The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  They made up at that time the largest episcopate in Latin America—sixty-six bishops representing forty-six dioceses. Argentina’s was the tenth-largest group of bishops at the Council. But they were mostly unprepared for what was about to happen there and were largely bystanders. They had been tightly linked to Pope Pius XII, had close ties to Italy, and identified with the Roman Curia, much of which resisted the Council’s reforms. With the exception of a number of new young bishops committed to renewal, most of the senior Argentine bishops took the Curia’s view in expecting the Council to be a brief gathering that would anathematize modernity and allow them to return home. When it took off in another direction, the Argentine bishops would find themselves burdened with implementing changes they had not sought, while clinging to a model of public engagement that was ever less credible to young Catholics.

  For that new generation, however, there were great expectations. They read the Buenos Aires Catholic magazine Criterio, edited now by a brilliant young priest, Father Jorge Mejía (made a cardinal in 2001, along with Bergoglio), who channeled through its pages the new streams of thinking from France. Also in its pages were articles by two seminary professors who would later be cardinals who shaped Bergoglio, Eduardo Pironio (a future collaborator of Paul VI) and Antonio Quarracino (who would persuade John Paul II to make Bergoglio a bishop and his successor as archbishop of Buenos Aires). These were the bright lights of a new generation.

  Goma, who had caught up with Jorge at the Máximo after staying on in Chile, remembers that the Council there “was like a personal devotion: some people barely knew it was happening, while others of us followed it closely.” He and Jorge, firmly in the latter group, set about publicizing the Council at the entrance to the Máximo with short texts mounted on exhibition boards answering questions about what the Council was and what it was setting out to do. The exhibition was a great success, and requests began to arrive to put it up in chapels and convents in the area.

  The Council was also followed in discussions between Jorge and the future provincial of Chile, Fernando Montes. They met over mate in the grounds, always in the same place under the trees, while others played sport: “He had his lung problem, and I just wasn’t very keen. I liked to chat,” Montes recalls. They became friends. “He wasn’t overwhelming, like other porteños,” says Montes, referring to the famed brashness of people from Buenos Aires. “Compared with them, he was more like someone from Santa Fe or Córdoba. He seemed to me more refined.” They didn’t just discuss earnest matters. They also laughed about the endless stream of nonsense spoken by an old Jesuit in the house who had lost his memory.

  But the Council occupied more and more of their conversations. He and Jorge were very aware, Montes said, “of being on the side of those who wanted a more open Church, not a Church of resistance to the world.” They had grasped that the objective of the Council was to redefine the Church’s presence in the world in order to speak to it better. Like the bishops in bed with the anti-Peronist military, defending the myth of the Catholic nation, distant from the poor, the Church had become, in its structures, disincarnate, absent from the contemporary world, responding primarily to itself. It lived by its own, often splendid light—the glory and logic of its timeless truths, the complex grammar of its ancient liturgies—and less by the mysterium lunae, God’s light.

  In that sense it was like much of the philosophy they were now studying—dry commentaries that offered elaborately sophisticated answers to questions no one was asking. “I studied philosophy from textbooks that came from decadent or largely bankrupt Thomism,” recalled Francis to Father Spadaro.

  When does a formulation of thought cease to be valid? When it loses sight of the human or even when it is afraid of the human or deluded about itself. The deceived thought can be depicted as Ulysses encountering the song of the Siren, or as Tannhäuser in an orgy surrounded by satyrs and bacchantes, or as Parsifal, in the second act of Wagner’s opera, in the palace of Klingsor. The thinking of the Church must recover genius and better understand how human beings understand themselves today, in order to develop and deepen the church’s teaching.

  For the Chilean Jesuits, accustomed to the more open and affectionate regime of the Casa Loyola, the Máximo was a cold shower. Rules about modesty and particular friendships—the numquam duo principle—were more tightly observed, as was the encouragement to speak only Latin to each other during recreation. Classes, too, were in Latin, as were the essays and theses. But during matches—in the best Argentine tradition, the Máximo’s sport was soccer, and its pitch was legendary—yelling in Spanish was the norm.

