The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Among the many barriers smashed by Perón’s 1946 electoral victory was the wall erected by Argentine liberalism against the Church. His was the first government in Argentina’s modern history to gain its legitimacy from identifying with Catholic values and priorities—above all with the Church’s social teaching, made popular in the Catholic and nationalist revival of the previous decade. The early years of the Peronist government looked like a high noon for the Church. Here, finally, was a government that would uphold Argentina’s Catholic heritage, implement Catholic social teaching, and support the Church’s work of evangelization.

  Later, after the Second Vatican Council, the Church would no longer—at least officially—look to the state to be an instrument of its evangelization. But at the time, this was the default position taken by bishops in Catholic countries: the Church was the guardian of moral and spiritual values that the government should uphold and implement, while respecting the Church’s freedom to Christianize society. Perón, eager for legitimacy—he gave no indication in his early life of being a believing Catholic, and little in his life story suggests much contact with the Church—embraced that idea, seeing his movement as the political incarnation of the “Catholic nation.” It was an idea that lingered long after the furious conflict between Perón and the Church from 1954 to 1955 that led to his being ousted in another coup.

  Just as Perón dispensed concrete benefits and real gains to the workers and their unions, and expected loyalty in return, he did the same for the Church: bishops and clergy received sudden increases in their salaries, seminaries were built, grants were offered to seminarians to study abroad, imported religious goods were tax-exempted, and Church organizations were offered state subsidies. But even more significant was the new openness to Catholic ideas. Perón explicitly identified his government’s doctrine with the social teaching of the Church—he spoke of humanizing capital and dignifying labor—and recruited Catholic Action leaders to put forward proposals on issues they had long campaigned for, such as the family wage and regulation of child labor, that quickly became law. The Peróns even had a Jesuit priest as an adviser, Father Hernán Benítez, who expressly linked Peronism to the Gospel and Catholic social teaching.

  But the relationship broke down because the Church refused to be bought. In the negotiations over a new constitution, Perón rejected the Holy See’s call to remove the patronato, the colonial-era right of the state to control the Church in a variety of ways, which the 1853 Constitution had continued to uphold. The Vatican, recently emerged from the fascist era in Europe, was sensitive to the dangers of supposedly Catholic states seeking to use the Church as an instrument of social control. And it knew that long after the Peronist government had gone, another, more hostile government could use that power seriously to inhibit the Church’s mission. For his part, Perón was not about to renounce his constitutional power to appoint politically loyal bishops; it was the logical corollary of Peronism as the political embodiment of the Catholic nation.

  Each side dug in. The Holy See, increasingly concerned by the attempted “Peronization” of the Church, refused to ratify new bishops, while for his part Perón, angered at what he saw as the Church’s ingratitude, began to attempt to detach Christianity from the Church. A new state doctrine, justicialismo, made an appeal to Christian values that were identified with Perón rather than Jesus Christ (“Perón is the face of God in the darkness,” declared Evita in her autobiography. “Here the case of Bethlehem, 2,000 years ago, was repeated; the first to believe were the humble.”) The state began to create parallel institutions to compete with the Church, depriving Catholic organizations of legal recognition. Peronism no longer claimed to be practicing what the Church preached but to preach what the Church failed to practice.

  In 1951, as the country prepared for elections, Evita became ill from cancer, dying the following July. Her appearances at the balcony of the Casa Rosada, giving impassioned speeches as the cancer wracked her body, would become iconic moments in Peronist mythology. Riding on a wave of sympathy for Evita, and backed by women to whom he had granted the vote in 1947, Perón swept the board in the 1952 elections.

