The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  While convalescing in September and October of that year, Jorge confided his thoughts about being a Jesuit to the family priest, Don Enrico Pozzoli. After again testing his call with some wise questions, the Salesian gave him the green light. In November 1957, he formally applied to the Society of Jesus and was accepted to start the following March.

  Because of Jorge’s tensions with his mother, Don Enrico was concerned about him returning home for the long intervening period, and arranged for him to spend the summer months in the retreat house his Salesian order ran in the mountains of Tandil, in the south of Buenos Aires province. There, in the Villa Don Bosco, in the company of vacationing priests and missionaries, Jorge recovered his strength. Some of those he met there would become lifelong friends.

  Bergoglio’s debt to Father Pozzoli is suggested by the warm tribute he paid to him in the title pages of his first book, Meditaciones para Religiosos (Meditations for Religious). Because Don Enrico was an outstanding watchmaker and a gifted photographer, Jorge describes him there as having “a very fine ear for the tick-tock of consciences and a very sharp eye for the imprint of God’s love on people’s hearts,” one who “knew how to embrace in God’s time the intricate passage of a soul, and to reveal the Lord’s designs in each person’s life.” What he most admired the Salesian for was his rootedness: he was the “king of common sense,” Bergoglio wrote in his 1990 letter to Father Bruno.

  The legacy of Jorge’s operation—to this day his voice is soft, and he gets breathless—has not prevented him from leading a normal life. But in removing part of his lung, the surgeons clipped his wings: while he kept his passion for soccer, he would no longer play it; and he would be exempted from the physically demanding activities during Jesuit training. His lungs were the reason why the Jesuit general rejected his application to go to Japan. Until his final mission in Rome, Bergoglio’s frontier would always be close to home.

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  JORGE’S decision to join the Society of Jesus while recovering from a brutal operation is striking, for the Jesuit story began, nearly five hundred years ago, with another man in similar suffering. Iñigo—later he Latinized it to Ignatius—was a thirty-year-old nobleman soldier from the Basque country in northern Spain whose leg was shattered by a cannonball while fighting the French. Carried in agony over the mountains from Pamplona to his home town of Loyola, he endured three leg operations without anesthetics, the details of which are best passed over, for they involved breaking his bones to reset them and sawing off a stump. He survived, just; and eventually, during nine months of convalescence in the top floor of the family castle in 1521, agonizing pain gave way to boredom and frustration.

  Ignatius was the dueling, womanizing, outdoor type who sported a fashionable two-colored slashed doublet with a cuirass and coat of mail, and hair under a bright cap that flowed down to his shoulder. Confinement was crucifixion. Worse, there were no copies at hand of the gallant-knight-rescues-distressed-damsel tales he read so avidly, only his sister-in-law’s pious tomes, specifically Ludolph of Saxony’s four-volume Life of Christ and Jacopo de Voragine’s Lives of the Saints.

  He was in for a surprise. As he turned from one saint to another, repelled by their piety and penances, some of the stories began to appeal to him—especially that of Saint Francis of Assisi, who before his conversion was, like Ignatius, a minor nobleman who spent his time in vanities. The young soldier found that these stories lifted his spirits and brought out good and noble thoughts in him—“What if I should do this?” he wondered—whereas when he thought of the knights’ tales, he felt dry and dissatisfied. Ruminating alone silently, hour after hour, intensely concentrated, he would lose himself in dreams and reveries; and as he came out of them, he began to detect feelings, motions of the spirit, which he learned to identify—by how they made him feel—as coming from either his own thoughts, or, if from outside him, from either God or what he called “the bad spirit” or sometimes “the enemy of human nature.” He began to contemplate, and had a vision of Mary that for hours flooded him with happiness, together with a revulsion at his former dissolute life. Finally one night, alone in his fourth-floor bed under a brocaded canopy, God gained a follower: unobserved by history, the soldier unconditionally surrendered.

