The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  It meant not just learning to distinguish good from bad but striving to do great things for God—the Jesuits’ motto is Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, “For the Greater Glory of God”—yet usually in ways that were humble and unseen. What Bergoglio learned as a Jesuit was the capacity to “do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God,” as Francis told Father Spadaro.

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  JORGE began as a novice in Córdoba alongside twenty-five young men ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-six. Saint Ignatius had conceived the novitiate as a series of six core experiences known as “experiments,” based on the lives of the early Jesuits. The most important was the monthlong silent retreat, the Exercises, where novices discerned the presence of God in their lives and confirmed (or not) their call to be Jesuits. There was also a month of work in hospitals, cleaning and emptying bedpans, spending time alongside people in severe pain and suffering. The third “experiment” was a month on pilgrimage, when the novices were sent off in threes with very little money and had to depend on the kindness of strangers. The fourth was an experience of “low and humble tasks” built into the daily timetable—cleaning, sweeping, waiting on tables, washing clothes—which for aristocrats in Ignatius’s time would have been seen by their families as deeply demeaning. The last two—teaching faith to children in local schools and practicing giving talks—helped novices prepare for their lives as Jesuits.

  When not out on an “experiment”—the retreat, hospital, or pilgrimage—the daily timetable was formal, penitential, and tightly regulated. From rising at 6:20 a.m. through to lights-out at 10:30 p.m., virtually every quarter hour was assigned. Except for meals, cleaning, Latin and Greek, and study of the Rules, time was absorbed in periods of prayer, either alone or as a group. As well as the Office (recital of the Psalms four times a day) there were meditations, Mass, the Angelus, Rosary, spiritual reading, the lives of the saints, and eucharistic adoration. Of these, the most important for Ignatius was the thrice-daily examen, when the novices would examine their consciences. To encourage penitence and humility, there was also the culpa, when the novice-master would pick out a novice and invite the others to criticize him.

  In common with other religious orders before the Vatican Council, the novices were invited to mortify the flesh in order, as Saint Ignatius put it, “that one’s sensual nature may be obedient to reason, and all the lower parts of the self may become more submissive to the higher.” Novices were invited to use the cilice—a prickly metal band worn for a few hours a week around the upper leg—as well as the discipline, a small whip for self-flagellation. These were to encourage chastity: the apostolic freedom to love others without being attached to them, and to embrace the poverty of not owning others. But in the early 1960s this idea was confused by a prevailing nervousness about sexuality, reflected in a number of rules: the novices had to address each other using the formal usted form, and to avoid so-called particular friendships there had always to be at least three (numquam duo, semper tres) in any group. If there was an unhealthy aspect to this—mortification of the flesh would disappear almost everywhere after the Second Vatican Council—there was also an important insight: that too much exclusivity in friendship can cause divisions and separation in the wider group.

  Bergoglio has not spoken of his novitiate, but there are glimpses of him in a memoir by his contemporary, Jorge González Manent, known as “Goma.” A colleague from his Catholic Action days in Flores, Goma had followed Bergoglio into the Jesuits but had spent his first novitiate year in Montevideo, Uruguay. When he joined Jorge for the second year in Córdoba, he found it strange to have to address him as “Brother Bergoglio.” He recalls that Jorge’s Latin was better than anyone else’s because of his eighteen months at the seminary, and that his bookshelves already revealed his future passions: Romano Guardini’s The Lord; a biography of Ignatius’s companion, Peter Favre; Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul; and a book about Saint Francis of Assisi. If Bergoglio was bookish, the explanation was partly his health: his damaged lung led him to be excused from the pilgrimage and from more onerous cleaning tasks. But his piety clearly annoyed some of the novices. Goma recalls how in one culpa where it was Bergoglio’s turn to be criticized, “many of the comments were about the pious long faces which he puts on when he takes Communion or when you meet him in the corridors with his head tilted to one side.”