  Then came the decline. As the economy experienced a downturn, Perón became defensive and paranoid, descending into the authoritarian madness that commonly afflicts populist-nationalist governments in Latin America, whether of the right or left. Nation, state, and government merged: state officials were required to be party members, disagreement was framed as dissent, and opponents (whether Radicals, socialists, or Catholics) defined as enemies of the people. Official art featuring the chiseled features of the Peronist “New Man” began to appear, and justicialismo descended into a vortex of philosophical banalities and bizarre dualities. The funeral of Evita, which has its modern parallel in that of Diana, Princess of Wales, was an extraordinary moment of mass grief, but the government’s attempt to create a cult of her—she appeared as a secular Virgin Mary on the school edition of her autobiography sporting a halo—marked a low point in relations with the Church.

  In 1951 and 1952, Catholic activists moved from critical collaboration to disillusionment, and then into outright opposition. Having lost many of their leaders to Peronism, Catholic Action was rejuvenated by their return. Church newspapers and Catholic Action meetings reported on the new Christian Democratic parties in Europe, comparing them unfavorably with the government. Perón detected the birth of a Church-backed political rival in his backyard and ordered a clampdown.

  In a speech in November 1954, Perón fulminated against priests meddling in politics and had a number arrested. Catholic Action was legally dissolved, and Church publications and radios were ransacked and closed down. In an echo of the Mexican Revolution, public religious acts were forbidden. A series of laws followed, aimed at restricting the Church and flouting its moral concerns, legalizing divorce and prostitution, banning religious education from schools, and derogating tax exemptions to religious institutions. The government began bestowing favors on Protestants and Spiritists, plastering churches with denials of Jesus’s divinity.

  As pastoral letters from the bishops were read out in parishes, lamenting these measures and accusing the state of attempting to create a parallel cult, Catholic Action, which at that time had seventy thousand active members, took to the streets. Networks of cells published and circulated pamphlets to counter the news blackout. Tactical commandos were formed to defend churches and prevent government stooges from interrupting Mass. But the main method of resistance was to organize public religious acts large enough to make the government’s prohibition of them unenforceable.

  On May 25, 1955, Perón boycotted the Te Deum at Buenos Aires cathedral, the annual ceremony of prayers for the nation attended by political and church leaders. Catholic Action began bringing people out on the streets in protest, culminating in Corpus Christi on June 11, a eucharistic procession of deep significance to Catholics. In spite of desperate government efforts to prevent it, more than a quarter of a million people processed silently behind papal and national flags in a definitive show of defiance.

  Perón panicked and ordered the arrest of dozens of priests and the ransacking of Catholic Action’s headquarters. The naval air force bombed the Plaza de Mayo, its planes bearing the slogan Cristo Vence (“Christ Conquers”), killing hundreds of counterdemonstrators organized by the unions. Recalling that moment in 2011, Cardinal Bergoglio told his friend Rabbi Abraham Skorka that the slogan “disgusts me, it makes me very angry. I am outraged because it uses the name of Christ for a purely political act. It mixed religion, politics, and pure nationalism. Innocent people were killed in cold blood.”

  In retaliation, twelve churches in the city center were gutted and burned. What followed were two months of further anticlerical campaigns and growing evidence of a series of military plots to unseat Perón. One of them, in September 1955, succeeded. It was known as the “Liberating” Revolution. The army had taken the reins again, called out from the barracks to restore orde
r and the constitution.

  The conflict between Perón and the Church did not lead, as might be supposed, to all Catholics becoming anti-Peronist. It was a family conflict, one that took place within the walls of the hallowed ideal of the Catholic nation. Perón, exiled in Spain, would in time make his peace with the Church, which was also keen to repair the breach. Seeing how ordinary people remained devotedly Peronist, in the late 1950s and especially in the 1960s, when Jorge was training as a Jesuit, many Catholics, fired by social justice, turned to Peronism, calling for the exiled leader’s return. Bergoglio was never active in a political party and, after 1958, the year he joined the Jesuits, he never voted. But he always had a natural affinity with the cultural and political tradition represented by Peronism.