  As he developed in the spiritual life—the next fifteen years were spent as a pauper, in and out of religious houses, on the road and on ships, reading and reflecting, fasting and begging—Ignatius delved deeper into the motions of the spirit, coming to understand some of the subtle ways in which the bad spirit appears sub angelo lucis, in the guise of good, tempting with feelings that initially seem to be of God; and how sometimes you can only spot what he called the serpent’s tail by tracing back the succession of feelings to the moment when the bad spirit took a person off course. Ignatius also came to understand that the spirits act differently with people, depending on their disposition. Thus in his famous seventh rule for discernment of spirits, the good angel touches a spiritually inclined soul gently, “like a drop of water which enters into a sponge,” whereas a bad spirit will feel harsh, like water falling on stone. Conversely, a person who is not advancing in the spiritual life will experience the good spirit as something that clatters and interrupts, whereas bad spirits enter quietly, “as into their own home, through an open door.”

  The Spiritual Exercises, which Ignatius eventually published, after much fiddling, in 1548, is a slim volume of tips and techniques, an instruction manual more than a book to be read, that enables a monthlong retreat to be given as easily in the middle of a noisy city—as he did in Paris and Rome—as in a rural retreat. Its flexibility made it the perfect adjunct to the age of travel and discovery: Ignatius was born in 1491, the year before Christopher Columbus stumbled on the Americas. From the Exercises flows Jesuit spirituality: finding God in all things, not needing to retreat from the world; being contemplatives in action, leading active lives but rooted in prayer; and freedom and detachment, learning how to be free of idols such as status, money, and power in order to be more available for serving God and others. In bringing people into direct emotional encounters with Jesus Christ through graphic imaginative contemplations of scripture scenes, the Exercises offered a new way of evangelizing that spread like seeds in a storm.2

  The construction of the Exercises is significant: they follow a forward-moving structure modeled on the spiritual path that Ignatius discovered in himself and others. Bergoglio once described that structure:

  The Principle and Foundation lays the groundwork by affirming the wisdom of indifference and explaining how “we ought to desire and choose only that which is more conducive to the end for which we are created” (SpEx 23). The First Week impresses with us two fundamental realities: we recognize and abhor our sins and their roots in the spirit of the world, and we converse about all this with Jesus “suspended on the Cross.” There is only one sure way to enter into the labyrinth of our sins: by holding on to the wounded hand of Jesus. In the Second Week, we hear the summons to work for the Kingdom; we come to understand the meaning of the struggle and how much is at stake; we begin to comprehend that the only weapon by which we can win the battle is humility; and we make our election. In the Third and Fourth Weeks, we meditate on the paschal mystery and how we are integrated by means of it into the community and the Church. In the light of this mystery, we confirm the election we have made.3

  This is the pattern of Christian conversion. It begins in a First Week experience, such as Jorge had at age seventeen, of God’s merciful love—the dawning knowledge that we are in relationship with God, who created us and is faithful to us, despite our turning away from Him. The rest flows from this grateful realization.

  As a Jesuit priest and provincial, and later as cardinal, bishop, and now pope, Bergoglio always insisted that the Church should offer people what he called this “primary proclamation”—the experience of God’s merciful love—prior to (in the sense both of precedence and importance) the rest of Christian teaching. Hence Fran
cis’s controversial insistence, in his interview with Father Spadaro in September 2013, that the Church should not be obsessed with moral doctrines but should be like a battlefield hospital tending to the wounded. This, he explained, was “proclamation in a missionary key”: only an experience of God’s love can prepare the mind and heart for everything else the Church offers and teaches. It is an insight that comes from the First Week of the Exercises, just as Francis’s major teaching document, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) flows out of the Fourth Week.