  In 1959 the novices had a distinguished visitor: Father Pedro Arrupe, then provincial in Japan, who would be elected superior general six years later. He showed them a documentary about the atom bomb falling on Hiroshima, which Arrupe had experienced firsthand, and described the extraordinary story of the Jesuits in east Asia since the days of Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci. Both Bergoglio and Goma were enraptured and asked him, separately, to be considered for mission there. Arrupe told them to wait until after philosophy, and to write to the general in Rome.15

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  JORGE took his simple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on March 12, 1960 and was now a Jesuit, with the right to put SJ (for “Society of Jesus”) after his name. The vows would be key to his calling. Poverty meant not being controlled by possessions and identifying with the poverty of Christ. For Jesuits it brings flexibility and simplicity, availability for the mission, and acts as a vaccine against what Jesuits refer to as “riches to honors to pride”—the desire for preferment and wealth that in the Exercises Ignatius imagines the devil using to lure people from their true calling. The second vow, chastity, was also about apostolic freedom: to be available to love and serve others without seeking to possess them. Obedience, the third vow, was also linked to freedom for mission: to boldly go where Jesuits were most needed, at the service of God’s will rather than their own. It meant trusting your superior, and sometimes knuckling down—a mortification not of the flesh but of the ego.

  Until the late 1960s the Jesuits in the southern cone of South America shared formation houses: although each did the novitiate in their own country, the Jesuit students of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia all did their juniorate in the Chilean capital, Santiago, and their philosophy and theology at the Colegio Máximo in Buenos Aires province. In Bergoglio’s case—because the Jesuits took into account his secondary education and time at the seminary—the juniorate was only a year. Together with Goma and others, Jorge traveled by truck to Mendoza, then by plane across the cloud-piercing mountain range of Aconcagua, landing in the improbable strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific that is Chile.

  The Casa Loyola was a purpose-built formation house twelve miles outside Santiago in a village then called Marruecos. The setting was rural and healthy: large gardens with almond trees and artichoke plants gave way to huge pear and apple orchards reached by rose-lined paths. There were farm animals, a wine-making bodega, and vegetable patches tended by Jesuit brothers. Like the novitiate, it was a monastic existence: self-sufficient, self-contained, bound by silence and prayer, with neither radio nor newspapers. Inside the house there were 130 simple small rooms (bed, cupboard, basin, desk) off long corridors at the end of which were the communal bathrooms, with hot water twice a week. The juniors dressed in cassocks outside the house and for Mass, but inside they wore ordinary clothes.

  The timetable was less micromanaged than at the novitiate, to allow time for studies. After getting up at 6:00 a.m., there was personal prayer until 7:30 a.m., Mass (in Latin), breakfast at 8:00 a.m., followed by house-cleaning tasks. Classes were from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Apart from Sundays and feast days, when talking was allowed, lunch was in silence at long tables, listening to an edifying book or fifteen-minute practice talks by juniors over the clatter of plates. After lunch there was time for rest before beginning classes again, from 2:30 p.m. until 8:00 p.m., with a break at 5:00 p.m., when the students gathered in groups under the trees to take tea and chat, supposedly in Latin, but in Chile the rule was seldom enforced. Twice a week there was time in the afternoon for sports—basketball and volleyball—and f
or the garden, clearing paths or picking apples. Outside the brief recreation periods, juniors were asked to keep silence, to pray and meditate constantly, and to study hard.

  The studies gave a grounding in humanities: Latin, Greek, literature, oratory, rhetoric, art, and culture. Because the grades were never posted on the board—it was an atmosphere that encouraged conformity rather than competition—it was impossible to know who stood out academically; the classes were formal, large (usually about fifty students), and passive, usually in the form of a lecture. Yet “although the times were still quite conservative, there was in the Chilean province a vision of change that would develop in the years following the Council,” recalls Juan García-Huidobro, a contemporary of Jorge’s at the Casa Loyola. His classmates all remember, for example, Father José Donoso, SJ, in whose interactive classes on art “we learned to savor the beauty and mystery of the world, what it was to be human, and the depth of God,” recalls Francisco López, a Uruguayan junior at the time. Goma, too, remembers Donoso’s blackboard packed with quotes and symbols that he spent the class unwrapping with “astonishing erudition.”