  By persecuting Peronism, the army turned it into a martyr and increased the loyalty of ordinary people to the exiled leader. For the next three decades, from 1955 to 1983, the Peronist party was banned from every election except that of 1973, eighteen presidents served terms of an average of 1.5 years each, and the armed forces ruled for nineteen years. By the end of the 1960s, Argentina had the largest guerrilla force in the region, which would be defeated in the 1970s by one of the continent’s most brutal military dictatorships. To explain why Argentina became the most unstable country in the Western Hemisphere, the account must always begin in the 1950s, when Catholicism and Peronism faced each other down, and the army tried to take the country back to the days before Perón ever appeared. From the 1950s to the 1970s Argentina was paralyzed by a political paradox that is hard for foreigners to grasp: the antiliberals (the nationalists, the Peronists) were popular and came to power by winning elections, while the liberals—the democrats, the pluralists—used dictatorship to keep the Peronists out of power.

  * * *

  BEGINNING in 1952, for five years, while he was at secondary school training as a chemist, Jorge was a member of the local Catholic Action in his parish of Flores. Catholic Action was still a vibrant part of the Church—more than one hundred aspirants, as the adolescent section was known, met at the basilica at that time—and the nursery of many vocations to the priesthood. It received a particular boost in numbers at the time of the Church conflict with Perón, but at the end of the 1950s membership began to decline.

  Among the aspirants Jorge stood out as quiet, polite, and well read (he helped to set up and run the bookshop in the parish narthex), but he kept his vocation to himself. During the Church-state tensions of 1954–1955 the aspirants concentrated on private charitable acts; but in 1956–1957, Jorge with thousands of others took part in rallies in favor of allowing the Church to run universities. There was also charitable work, visiting the very poor in Flores, offering material help and comfort.

  At weekly Catholic Action talks by priests, known as “Tribunes for a Better World,” Jorge drank in the core tenets of the Church’s social teaching, still largely defined by the most recent papal letter on the subject (known as a “social encyclical”), Pope Pius XI’s 1931 Quadragesimo Anno. Read through the eyes of contemporary political events, the encyclical offered ammunition for both supporters and opponents of Peronism: on the one hand it deplored liberal economics and called for unions and state intervention in the economy; on the other, it sought to demarcate the limits of the state’s pretensions to control and shape society. For the adolescent Jorge, who was eighteen when the Church-state conflict broke out, it was a fertile environment for his awakening consciousness of faith and political ideas.

  The son of the head of his secondary school recalls his father reprimanding Jorge for arriving at class with a Peronist insignia; college kids were banned from wearing symbols of any sort. Yet Hugo Morelli, one of Jorge’s classmates who knew him well, claims that Jorge was anti-Peronist. “I was Peronist and he wasn’t, and we argued about it all the time.” What divides those two recollections was the growing Church-state tensions of the 1950s, when many Catholics who had been pro-Perón turned against him; by the mid-1950s, Jorge was one of them: he was attracted to socialism at the time. Later—in the 1960s and 1970s—he would come to respect Peronism as the expression of the values of ordinary people.

  The parrot next door to the school, on the other hand, had no doubt about its allegiances. Jorge’s classmates vividly recall that during classes it would screech ¡Viva Perón, carajo! (“Long live Perón, dammit!”), causing fits of giggles. In addition to Morelli, Jorge’s classmates between 1950 and 1955 were Alberto D’Arezzo, Abel Sala, Oscar Crespo, and Francisco Spinoza; they became close friends with him and with one another and would have regular reunions later in life, when Bergoglio was cardinal.

  The Escuela Industrial No. 12, which had started the year before in a private house in the barrio of Floresta, was an avant-garde initiative, part of the drive by the Peronist government to boost Argentina’s industrial capacity. Jorge’s father, Mario, was president of a civic association that raised funds for the school, and he secured his son’s place there. There were just a dozen pupils at this time. Although the school followed the nationally agreed-upon curriculum of obligatory subjects, it gave extra time and resources to food chemistry, qualifying its students to work in laboratories.