  Ignatius shared his portable desert with women as well as men, married as well as single people. Among the last was a group of students he studied with in Paris, who became the first Companions of Jesus (the word Jesuit came much later—an unfriendly epithet that stuck). They, in turn, directed others, who in turn offered themselves, and the Society expanded in a viral, capillary fashion familiar to us in the Internet age. From the first ten companions in Rome—Bergoglio’s favorite was the least educated of them, a brilliant French peasant named Pierre Favre whom within a year of his election Francis declared a saint—the Society’s growth was little short of meteoric: by Ignatius’s death in 1556, there were already more than 1,000 Jesuits in twelve provinces. In 1615 there were 13,112 members in thirty-two provinces, which by the mid-eighteenth century had nearly doubled. There were 36,000 Jesuits worldwide in 1965, although for most of the twentieth century the number was far lower—23,000 in both 1945 and 1995. Yet even after shrinking, the Society of Jesus remains the Church’s largest male religious order, active in 112 nations on six continents.

  Ignatius and his first companions placed themselves at the service of the pope, promising to go wherever he saw fit to send them. This is the origin of the famous Fourth Vow Jesuits take of special obedience to the pope “in regard to the missions,” which produced a moment of hilarity at a Vatican press conference after Francis’s election. Was the pope, as a Jesuit, still bound by it? a journalist wanted to know. The Vatican spokesman, Father Lombardi, also a Jesuit, and still reeling from the news, could barely contain his laughter. “I imagine,” he eventually managed, wiping his eyes, “that being pope now himself, this vow no longer applies.”

  Ignatius wasn’t just a spiritual master. He was skilled in attracting bright young men, forming them, and fanning them out to the far corners of the earth while keeping them linked to him and to one another. “The flamboyant gentleman-at-arms,” writes his biographer, Philip Caraman, SJ, “became a pivotal administrator, a level-headed patriarch of an ever-increasing family.” He did it all from a small desk in Rome. Between 1540, when Pope Paul III authorized the Society, to Ignatius’s death sixteen years later, the founder of the Jesuits wrote an astonishing seven thousand letters, full of encouragement, advice, news, and heartfelt promises of support and love.4 Ignatius saw letter-writing both as an art and a ministry, a way of walking with others. In this respect Jorge Bergoglio is Ignatius’s son: even as pope, he continues to handwrite huge numbers of letters, penning “F. Casa Santa Marta. 00120 Vatican City” on the reverse, should it need returning to sender.

  Ignatius and Francis are alike, too, in that they fuse two qualities that are seldom found combined in a person. On the one hand, Ignatius (as does Francis) had raw political ability, which some might call charm: a capacity for reading people, earning their trust, inspiring them, organizing them to work for high ideals, together with enormous skills as a natural leader, teacher, and negotiator. On the other hand Ignatius (like Francis) was a mystic, who lived and led by discerning spirits, choosing whatever served the greater good, God’s greater glory, which Jesuits describe with the Latin word magis. Spiritual guides are seldom good governors, and those in power are almost never saints. Ignatius and Francis are among the few who break the mold.

  They share, too, a constant attention to spiritual discernment—where is God calling us? what are the temptations and distractions from this call?—in hours of dawn prayer as well as in reflecting on the most mundane of activities. It is a focus that brings a remarkable freedom from the habits and norms of the day, whether in the Church or society; and yet, paradoxically for the modern world (but not for a Catholic), it produces a radicalism rooted in obedience to the Church as God’s instrument on earth. For both Ignatius and Francis, radical reform is ultimately about the courage to strip away the accrued layers of distraction to recover what has been lost. It is a going back in order to go forward. It is what makes them both great reformers.

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  THERE is a popular image of the Jesuits as an obedient, disciplined, well-trained Counter-Reformation army blindly obedient to the pope. There is some truth to it: the Jesuits would be for many centuries the defenders of papal universalism against the growing tendency of states to take control of the Church. But a more helpful analogy is to see the Society as a kind of dynamic global corporation, one that combines a clear common purpose and loyalty on the one hand with a reliance on individual initiative on the other. Its purpose, of course, is not shareholder profit but the building of God’s Kingdom. But just as successful corporations invest heavily in developing and training their leaders, so the Jesuits stood out in early-modern Europe by the astonishing effort and resources they put into their formation, which remains to this day longer and more thorough than any religious order’s.

