The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  It was October 1927 when the Italian passenger ship en route to Buenos Aires went down after a cracked propeller shaft damaged the hull. The Principessa Mafalda was among the fastest and most luxurious ships of her day, the transport of choice for celebrities such as the Argentine tango singer Carlos Gardel. It was Italy’s Titanic, a disaster of human arrogance and incompetence.

  Jorge Mario’s grandparents, Giovanni Angelo Bergoglio and Rosa Margarita Vasallo di Bergoglio, together with their six children—including Francis’s father, Mario—had bought steerage-class tickets on that ship. But because the proceeds of the sale of their Turin coffee shop had taken longer than expected to arrive, at the last minute they had swapped the tickets for passage on the Giulio Cesare a month later.

  Their lucky escape was part of Bergoglio family lore.

  * * *

  IN emigrating to Argentina, the Bergoglios were following a path taken by hundreds of thousands of Italians before them.

  According to the old Latin-American joke, while Mexicans are descended from Aztecs and Peruvians from Incas, Argentines are descended from boats. In the period of mass emigration to Argentina, between 1880 and 1930, so many boats came from Italy that the writer Jorge Luis Borges used to declare playfully that he couldn’t be a pure Argentine because he had no Italian blood. A glance at the Buenos Aires telephone directory tells the same story—as does a list of its cardinal archbishops in the twentieth century. Only one (Aramburu) was of Spanish extraction; the others—Copello, Caggiano, Quarracino, Bergoglio—were all tanos, as they are known in Argentine slang. The Italians gave Argentine cities not just trattorias, pizzas, exquisite gelato, and the custom of ñoquis (gnocchi) on the last Friday of each month, but bequeathed to Argentines an instantly recognizable musicality of speech along with those famously emphatic arm gestures.

  As immigrants usually do, the newcomers were joining relatives. Giovanni Angelo Bergoglio’s three brothers had done well in Paraná since arriving seven years earlier in that thriving river port upstream from Buenos Aires. From the profits of their paving company, the future pope’s great-uncles had raised an impressive four-story residence with a pretty turret, the only one in town with an elevator. The family nicknamed it the Palazzo Bergoglio.

  For Giovanni Angelo and Rosa, it was the second major move in a few years. They had married and raised their six children in the town of Portacamaro—where Bergoglio is quite a common surname—in Asti, in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. They were of peasant stock but, like many at the time, were moving into the middle class by educating their offspring. In 1920, they had moved thirty-four miles west to Turin, where the coffee shop they ran just about covered the children’s schooling. The future pope’s father, Mario, their only son, born in 1908, was a raggionere, an accountant who worked in the Banca di Italia.

  When, after a five-week crossing, the Bergoglios disembarked in Buenos Aires in January 1928, the country’s model of export-led growth, which had made it the world’s eighth-largest economy, more akin to that of Canada and Australia than Latin America, was about to come to an end. The Wall Street Crash the following year, which triggered the Great Depression, would eventually leave them penniless, forcing yet another fresh start. That recession, and the world war that followed a decade later, would change Argentina’s place in the world, triggering a new turbulence in its economy and politics.

  But as they stepped from the Giulio Cesare into the torrid heat of mid-summer Buenos Aires, that new horizon was still invisible to Mario’s parents and siblings. Rosa clung to her fox-fur coat as if it were winter, for sewed into its lining were the proceeds from the Turin coffee shop. The Bergoglios barely had time to take in the great avenues and stately buildings of belle époque Buenos Aires, the “Paris of South America,” before making haste upriver to a new life in Entre Ríos.

