The circumspect quality to Bergoglio’s liberalism at the time, motivated by his need to navigate the pressures and opportunities of Church politics, explains his supportive but cautious approach to liberation theology. “As head of the Jesuits in Argentina and then as a bishop, Francis never joined in the attack on liberation theology—but he was never a forceful defender of it either,” Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox has written. “As a bishop, he claimed that he favored it, but not in an ideological way. When debates about the movement split both the church and the Jesuits, Francis tried to patch up the divisions. He has subsequently conceded that he often did it with a heavy hand, which he now regrets.”18
In 2016, with the blessing of Pope Francis, the Jesuits made their general superior a Venezuelan, Fr. Arturo Sosa, whose communist sympathies have long been known. He has written about the “Marxist mediation of the Christian Faith,” arguing that the Church should “understand the existence of Christians who simultaneously call themselves Marxists and commit themselves to the transformation of the capitalist society into a socialist society.”19
A Champion of the Spirit of Vatican II
Bergoglio is not only the first Jesuit pope in the history of the Church but also the first pope to have been ordained after Vatican II. That combination of influences forms another key to understanding his papacy and the left’s warm reception of it. Like many priests educated at that time, Bergoglio viewed the pre–Vatican II Church as hopelessly unenlightened. He has said that his liberal grandmother weaned him off what he saw as the rigidity of the pre–Vatican II Church. During an interview in which he randomly declared that Buddhists go to heaven, he lampooned the pre–Vatican II Church for its dim view of ecumenism:
I remember my first experience of ecumenism: I was four or five years old and I was walking along with my grandmother who was holding my hand. On the other pavement there were two women from the Salvation Army wearing that hat which they no longer wear and the bow. ‘Are those nuns, granny?’ I asked. To which she replied: ‘No, they are Protestants, but they are good!’ That was the first time I heard someone speaking well of people who belonged to different religions. The Church’s respect for other religions has grown a great deal, the Second Vatican Council spoke about respect for their values. There have been dark times in the history of the Church, we must not be ashamed to say so because we are also on a journey, this interreligiosity is a gift.20
As pope, Bergoglio’s reliance on such caricatures of the pre–Vatican II Church has been constant. He shares none of the sympathy that his two immediate predecessors felt for the pre–Vatican II Church. He is keenly aware of his status as a son of Vatican II, saying, “I am the first Pope who didn’t take part in the Council and the first who studied theology after the Council and, at that time, for us the great light was Paul VI.” In a characteristic comment, he criticized the pre–Vatican II Church for taking too hard a line on suicide, whereas “I still respect the one who commits suicide; he is a person who could not overcome the contradictions in his life.”21
He routinely subjects the Church to severe criticism, but exempts from his critical gaze the post–Vatican II Church, which he regards as an era of enlightenment beyond questioning:
With the Council, the Church entered a new phase of her history. The Council Fathers strongly perceived, as a true breath of the Holy Spirit, a need to talk about God to men and women of their time in a more accessible way. The walls which for too long had made the Church a kind of fortress were torn down and the time had come to proclaim the Gospel in a new way. It was a new phase of the same evangelization that had existed from the beginning. It was a fresh undertaking for all Christians to bear witness to their faith with greater enthusiasm and conviction. The Church sensed a responsibility to be a living sign of the Father’s love in the world.22
In his interview with the Vatican-approved Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica, Pope Francis made a plea for a politically correct Catholicism inspired by the spirit of Vatican II. Yet he seemed oblivious to the devastation that the embrace of a diluted and politicized Catholicism caused his own religious order. Even the liberal author Garry Wills, famous for his aggressive criticism of the Catholic Church’s conservatism, has had to acknowledge that the Jesuit order’s liberal experimentation after Vatican II backfired, causing it to spiral into a period of heterodoxy and decadence.
“Entering the Jesuits used to take one into a stable world; but that is far from the experience of recent times,” Wills wrote in the New York Review of Books. “A thirty-five-year-old still studying theology says: ‘My novice master left to marry, my formation director left for a relationship with another man, et cetera. One cannot help but get the sense that we of this generation of Jesuits may be the last of the Shakers.’”23
If future historians of this pontificate find themselves in an ironic Gibbonian mood, they will find it a revealing measure of the crisis in the modern Catholic Church that Bergoglio, the first Jesuit pope, emerged at the very moment the Jesuit order was at its most corrupt and chaotic. Flattering the liberalism of the Jesuit editors of La Civiltà Cattolica, Pope Francis scolded “small-minded” traditionalists for their “pastoral” incompetence, a laughable claim in light of his own order’s disintegration.