  A Jesuit spends two years as a novice—time to decide, with the help of the monthlong Exercises, if God is calling him to the Society of Jesus—before taking his first, “simple” vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He then begins anywhere between ten and thirteen years (depending on his preexisting qualifications) of “formation,” toward the end of which he is normally ordained a priest. This might include initial university studies, but will always include some years of philosophy and theology study, broken by a two-year period of teaching (known in English as the regency). He will end with a kind of second novitiate, called a tertianship, during which again he repeats the monthlong Exercises. After this, the Jesuit will be invited to make his solemn profession, which includes the Fourth Vow.

  Ignatius regarded this process not as hoops to pass through to “qualify,” but as an opportunity for God to shape a mature human being: one who emerges, hopefully, as a self-reliant, mature, and wise spiritual leader, competent and broadly educated, able to be “sent” to where he is needed, whether to a university lecture hall or a hut in a far-off forest. Rather than tightly controlling his members, Ignatius governed loosely, relying on the Jesuits’ developed capacity for discernment, and on an internal compass he called nuestro modo de proceder, “our way of proceeding.” Jesuits are organized into provinces—a flexible unit that might include one or more countries, or (where there are many Jesuits) a region or region within countries—led by a provincial appointed for six years by the superior general in Rome. Apart from general congregations—once-a-decade meetings of all provincials, which set the general direction—provinces are largely self-governing.

  Jesuits are famous for their individualism. It is said that when you’ve met one Jesuit, you’ve met one Jesuit. The long formation produces, by definition, leaders; and leaders, by definition, lock horns. The Society of Jesus, a Jesuit once ruefully observed, is essentially an “orchestra of first violinists.” Because consensus can be difficult—three Jesuits, four opinions, say the Italians—the Society of Jesus sets great store by obedience.

  Jorge’s formation involved two years’ novitiate, a year’s juniorate (university-level humanities), three years’ philosophy, three years’ school teaching, three years’ theology, and a year’s tertianship. It lasted thirteen years, from 1958 to 1971. All but two of those years—the juniorate in Chile, and the tertianship in Spain—were spent in Argentina: the novitiate was in Córdoba, the regency in Santa Fe and Buenos Aires, and for six years (broken by teaching) he studied philosophy and theology at the Colegio Máximo, in the Buenos Aires province town of San Miguel. At the end of theology, in 1969, he was ordained a priest. In 1970, he took his final vows.r />
  His formation coincided with a period of epochal change in the Church. Months after he began his novitiate, Pope John XXIII announced his intention to call a meeting of the world’s bishops, the first in almost one hundred years, in Rome. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965)—overseen first by Pope John; then, from 1963, by Pope Paul VI—unleashed reforms that transformed the way the Church related to the world and led to far-reaching internal changes. The Council would be Bergoglio’s greatest teacher, and the single greatest source, later, of his pontificate. Among the changes the Council called for was for religious orders to return to the original charisms and activities of their founders. Leading this renewal-by-return would be one of his main tasks as provincial of the Argentine Jesuits in the 1970s.

  Jorge’s formation led him to draw deep from the wells of Ignatian spirituality and Jesuit history, developing a vision of formation that he would implement as novice master and provincial. At a time of crisis in the Society, on the eve of the Council, when many Jesuit students were leaving, Jorge discovered both internal spiritual clarity and a distinctive vision of the future of the Society and himself in it. His ideas were the product of different sources: the spirituality and ideas of the early Jesuits, as well as Catholic theology, especially of the Vatican Council, but also of the history of Argentina and the extraordinary role of the Jesuits in its formative period.

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  THE Jesuits in the colonial era laid the foundations of modern Argentina. They were explorers and founders of settlements that later became cities. They ran the largest and best-managed estancias (huge ranches) that lay at the heart of the colonial economy. They were protectors of the natives, opposing their abuse by the settlers. And they were the great educators of the time, founders of the colony’s universities and colleges.5