  One part of the juniors’ formation especially impacted Jorge: the weekend apostolic visits to the poor of the area. The Casa Loyola had been built by Father—now Saint—Alberto Hurtado, SJ, a Jesuit pioneer of social projects such as the Hogar del Cristo that continue to this day. Like most of the Chilean Jesuits of his time, he came from the upper class but began to question, in the 1940s, the Church’s place in society: for Father Hurtado, poverty was a scandal that undermined Chile’s claim to be a Catholic country, and he famously said that charity should only begin where justice ends.

  Father Hurtado had wanted direct contact with the poor to be a necessary part of Jesuit formation, and for the Casa Loyola to have a mission to the people of Marruecos. It was a model that Bergoglio, as provincial, sought to imitate in Argentina more than ten years later.

  The village was the hub of a district of poor tenant farmers who lived on the edge of destitution. Argentina and Uruguay were at the time far wealthier than Chile, and the sight of the very poor wandering the street was a new sight for Jorge and his Uruguayan contemporary, Francisco López. Jorge was assigned to teach religion in a basic little school in Marruecos, the Escuelita No. 4, where the children arrived dirty and often without shoes. In a May 1960 letter to his sister María Elena, Jorge sought to connect the poverty he saw in Chile with her eleven-year-old prayers. After congratulating her for her letter and diligent studies, he turned to her spiritual growth. “I want you to be a little saint,” he wrote. “Why don’t you try it? We really need so many saints.”

  Let me tell you something. I give religion classes in a third and fourth grade school. The boys and girls are very poor, some even come to school without shoes on their feet, and very often they have nothing to eat and in winter they feel the harshness of the cold. You don’t know what that’s like because you’ve never wanted for food and when you’re cold you just get close to the stove. But while you’re happy, there are many children who are crying. When you sit at the table there are many who don’t have more than a piece of bread to eat, and when it rains and it’s cold many of them are living in tin shacks and they have nothing to cover themselves with. The other day a little old lady said to me, padrecito,16 if I could get hold of a blanket how good that would be, padrecito.

  And the worst of it is that they don’t know Jesus. They don’t know Him because they’ve got no one to teach them. Do you see now why I say to you that we need many saints? I want you to help me in my apostolate to those children—you’d do it really well. For example, what would you say to making the effort of praying the Rosary each night? I know it’s an effort, but your prayer would be like the slow drizzle of winter that, when it falls on the land, makes it fertile, makes it bear fruit. I need my apostolate to bear fruit and that’s why I’m asking for your help.

  I’ll wait now for you to write soon and tell me what plan you have for helping me in my apostolate. Don’t forget that on that plan a child’s happiness depends.17

  Jorge’s companions remember him as quiet and studious, and a good conversationalist. His lungs continued to exclude him from sport—in the Casa Loyola it was basketball—and for the same reason he did not go camping in the mountains with the other juniors in the summer. But he did swim—a habit he would keep up, for the sake of his lungs.

  Unlike Chile’s juniors, who were almost all the products of the Jesuit-run fee-paying upper-class Santiago schools, the Argentine juniors were socially more mixed, and divided politically. “Those who came from the popular classes were staunch Peronists, while those came from the upper class who had come through the Colegio del Salvador were strongly anti-Peronist,” recalls Raúl Vergara, a Chilean contemporary. “You really noticed that among the Argentines, that lack of togetherness.”