  There were some spring shoots of renewal. Jacinto Luzzi gave classes on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit author of The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu, who was a forbidden theologian prior to the Council. Teilhard not only reconciled faith with the natural world and science but posited an optimistic, evolutionary, incarnate kind of thinking that was at odds with the neoscholastic philosophy taught at the time. But for Jorge the most important professor at the Máximo was the dean of philosophy, Miguel Fiorito, who was a master of Ignatius’s discernment rules. As Bergoglio’s spiritual director, Fiorito was key to his development. “Spiritual discernment is one of the great dimensions of Pope Francis,” recalls a Bergoglio contemporary, Father Fernando Albistur, “in large part learned from Father Fiorito in this house.”19

  But these were the exceptions. “It was an era of change that the Máximo responded to with a certain resistance and formalism,” recalls Jorge’s Uruguayan contemporary, Francisco López. Most of the professors were old, foreign, and unprepared for the engagement with the contemporary world—“The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted,” as the opening of the 1965 document Gaudium et Spes famously put it—to which the Council was inviting the Church. The real action at the Máximo in those years was in the small groups who formed to discuss what it meant to be a Jesuit in these new times. It was a process of self-questioning that would lead many to leave; for Bergoglio, it shaped his ideas about the Society’s renewal.

  Jorge’s cycle of philosophy studies ended, in 1963, with the periculum, the oral defense of three years’ study. It was an intimidating exam: it lasted two hours, and was conducted in Latin in front of a panel of at least ten Jesuits. On the basis of the results, the scholastics were divided into sheep and goats. The more intellectually gifted in the upper stream would go on to teach and research, while those in the lower were destined for more practical pursuits, such as communications. Jorge entered the upper stream.

  At the end of philosophy, Jorge, along with the other graduates, received his minor orders, a stage toward priesthood. He wrote to Father Arrupe, who had just been elected general, to offer himself for the mission in Japan, but he received the answer back that his lung disease made him unsuitable.

  He was now a regent, meaning a Jesuit bound to teach for the next two (or, in his case, three) years in a school. Jorge, along with Goma, was assigned to teach literature at the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción in Santa Fe, one of the Argentine Jesuits’ oldest and best-loved institutions.

  * * *

  BEFORE he died in 1999, the last novel published by Morris West, author of Vatican potboilers such as The Shoes of the Fisherman, was about an Argentine cardinal who was elected pope. Apart from the Italian surname, there is almost nothing in common between Luca Rossini, the main character of Eminence, and Jorge Bergoglio.20 But what is surprising is how little of Argentina there is in the Rossini character. Perhaps West thought it would seem ridiculous to have an Argentine pope who loved tango, drank mate, and followed San Lorenzo. No doubt he would have also strained credulity to the breaking point if he had imagined that his character also knew the great short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges.

  But truth is stranger than metafiction: Bergoglio did know Borges, after inviting him in 1965 to give classes on gaucho literature to the
sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds he was teaching at the time. The link was María Esther Vázquez, Borges’s secretary, who had taught piano to the Bergoglio children. At that time she presented a radio program on the Radio del Estado and invited Jorge—who in turn invited Goma to join him—to be interviewed about Jesuits teaching literature.21

  La Inmaculada, which occupies a whole block on Santa Fe’s main square, is Argentina’s first and oldest secondary school, and can claim to be its most prestigious, the alma mater of many of Argentina’s best-known public figures. It was in the college—founded in 1610 to educate the colonial elite and restored to the Jesuits in 1862—that the then rector had persuaded the chiefs of the local Mocobi and Abipone peoples to be reduced, and where, in 1636, a Jesuit brother’s painting of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, hung in the chapel next to the college, began giving off little streams of healing water.

