Argentina’s national day in 1998, Bergoglio preached in the presence of Carlos Menem and his government. ‘A few are sitting at the table and enriching themselves, the social fabric is being destroyed, the social divide is increasing, and everyone is suffering,’ he said. ‘As a result our society is on the road to confrontation.’ Two months later, he said in another sermon: ‘The church can’t just sit sucking its finger when faced with a frivolous, cold and calculating market economy.’
Bergoglio’s real confrontation with the Argentinian government began with the election of Néstor Kirchner, in office between 2003 and 2007, and continued after the election of Kirchner’s wife, Cristina Fernández, who held power between 2007 and 2015. ‘The people are not taken in by dishonest and mediocre strategies,’ Bergoglio said in his first sermon in the presence of the Kirchners. ‘They have hopes, but they won’t be deceived by magical solutions emanating from obscure deals and vested political interests.’ Soon, the Kirchners gave up attending his sermons. Néstor called him ‘the spiritual leader of the opposition’. Quarracino used to take his guitar to the presidential residence and, Burns writes, would ‘stay up late drinking and socializing with the hedonistic Menem and his entourage’. But Bergoglio refused even to visit Néstor Kirchner in Casa Rosada, the seat of government, to pay his respects after the president’s election.
Bergoglio was praised for speaking truth to power on behalf of the poor. ‘Here was the church assuming its proper role as the moral conscience of the community, which had delegated (and could withdraw) its consent to the government to rule on the community’s behalf,’ Ivereigh writes. ‘It was not to the institution of the church that Bergoglio was demanding that the state defer, but to the ordinary people in a culture imbued with the Gospel, of whose values the church was guardian and protector.’ This is all very well, but it raises a question about Bergoglio’s trajectory. One way of reading his rise to power is to attend to his two-year-long exile in Córdoba between 1990 and 1992. As a Jesuit, Bergoglio would have been skilled in the art of introspection. He could see the ways he had failed. As a novice master and a provincial, he had not been a uniting force. He was austere, a disciplinarian, humourless. And he had neglected to confront a vicious dictatorship. It’s possible that during those two years of banishment he decided to change. What he did once he became cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires was the result of that change. And it happened to lead him to the papacy.
Another scenario is that from the very beginning, from his ordination onwards, Bergoglio sought power, that he was guilty of the very ‘careerism and the search for promotion’ that he would deplore. Recently, he disclosed that while banished to Córdoba he read ‘all 37 volumes of Ludwig Pastor’s History of the Popes’. But there is perhaps a third and more banal way to see Bergoglio. In this, he is simply a great conformist. His rise, in this version, is not deliberate or calculated. It happened because it was noted that he would not disrupt or act courageously and would not move against the mainstream. He was a quintessential company man.
As he opposed the move to make gay marriage legal in Argentina, Bergoglio let it be known that he himself supported some form of civil union. Nonetheless, he wrote a letter to the four Carmelite monasteries in Buenos Aires in which he spoke of gay marriage as ‘something that the Devil himself was envious of, because it brings sin into the world by trying to destroy the image of God: men and women with their God-given mandate to grow, multiply and exercise their dominion over the earth’. The new law was ‘a frontal attack on God’s law . . . a bid by the father of lies seeking to confuse and deceive the children of God’.
He asked the nuns to pray to the Holy Spirit ‘to protect us from the spell of so much sophistry of those who favour this law, which has confused and deceived even those of goodwill’. This was, he wrote, ‘God’s war’.
The letter was leaked, and Kirchner responded by saying that it was time for Argentina ‘definitively to leave behind these obscurantist and discriminatory views’. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organization, declared that the church’s complicity with the dictatorship meant it ‘lacked the moral authority’ to preach on this issue. Even after the Dirty War, Bergoglio had kept his distance from the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The argument over what should be done about the disappearances – Menem had issued pardons in 1989 and 1990 that were revoked in 2003 – continued to rage right through the Kirchners’ time in power. Ivereigh weighs in on the subject: ‘The efforts of the vast, state-funded human rights industry have led to little new information about disappearances . . . while in many ways making it harder for Argentines to come to terms with the 1970s.’
This view was not shared by the Kirchners. ‘At no point’, Burns writes, did Cristina Kirchner defend Bergoglio while he was archbishop and cardinal ‘from those who alleged he had been complicit with the military during the Dirty War’. In 2010 he was formally cross-examined: in Burns’s words, he ‘asked for and was granted a special dispensation under Argentine law as a high-ranking official who was not charged of any crime’. He was allowed to give evidence in the archbishopric, behind closed doors, without having to appear in court. His evidence, almost three and a half hours of it, can be seen on YouTube.