  Jorge was not from the privileged world of Jesuit private schools, and his sympathies were increasingly with Peronism—although his fellow juniors do not recall him taking a stand in these arguments. In 1956, a first cousin of his—Lt. Col. Oscar Lorenzo Cogorno—was one of eighteen officers killed by an army firing squad after taking part in a failed uprising against the anti-Peronist president, General Aramburu.18

  That uprising had been in protest against gorilismo, or fanatical anti-Peronism, something Bergoglio, too, opposed. He was part of a generation of young Catholics who were increasingly angered by the veto exercised by the army over Peronism, which prevented it taking part in elections and in countless other, often petty, ways sought to humiliate its supporters. The bishops, who after the overthrow of Perón deplored what it called a “totalitarian régime that, invoking God, deceived and disoriented the masses, and persecuted the Church with the aim of replacing it,” had thrown in their lot with the army as the guarantor of a Christian nation, which associated the Church, in the popular mind, with gorilismo. When Jorge voted in 1958, it was very probably for Arturo Frondizi, a Radical close to the nationalists and Christian Democrats, who came to power on the promise of lifting the ban on Peronists taking part in elections.

  The Jesuit students at the Casa Loyola lived, says the Uruguayan Francisco López, between two eras: “on the one hand, a way of life and daily practice of what we understood to be the daily life of a Jesuit, and on the other a feeling that this could all be done another way.” The tensions between what was and what could be would lead almost all of Jorge’s contemporaries leaving religious life. But in his case, it produced a determination to stay and lead the change. Those who knew him at this time were struck by his focus. Even in that early stage of his formation, Jorge clearly saw his path ahead. Vergara recalls that during one afternoon’s tea recreation, “someone asked Bergoglio what future he saw for himself and he said, ‘what I’m really interested in is being in charge of the formation of future Jesuits.’ In other words, he saw himself as a novice master or provincial.”

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  IN March 1960 Jorge entered the Colegio Máximo, an hour’s drive from the Argentine capital, in the province of Buenos Aires, which would be his base for twenty-three of the next twenty-six years. Set in a 120-acre estate, it had rooms for 180 Jesuits, a cavernous church, and endless little chapels for the priests to say their daily Mass on their own, for there was a large community of priests and brothers there, in addition to the students. The college also had a retreat house for guests—known as the “Mínimo”—as well as various offices coordinating local pastoral and evangelization initiatives.

  Its main purpose, however, was study. The Máximo was one of the most important Catholic centers of teaching and research in South America: researchers and doctoral students came to use its immense world-class library and archive. Next door was the Jesuit-run National Observatory, and three buildings were dedicated to scientific research. There was an active printing press, which ran off the highly respected theology journal Stromata. Although only Jesuits were resident, the classes were full of members of other religious
orders that had formation houses in the vicinity of San Miguel in order to take advantage of the Máximo. The Jesuits’ mother college was at the heart of a network of houses belonging to various orders that made San Miguel a hub of religious life in Argentina.

  A few months into his first year of philosophy, Jorge lost his two fathers—one biological, the other spiritual—within weeks of each other. Mario died on September 24, 1961, in his early fifties, of a heart attack at the Old Gas Meter stadium. Father Enrico Pozzoli, by now frail, came to the wake, and soon after was taken to the Italian Hospital.

  When Jorge went to see him there the Salesian was asleep, so he left the room and chatted to a priest in the corridor outside. Soon another priest came out of the room to tell Jorge that Father Pozzoli had woken and was expecting him. Jorge then did something strange: he told the priest to inform Don Enrico that he had already left. Days later, the Salesian died without saying good-bye to the young man whom he had guided over many years.

  His action tormented him for a long time. “I assure you, Father Bruno,” he wrote to the head of the Salesians in 1990, “if I could have that moment again I would.” Even twenty-eight years after the event, his letter shows that Bergoglio’s reaction remained mysterious even to himself: he had not wanted the priest woken up, he explained, because “I felt bad, I didn’t know what to say,” and lied because “I don’t know what happened to me, if it was shyness or what.” He was clearly wrestling with emotions he could not fathom or express.

  In the Church, too, there was a dying. New winds were blowing in the era before the Second Vatican Council, which opened in Rome in October 1962. There was a growing generational divide between the young clergy and lay people who had come of age in the 1950s, on the one hand, and the Argentine bishops, who belonged to the previous generation of the 1930s and 1940s, on the other.