  When Jorge arrived there in 1965, he came through a formidable colonial entrance leading to a patio with orange blossom trees. From here the school led off to the right, the Jesuit community to the left, with the movie theater directly ahead—a huge atrium, where the school assemblies were held, but which on Sundays became the Cine Garay. It was the best cinema in town, with room for fifteen hundred people and the latest movies on 70mm projectors. In summer the movies were projected onto huge screens hung between the orange trees, while smoke from mosquito coils curled up between the chairs.

  When Jorge taught at La Inmaculada, at the ages of twenty-eight and twenty-nine, about half of the pupils boarded. It was disciplined, and with a strict dress code—jackets and ties at daily Mass—but it was not as severe as English boarding schools at the time. Two days a week, the pupils did community work, building wooden houses in the poor parish that the Jesuits ran in Alto Verde, or playing sports and camping.

  “From the first moment, he seemed to be mature,” recalls one of the Jesuits at the time, Father Carlos Carranza, who describes Bergoglio as “discreet, serene, peaceful, someone for whom the students cared a lot.” Goma, who took over Jorge’s literature course, also recalls his “very special relationship” with the students of the literature academy, who remember their teacher as demanding, generous, and brilliant, yet gentle and reserved. They were won over by his humor and directness, touched by how hard he worked for them, and aware of his sophisticated mind. “On the blackboard there were always arrows linking facts and ideas inside circles,” recalls Rogelio Pfirter, later an ambassador to London. “He encouraged questions of all kinds and his answers were rapid and precise. I never saw him hesitate.” Rogelio’s brother Eduardo recalls Bergoglio’s self-effacing nature: “He behaved with great simplicity, never seeking to dominate or stand out, which wasn’t very common in the Jesuits in those days.” Many have also commented on the quality of his talks, which a former pupil, Guillermo Venturi, remembers as engaging and entertaining. “Besides his natural speaking qualities, he added a literary knowledge that gave him the ability to explain things in a very beautiful way,” recalls Father Carranza.22

  But his popularity didn’t save him from the inevitable nicknames. Jorge Milia remembers him being called Carucha—“Long Face”—because of his mournful expression. He was also known as Irma la Douce, after the French hooker played by Shirley MacLaine in the 1963 comedy, because as sub-prefect of discipline “he handed out harsh punishments with an angelic face.”

  Roberto Poggio, a student there, will never forget one of those punishments. After Poggio slapped a younger boy during a sports match, Bergoglio asked him to come to a classroom at a particular time. When he got there, he saw ten of his friends sitting in a circle and Bergoglio sitting off to one side. “He told me I should tell my friends in detail what happened, and it became something that stuck with me for life. They were understanding, they gave advice, and somehow I felt as if a load been lifted from me—I felt no reproach or criticism from them.” The pupils’ jury decided the punishment: Poggio was suspended from sports for two weeks and had to apologize to the younger student.23

  Jorge Milia also remembers Bergoglio’s unique way of punishing. Milia was given an oral examination on literature—the result of his failing to hand in his work on time—as part of his final exam by three Jesuits, including Bergoglio. After giving it his all, Milia reached his conclusion and waited. After a long silence, Bergoglio began speaking.

  We all know there is no grade for an exam like this and we also know that Señor Milia should never have had to undergo it, that if he had to do so it is because he did not hand in his practical work on time, because he supposes that for him rules do not exist, because he does what he wants at whatever cost, as is his custom. Therefore, although the grade that should correspond to him is ten, I believe we should give him a nine, as a final reminder of his time here in this college. Not to reprimand him, but so that he remembers always that what matters is the duty carried out day by day, the work that is done systematically yet which should never become routine, the patient building, brick by brick, rather than the impulsive improvisation to which he is so attached.