  His classmates paint Jorge as an ordinary young guy of his time, a warmhearted, book-addicted, but engaging companion. He teased them when their teams were thrashed by San Lorenzo, played basketball with them during breaks, and on weekends hooked up with them to go dancing with girls.

  But their descriptions reveal two respects in which Jorge stood out. The first was his fierce intelligence: he grasped new ideas and information with a speed that ensured he always, and apparently without effort, came out head of the class (his “truly enviable intelligence was honestly far above ours,” says Morelli. “He was always many steps ahead of us”). His classmates, who went on to have careers, as expected, in chemical industries, were clearly a bright group, which makes their awe of Jorge’s brainpower significant. They admired his performance, too, outside chemistry class, especially in his top subjects of literature, psychology, and religion. But his brilliance didn’t inspire resentment because he placed it at their disposal. “He supported us all the time if we had problems with any of the subjects; he always offered to assist,” recalls Crespo. There are glimpses, in these remarks, of the future priest: he had a particular ability for solving problems, adds D’Arezzo, “whether in our studies or in our personal lives.”

  The second distinctive trait was his intense faith. “At that time, when we were fourteen or fifteen, he was already militantly religious,” recalls Néstor Carabajo, who was part of a large group of fifteen to twenty guys, including Jorge, who often went on picnics in the Tigre Delta, an area of forest and grasslands just outside the city. Jorge, “with his baby face, always had staunch Catholic religious tendencies,” agrees Morelli.

  He and Crespo vividly recall a religious education class, a compulsory subject since being introduced by the military government in 1944, and subsequently ratified by Perón in his pro-Church phase. The teacher asked if anyone hadn’t received their First Communion, which was a requirement of the course. Two of them raised their hands. “It was obvious he had spoken beforehand to Jorge,” says Crespo, “because he told us: ‘compañero Bergoglio has offered to be your sponsor in the Basilica of St. Joseph of Flores.’” After Jorge instructed his two classmates in the Church’s understanding of the Sacrament of the Eucharist, he took them to receive their First Communion at St. Joseph’s, and afterward to lunch at his house. He was fifteen at the time.

  Jorge was by now working to earn money. His father had found him a job in his accountancy firm, initially just doing the cleaning, but later helping out with administrative tasks. He went on to do clerical work at a hosiery factory that was also one of his father’s clients. Combined with his studies, these were long days, when he would often not return home until 8:00 p.m. But he loved to work, and his extraordinary capacity for it has impressed others throughout his life. As cardinal, he was evange
lical about the vital importance of work for a person’s self-worth and dignity, and he was a determined opponent of the scourge of long-term unemployment.

  He did not take vacations but relaxed, above all in the summer, in the house of his maternal grandparents, where his great-uncles would teach him risqué Genoese ditties. There was a lot of adolescent hanging-out. Crespo recalls, “We always met in a bar on Avellaneda and Segurola, where we played pool. On weekends we met up in each other’s houses and went to dance in a club in Chacarita because there were lots of girls there.” Both he and Morelli remember Jorge going out with one of them. “Sure, he had a girlfriend,” says Morelli. “He was kind of cautious, but he danced with the rest of us. But yes, he was cautious. We encouraged him.”

  Once he overcame his shyness Jorge loved to dance, especially the milonga. Among his favorites was Ada Falcón’s version of “La Puñalada.” Anna Colonna, a friend in his parish circle, remembers him dressed in a suit, gallantly asking girls to take a turn with him. She was one of Jorge’s group of friends who regularly organized asaltos, parties which lasted through Saturday nights in people’s houses. The boys wore ties (white jackets if it was someone’s birthday) and brought the drink, the girls the food. At dawn, the boys accompanied the girls to their houses, hoping for a kiss if they got lucky. But these were Catholic Action teenagers in the 1950s. “At eight o’clock the next morning,” recalls Colonna, “we were all at Mass.”