“There is no going back,” he has said. “Whoever goes back is mistaken.”24 Such confident talk would imply that his own order is moving forward briskly. It isn’t. The Jesuits to whom he was speaking preside over pews that are largely empty and seminaries that look like ghost towns. To take just one measure of the Jesuit order’s failure, the vast majority of graduates from Jesuit universities in the U.S. Congress vote for gay marriage and abortion rights.25
In the book Passionate Uncertainty, the sociologists Peter Mc-Donough and Eugene Bianchi, despite approving of the liberal direction of the Jesuit order, still conclude that its “soft-boiled” spirituality and embrace of radical left-wing politics hastened its crack-up. Limiting their study to American Jesuits, they noted that the number of Jesuits who quit the priesthood and abandoned the order after Vatican II outnumbered the ones who stayed. Far from energizing the order, the liberal spirit-of-Vatican-II approach, which Bergoglio as pope has sought to renew, wiped it out.26
The same holds true in the archdiocese of Buenos Aires. Under the self-consciously progressive and “pastoral” leadership of Jorge Bergoglio, the vocation rate didn’t rise; it plunged. Pews didn’t fill up; they emptied out, as many disaffected Catholics joined booming conservative Protestant sects. Shortly after Francis’s papal election, Vatican correspondent John Allen, who is sympathetic to the pope’s liberalism, traveled to Buenos Aires and reported that “vocations to the priesthood have been falling in Buenos Aires on [Bergoglio’s] watch, despite the fact they’re up in some other dioceses. Last year the archdiocese ordained just 12 new priests, as opposed to 40–50 per year when Bergoglio took over.”27
As pope, Bergoglio has doubled down on the very liberalism that crippled his own order and archdiocese. The movements most strongly associated with the modern Jesuits and Latin American Catholicism have largely defined his pontificate. “Who am I to judge?,” the saying for which Francis is most famous, would never have come out of the mouth of a pre–Vatican II pope. But it is not surprising coming from a Jesuit like Francis, who swallowed the liberal interpretation of Vatican II whole, evident in his comment that Vatican II mandated a “re-reading of the Gospel in the perspective of contemporary culture.”28
Jesuitical Situation Ethics
The German philosopher Robert Spaemann sees in this pontificate a return to the situation ethics that Pope John Paul II rejected, “an influential movement… which can be found as early as the 17th century among the Jesuits.”29 The popularity of Jesuitical situation ethics diminished under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, as they battled the “culture of death” and the “dictatorship of relativism.” But under the pontificate of Francis, it has been revived, even though the magiste
rium of the Church has repeatedly condemned it.
“Many of the things established in ‘situation ethics’ are contrary to the dictates of reason, of truth and of that which is reasonable, they display traces of relativism and modernism, and stray enormously from Catholic doctrine transmitted over the centuries,” the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared in 1956. Pope Pius XII condemned situation ethics by name, saying that no “situation” justifies the suspension of moral norms rooted in the natural moral law.30
Jesuits educated around the time of Vatican II also fell hard for modern psychology, asking trendy therapists such as Carl Rogers to hold “encounter groups” for them and to teach them about “non-directive therapy.”31 That helps explain the distinctly therapeutic feel to many of the pope’s musings. To anxious priests, he has given the advice, “Go to a doctor who will give you a pill for your nerves.”32 That would be unusual advice from most popes, but not this one.
He has never questioned the damaging liberal fashions within the Jesuit order, reserving his scorn instead for “bankrupt” Thomists and other traditionalists whom he deemed insufficiently progressive for failing to “understand how human beings understand themselves today.”33 In 2016, during a meeting with Jesuits in Poland, he encouraged confessors to go easier on penitents. “We need to truly understand this: in life not all is black on white or white on black,” he said. “No! The shades of grey prevail in life. We must them teach to discern in this grey area.”34
With its free-floating concepts of mercy and sin, Pope Francis’s 2016 papal exhortation Amoris Laetitia reads like something Carl Rogers could have written. More than a few commentators have noted the Jesuitical casuistry of the document, with its slippery appeals to non-judgmentalism and its tributes to the primacy of conscience.
“Situation ethics is back,” says Thomas Pauken, author of The Thirty Years War, in an interview for this book. “Francis was infected by the virus of 1960s liberalism.”
Amoris Laetitia is “typical of a Jesuit,” said Archbishop Bruno Forte, who helped Pope Francis draft it. Forte recounted how Francis told him that they needed to use ambiguity to loosen up the Church’s prohibition on Communion for adulterers. According to Forte, Francis said to him: “If we speak explicitly about Communion for the divorced and remarried, you do not know what a terrible mess we will make. So we won’t speak plainly, do it in a way that the premises are there, then I will draw out the conclusions.”35
Were a conservative pope to operate in this Machiavellian manner, the liberal media would object. But it approves of Pope Francis’s Jesuitical methods. The leftist filmmaker Michael Moore has praised him for his devious patience (“he bided his time”) and his “long game.”36
“Francis would like to liberalize church doctrine on marriage, the family, and homosexuality, but he knows that he lacks the support and institutional power to do it. So he’s decided on a course of stealth reform that involves sowing seeds of future doctrinal change by undermining the enforcement of doctrine today,” writes Damon Linker of the Week. “The hope would be that a generation or two from now, the gap between official doctrine and the behavior that’s informally accepted in Catholic parishes across the world would grow so vast that a global grassroots movement in favor of liberalizing change would rise up at long last to sweep aside the old, musty, already-ignored rules.”37
As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio was often criticized for his Jesuitical opaqueness at the service of modernist incrementalism. Argentinian journalist Elisabetta Piqué has reported that Vatican officials under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI saw Bergoglio as “not being orthodox enough” and didn’t trust his recommendations for bishops.