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH Argentina had become independent from Spain back in 1816, for many decades afterward it was a nation-state only on paper. In the absence of a central authority, the idea of a united nation governed from Buenos Aires by lawyers and merchants—the ambition of the so-called unitarians—provoked only chaos. From the 1830s to the 1860s the country was a confederation of self-governing provinces ruled by caudillos, cattle ranchers with armies of cowherds or gauchos. The greatest of these caudillos were Juan Manuel de Rosas in the province of Buenos Aires, Estanislao López in Santa Fe, and Facundo Quiroga in La Rioja. Their immense cattle and sheep estancias, some of which were as large as European nations, contained at the time most of the nation’s power and wealth. Of these three the most successful, most enduring, and wealthiest was Rosas, the “restorer of the laws,” who sat astride the period 1835 to 1852 like a creole Napoleon. Despite a fearsome reputation as a disciplinarian, he was a well-read, accomplished manager and a pragmatic leader, whose political strength lay in his close rapport with the gauchos. He understood their needs and their culture, and the importance of discerning the right moment to act. Later, Bergoglio would deduce from a letter Rosas wrote to Quiroga his own principles of good government, not least that “reality is superior to the idea.”

  Only with the defeat of Rosas in 1852—improbably, the Tiger of the Pampas retired with his wife to a cottage in Southampton, England—were the architects of the liberal project free to reverse that principle. What followed was the attempt to graft a new idea of a nation, one that was modern, liberal, enlightened, and cosmopolitan, onto the rootstock of a Spanish Catholic colony.

  The emerging export economy was shifting the power and wealth to the cities, where the unitarian lawyers and merchants reigned. Yet, despite agreeing to a national constitution, what followed were more years of caudillo uprisings against the central government, until, in the 1870s, the War of the Triple Alliance against Argentina’s neighbor Paraguay helped to settle the question. The national army, which returned victorious from that conflict, could now begin to impose the will of the state.

  Schools and railways were built, and immigrants began to arrive. It was President Domingo F. Sarmiento’s ambition to Europeanize Argentina. He dreamed of north European Protestants filling Argentina’s empty spaces, consigning the so-called barbarism of the caudillos and the gauchos to the past, and inaugurating a civilization of modernity and progress, with Argentina increasingly absorbed into the international economy. The lodestars in this project—economically, politically, and culturally—were Britain and France; travel in their direction, signposted progress, would lead liberal Argentina out of its backward Hispanic, colonial, mixed-race past.

  It is in this clash between modernity and the past, between the foreign and the national, the old and the new, that the Argentine culture wars of the twentieth century have their genesis.

  Argentina’s mostly creole—that is, Spaniards born in Latin America—ruling class had a mentality not so different from the Jeffersons and Washingtons in the United States. But the religion of the Argentine liberal elite was not Deism or Unitarianism but Freemasonry, which gave its adherents an institutional base to rival the Catholic Church. Theirs was a mentality shaped by Social Darwinist ideas about science and the superiority of white (preferably Protestant) culture. Sarmiento and other late-nineteenth-century presidents were disappointed that the migrants who came were mostly Italians and Spaniards, rather than Swiss or Germans; and they saw the defeat of the savages of the plains as an inevitable triumph of racial progress.

  In this enlightened, liberal view, the Catholic Church—and all religion—was a thing of the past, an affront to reason, the creed of the mixed-race, rural world that modern Argentina sought to leave behind. But they didn’t want to eradicate the Church, only to control it. The population was not ready for too much scientific progress, said the main thinker behind the 1853 Constitution, Juan Alberdi, and in the meantime the divine sanction of religious morality “is the most powerful mechanism available for moralizing and civilizing our people.”

  Just as, in the United States, the world of the frontier cowbo
y was romanticized just at the moment it was disappearing, in 1870s Argentina stories of gaucho life in the pampas began to be popular. José Hernández’s epic poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro, a favorite of Bergoglio’s and considered the defining Argentine classic, is both a protest at the mistreatment of the rural poor at the hands of landowners and army officials, and a celebration of a way of life vanishing under the onslaught of barbed wire and foreigners. As Fierro complains of the Italian immigrants, “I’d like to know why the Government / enlists that gringo crew / And what they think they’re good for here? / They can’t mount a horse or rope a steer, / And somebody’s got to help them out / In everything they do.” Priests in Buenos Aires say Bergoglio could recite long passages of Martín Fierro from memory. As cardinal in 2002 he used it, in the middle of a devastating crisis, to help reimagine the nation Argentina was called to be.