The video of the hearing is possibly the best view we have of Bergoglio. Most of the time, as he is questioned about the case of Jalics and Yorio, the two abducted Jesuits, he is in full command. His answers are brisk, to the point, without seeming hostile or obviously evasive. His comportment is a far cry from the smiling figure that will emerge in St Peter’s Square little more than two years later. Under pressure, he is steely, distant and formidable, if somewhat impatient, even at moments arrogant. When he is irritated by a question, he has a hard, cold, withering stare. It’s easy to see why he would have been selected for early promotion by the Jesuits and then by the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires and then by the papal conclave. He exudes authority while keeping a great deal in reserve. Despite his eminent humility, he looks like a prince of the church.
But there are a few moments when he appears less than confident. He said that he first heard about the secret adoption of children born to women in captivity only two decades after the events. When questioned, he quickly revised his statement, saying that he learned about the adoptions at the time of the 1985 trial. But he insisted that he didn’t know about it when it was happening.
Estela de la Cuadra, whose pregnant sister, Elena, was kidnapped by the military, said it was inconceivable that Bergoglio didn’t know about the stolen babies. Her father had secured a meeting with Bergoglio at the time. When Bergoglio was asked about that meeting he said: ‘I don’t recall him telling me if his daughter was pregnant.’ Many of his friends and associates remember how well informed he was in the 1970s. One close friend, the human rights lawyer and judge Alicia Oliveira, stated: ‘He always seemed to know more than me when we met to exchange information.’ The Lutheran theologian Lisandro Orlov, who defended Bergoglio’s record during the Dirty War, doesn’t accept the idea that he knew nothing about the secret adoptions: ‘None of us who were around in those years can say we didn’t know what was going on. He can’t sustain the argument that he didn’t know about the missing children.’
Bergoglio continued his campaign against the Argentine government. He remained, Burns writes, ‘an ever-present thorn in the side of the Kirchner regime, questioning the legitimacy of its mandate to govern’. But he also remained skilled in the use of silence. When a priest called Julio Grassi was found guilty in 2009 of sexually abusing a prepubescent boy, Bergoglio, according to The Washington Post, declined to meet the victim. He didn’t offer apologies or financial restitution. ‘He has been totally silent,’ Ernesto Moreau, a member of Argentina’s Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, said. ‘In that regard, Bergoglio was no different from most of the other bishops in Argentina, or the Vatican itself.’
Bergoglio was seventy-six when Pope Benedict retired in 2013. ‘No runner-up at a conclave,’ Ivereigh writes, ‘had ever been elected a pope in the following one.’ Since Ratzinger’s resignation was due to age, it was believed that the conclave would, in any case, elect a much younger pope. On the face of it, it was unlikely that Bergoglio would be elected this time, but as Ivereigh also writes, ‘Bergoglio was a once-in-a-generation combination of two qualities seldom found together: he had the political genius of a charismatic leader and the prophetic holiness of a desert saint.’ He had other important qualities too: he was not a theologian, and so might be easy to undermine; he was not homosexual, and so might not have a sense of the amount of secrecy surrounding sex in the Vatican; in fact, he had no intimate knowledge at all of the workings of the Vatican and so might be easy to confuse. Also in his favour: he had been detached from the Jesuits for more than twenty years and would not be controlled by them; he had extensive pastoral experience; he had rearranged and managed the finances of his diocese with skill and prudence; he had openly opposed the government of Argentina on social and economic questions; he had made friends with leaders of other faiths; he had created an aura around himself as a man of humility. And there must have been a few old diehard cardinals who were not unimpressed at the way he had conducted himself during the Dirty War.
Being elected pope cheered Bergoglio up immensely. He knew that no one wanted a dour old pope. Just as he had adapted to the mood of the moment by becoming humble in 1992 on his return to Buenos Aires as archbishop, now he began to smile and look lively. Immediately after the election, he travelled with the other cardinals by bus rather than in a limousine. He went himself to collect his suitcase from the hotel where he had been staying and to pay the bill. In his first papal sermon, as Ivereigh puts it, he quoted strong stuff from ‘the radical French convert Léon Bloy, whom he had read with his friends in the Iron Guard in the 1970s: “Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the Devil.”’
The new pope was shown his palatial quarters by Georg Gänswein. ‘As Gänswein fumbled with the light-switch,’ Ivereigh writes, ‘Francis found himself peering into a gilded cage.’ He ‘decided at that moment to remain living in the Santa Marta’ – the accommodation where the cardinals had lodged during the conclave. On the same day he personally cancelled a dental appointment in Buenos Aires and his newspaper delivery. All this became news, and, combined with his smile and the informality of his ‘buona sera’ when he first appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s, it made Bergoglio a poster boy for informality, humility and good-natured cheerfulness.
One of the subjects that continued to intrigue the Catholic hierarchy was whether members of the faithful who divorce and remarry can receive communion. Bergoglio set up a synod at which this would be discussed. The argument is between a theory and common practice. The theory says that marriage is indissoluble and that those who enter a second relationship are sinful and therefore can’t receive communion. The practice is that Catholics all over the world get divorced and remarry and many don’t feel sinful. But some of them still look to Rome and want the rule relaxed. This is a divide made in heaven, especially for elderly cardinals who like factions. It can and will go on forever.