“They would get his lists and drop the names he submitted. Adriano Bernardini, the papal nuncio under Benedict XVI, did ‘not like Bergoglio at all,’” she wrote. “Bergoglio [was] accused of not defending doctrine, of making pastoral gestures that are too daring, and of not arguing publicly and with greater determination with the Argentine government of the time.”38
As archbishop, Bergoglio surrounded himself with liberal advisers, one of whom was Victor Manuel Fernández, a theology professor at the Catholic university in Buenos Aires. Fernández was famous for his flakiness, writing such books as Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing. A defender of situation ethics, Fernández criticized Pope John Paul II for his opposition to relativism’s denial of intrinsically evil acts. Consequently, according to Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister, “the congregation for Catholic education blocked the candidacy of Fernández as rector of the Universidad Católica Argentina, only to have to give in later, in 2009, to then-archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who fought tooth and nail to clear the way for the promotion of his protege.” Fernández now serves Pope Francis as a ghostwriter. Magister has found striking parallels between passages in Amoris Laetitia and Fernández’s writings.39
Fernández’s friendship with Pope Francis has contributed to the chaos at the Vatican. Fernández made news by attacking the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller. Fernández belittled Müller’s role as a guardian watchdog, saying, “I’ve read that some people say the Roman Curia is an essential part of the Church’s mission, or that a Vatican prefect is the sure compass that prevents the Church from falling into ‘light’ thought; or that this prefect ensures the unity of the faith and guarantees a serious theology for the pope.” In fact, claimed Fernández, “The Roman Curia is not an essential structure. The pope could even go and live away from Rome, have a dicastery in Rome and another one in Bogot[á], and perhaps link-up by teleconference with liturgical experts that live in Germany.”
Angered by this comment, Müller shot back that Fernández had drifted into heresy. Fernández is “fundamentally wrong and even heretical,” said Müller. “In this matter, one only has to once read the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium of the Second Vatican Council in order to recognize the ecclesiological absurdity of such thought games. The residence of the pope is the Church of St. Peter in Rome.”40
A Lax Archbishop
The same odd silences on controversial moral issues that have characterized his pontificate also defined his tenure as archbishop of Buenos Aires. Pro-family activists complained that Bergoglio wouldn’t lift a finger to help them protest the cultural relativism of the Argentinian legislature. In fact, according to Piqué, he would discourage them from holding protests. “Bergoglio shock[ed] Rome on the pastoral level by his intolerance of the obsessive strictures of some clergy on the subject of sexual ethics,” she reported. “In 2010, in the midst of the episcopate’s battle to stop the passing of the law on same-sex marriage in Argentina, the idea for a prayer vigil is announced. Esteban Pittaro, who works for internal communications at Austral University (of Opus Dei), sends an e-mail to the archbishop of Buenos Aires, informing them of the idea.” Bergoglio told Pittaro not to hold it.
Bergoglio preferred to play the prototypical “cool” priest of the post–Vatican II era and the liberal Jesuit order. He didn’t like formal titles and musty traditions (he once referred to them as a “dictatorship of the church”), would try to impress the worldly with stories about his past as a “bouncer,” and would chuckle at the mischief of others. According to his sister, Bergoglio “taught swear words” to her son, which resulted in the boy swearing during one of his sermons at an “important mass.” “After Mass, Jorge came to us and could not stop laughing,” she said.41
Above all, he sought to cultivate an image of humility. To this day, priests chuckle at the lengths to which he would go to foster that image. For example, he famously didn’t own a car, preferring to travel by subway. But one priest interviewed for this book said that Bergoglio would occasionally get rides from people, then ask them to “drop him off a block or two from his home so that he could be seen walking to it.” “He is a little bit of schemer,” said the priest. “There was an ostentatious quality to his humility.”
“Father Jorge,” recalled Argentinian Catholics, was also happy to be seen presiding over “tango” and “Pinocchio” masses. He had a decidedly casual approach to Church discipline. “On communion for the divorced and remarried, it is already known how the pope thinks. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, he authorized the ‘curas villeros,’ the priests sent to the peripheries, to give communion to all, although four fifths of the couples were not even married,” reported Sandro Magister.42
“He explicitly permitted a homosexual couple to adopt a child. He kept in touch with priests who were expelled from the official church because they had gotten married,” said the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff.43
Advocates for abused children within the Church saw Bergoglio as similar to other bishops in his laxity and negligence. Bishop Accountability.org has done a study of his record as archbishop of Buenos Aires and found it to be dismal:
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1998 to 2013 and president of the Argentine bishops’ conference from 2005 to 2011. During these years, as church officials in the US and Europe began addressing the catastrophe of child sexual abuse by clergy—and even as Popes John Paul II and Benedict made public statements—Bergoglio stayed silent about the crisis in Argentina.
He released no documents, no names of accused priests, no tallies of accused priests, no policy for handling abuse, not even an apology to victims.
The Political Pope Page 7