  By 1880, federalism was spent as a force, and the liberal project—centralizing, modernizing, capitalist—was unchallenged. Buenos Aires was made the federal capital, and the city of La Plata the capital of Buenos Aires province. National elections were held: presidents completed six-year terms and handed over to elected successors. As a democracy, it was far from perfect: until 1912 only naturalized citizens who were also male property owners could vote, and a single party, a coalition of provincial forces known as the National Autonomist Party (PAN), ensured its self-perpetuation by means both fair and foul. But it was stable, and what followed were five decades of rapid growth: finance and industrial goods poured in, along with millions of immigrants from southern Europe, while exports, mostly wheat, beef, and wool, flowed out. In this first era of globalization, triggered by massive cost reductions—the steam engine and the ship propeller had the same effect on that age as the microchip has on ours today—Argentina was the tiger economy of its day, proof, said its advocates, of the virtues of free-market capitalism.

  Economists call it comparative advantage: what Argentina produced well and cheaply was what European countries needed, and vice versa. As demand for Argentine exports accelerated, the frontier was pushed back; in 1879, the so-called Conquest of the Desert wrested eight million hectares of land from the Tehuelche and Araucanian natives and handed them over to just four hundred landowners. As huge swathes of territory opened up, Argentina sent increasing quantities of food and raw materials to Europe’s expanding industries and urban populations, while using the currency it earned from its exports to buy in the industrial goods and technology it needed to develop. Britain, then the world’s leading industrial power and provider of capital, was Argentina’s main market, its leading investor, and its major source of industrial goods. British capitalists invested in or ran the railway, the telegraph, the gaslights on the streets, the postal service, and the Buenos Aires trams, as well as Latin America’s first ever underground train, Line A of the Buenos Aires subte, which, decades later, would have one of its most loyal passengers in Cardinal Bergoglio.

  Together with New York—and in some years even more than New York—Buenos Aires was the main destination of a vast transatlantic migration. In the 1880s, 1.5 million people entered Argentina, rising to a staggering 4.3 million between 1890 and 1914. Over a million Italians and some 800,000 Spanish made new lives there, alongside large communities of Polish Jews and Syrian Muslims, as well as Welsh sheep farmers (who went south, to Patagonia) and Swiss Protestants (who settled in Santa Fe). Buenos Aires alone went from a population of 180,000 in 1869 to 1.5 million in 1914. Immigrants were usually educated and socially mobile; they were especially adept at creating small businesses, and soon came to outnumber the native-born as owners of local industries. This was especially true after 1930, when Argentine exports and imports dropped sharply, and people began to make locally what had previously been imported.

  The main beneficiaries of Argentina’s golden age were the families of lawyers, landowners, and merchants with land and capital whom Argentines shorthand as “the oligarchy.” Many were fabulously wealthy, the Texas millionaires of their day, notorious for their elegance and extravagance (the French for a time used the expression “as rich as an Argentine”). They moved out of the humid, mosquito-prone historic center of Buenos Aires to build sumptuous mansions in the latest French styles in the north part of the city cooled by the River Plate, known as the Barrio Norte. In contrast, the southern part of the city, by the fetid river Riachuelo, was where the poor from the interior would start out, crowded into cheap housing known as conventillos—nurseries of crime, disease, and the sultry music known as el tango. In the late twentieth century, this is where most of the shantytowns, the so-called villas miseria, could be found.

  The European immigrants were better off than those who came from the interior. They arrived, like the Bergoglios, with access to capital and learning and, on the whole, settled in the middle part of the city, in areas that ranged from working-class to petit bourgeois. In this respect, Jorge, born to Italian immigrants in the then lower-middle-class Buenos Aires barrio of Flores, the bull’s-eye center of the city, was amazingly unexceptional. Because of this great European immigration of skilled workers Argentina, like the United States, became a nation with a large middle class, placing great store in hard work and progress; and in this, too, the Bergoglios were a migrant family straight out of Argentine central casting.

  * * *

  JORGE’S grandparents and their children had been in Paraná for just two years when the world recession struck. The death from leukemia of the eldest brother, Giovanni Lorenzo, who headed the family’s paving company, together with the economic crisis, which was at its worst in 1932, put the business under. The Bergoglio Palace was sold for a song, as was the family’s marble tomb. The youngest brother made his way to Brazil, while Giovanni Angelo, with his remaining brother, headed with their families to Buenos Aires.

  There they sought the help of a priest whom Giovanni’s son Mario—the future pope’s father—had come to know on his visits to Buenos Aires. Father Enrico Pozzoli belonged to the Salesians of Don Bosco, an Italian teaching order that was prominent among the urban working class both in Italy and in the Americas. Mario had known the Salesians back in Turin and had looked them up within months of arriving in Argentina, lodging with them in their guesthouse whenever he went to Buenos Aires. It was at the guesthouse that he met Don Enrico, who became, from 1929, Mario’s confessor—a mentor, adviser, and spiritual director.

  After the Bergoglios arrived, penniless, in Buenos Aires in 1932, Don Enrico arranged for them to be lent 2,000 pesos, with which the family bought a confitería, selling coffee and cakes. Mario helped out by making deliveries of cakes on a bicycle, until, as the economy began to recover, he got work as a part-time bookkeeper in various small firms. The Church in Buenos Aires was a lifeline at this time for Mario, as for so many other families, mobilizing solidarity, weaving webs of support, just as it did seventy years later under Cardinal Bergoglio, during the brutal crisis of 2002–2003.

  Mario had become part of a circle of young men around Don Enrico who used to meet with him at the Salesian church of St. Anthony of Padua in the working-class barrio of Almagro. In the group were the two Sívori Sturla brothers, who introduced Mario to their sister Regina in the church one Sunday in 1934. She was the daughter of an Argentine-born descendant of Genoese immigrants and a Piedmontese woman, Francisco and María Sívori Sturla, who lived just a few blocks from the church. One of Regina’s uncles was a close friend of Don Enrico, with whom he shared a passion for photography; other uncles were active in the Catholic Worker Circles. This was the vibrant, thoroughly Italian and Catholic working-class world that shaped Jorge’s childhood. It revolved around the Salesian fathers, who were famous teachers and confessors. Children were taught to ask for the blessing of Our Lady, Help of Christians, every time they said good-bye to a Salesian.

  Mario Bergoglio married Regina Sívori on December 12, 1935. They had five children, of whom Jorge was the eldest. Until his death in 1961, Don Enrico was the family priest o
f both the Bergoglios and the Sívoris. “If in my family we live as serious Christians, it’s thanks to him,” Jorge later wrote. Don Enrico baptized Jorge on Christmas Day 1936, in the Almagro basilica of Our Lady, Help of Christians, eight days after he was born on December 17, with Jorge’s paternal grandmother, Rosa, and his maternal grandfather, Francisco, acting as godparents. Although the Salesian was away for the birth and baptism of the next Bergoglio child, Don Enrico would baptize the three that followed.

  Mario was by now doing the books for various small businesses in Flores. At first he and Regina rented, but soon after bought, a humble two-floor house, a casa chorizo, with kitchen and living room downstairs and bedrooms upstairs. It was there, at 531 calle Membrillar, that Jorge Mario was born, soon followed by two brothers and two sisters: Oscar, Marta, Alberto, and María Elena, the youngest born in 1948. His paternal grandparents, Giovanni and Rosa Angelo Bergoglio, lived close by in Flores. His maternal grandparents, Giovanni and María Sívori, remained in Almagro, four blocks from the church where Jorge’s parents had met.

  When Jorge was a child you could still see the remains of the fertile plots that gave Flores its name. Older residents recalled that the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas had had a quinta there, and how Flores had been the first and only stop on the very first Argentine train journey in 1857. The station improvised for the occasion was then on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and even in the 1940s, when Jorge was growing up there, it was a long way from the center. Since the city now has over ten million people, it feels far more central and middle-class than it would have done then: nowadays its streets are lined with pretty casonas adorned with curlicues and ironwork balconies, concealing patios or little gardens. But back then the houses were simple, just one or two floors, and the dusty streets turned to mud when it rained.