  “Nine,” agreed the other Jesuits. Milia, who was overwhelmed by the justice of his teacher’s decision, has never forgotten that lesson.24

  The subjects assigned to Jorge—literature, psychology, and art—were not the obvious ones for a chemical technician, but it was typical for Jesuits to be stretched by teaching subjects not their own. Jorge was in any case an avid reader of the classics, and it made sense to put him in charge of the school’s prestigious literature academy. The Inmaculada academies, specializing in different subjects, were a distinctive part of the school tradition: pupils applied to join, making the case for why they should be admitted, and the teachers in charge of the academies decided whether to accept them.

  Jorge taught the literature of Spain in his first year at the college, and of Argentina in the second. Detecting a desire in his pupils to go straight to modern texts, he rearranged the syllabus so that they read the medieval classic El Cid at home and began in class with the twentieth-century poet Federico García Lorca. As they discovered a taste for literature, he moved them back through the Spanish Golden Age authors such as Cervantes, Quevedo, and Góngora in an order that, he later said, “came naturally.” The experiment worked; as the boys became more engaged, he encouraged them to pursue their passions, offering tutorials. “The great thing about Bergoglio,” wrote Milia in his school-days memoir, “was that no doors were closed. Whoever wanted to explore that monument that is the Spanish language could do so in whatever depth he wished, without conditions or euphemisms.”

  Milia recalls Jorge introducing them to the late-medieval Danza de la Muerte, macabre Spanish recitals in which a personification of Death invites people in different stations in life to dance around a tomb, reminding them, in poetry, of their mortal end. To aid their understanding, Jorge arranged a Cine Garay showing of the 1957 Ingmar Bergman movie The Seventh Seal, which tells the story of a medieval knight’s chess game with Death. Milia and the others were then asked to write film critiques, commenting on the use of scenery, characters, music, and so on.

  It was Jorge’s idea to invite writers to the school, so that his pupils could learn not just about the fruits but also the craft of authorship. The first was María Esther Vázquez, who subsequently arranged for Borges to visit La Inmaculada for five days in August 1965 to speak on gaucho poems. It was an extraordinary coup, which the local university jealously regarded—recalls Milia—as “being like the Berlin Philharmonic coming to play ‘happy birthday’ at a children’s party.”

  The poet, essayist, and master of the short story, precursor of what would soon be an international explosion of 1960s Latin-American literature, was at this time in his sixties, an icon in Argentina who was recognized wherever he went and whose distinctive voice was widely imitated. His growing fame coincided with the rapid loss of his sight—God gave him, Borges once poignantly said, “books and the night at the same time”—and was at this time depend
ent on his librarian-like memory to source his playful, cerebral fictions.

  Borges, Bergoglio said in 2010, “had a genius’s knack for talking about any subject without ever showing off.” He knew and loved Borges’s stories, which take place in a kind of hyper-reality, where the characters move as ciphers in a labyrinthine world of libraries and ideas. There is much in Bergoglio’s own style of speaking and writing—crisp, witty, and playful, relishing paradoxes and wordplays—that suggests an affinity.

  John Baptist–like, Jorge prepared for the great man’s coming by giving a crash course in his oeuvre, so that when Borges arrived, by bus, in the chill of August 1965, he was amazed to find the boys so well acquainted with his works. During those days, almost blind and walking with a cane, he was feted, spoke to appreciative audiences, and enjoyed both students and the Jesuits. Looking back, Milia realized that Bergoglio’s great gift to his pupils was precisely the time they had been able to spend with that unseeing guru who could spin the most trivial object or event into a marvelous tale.

  Jorge made sure it bore fruit. He had been encouraging his pupils to write, and now he asked them to create some tales, the best of which would be sent to be read to Borges. He and Goma selected the eight best and dispatched them in a file labeled “Original Stories.” Soon after, the rector of the college, Father Ricardo O’Farrell, received a letter from Borges thanking him for the Jesuits’ hospitality and offering to write a prologue to “that book,” whose title he said he liked very much. It was the first time it had occurred to anyone that the stories were a book, let alone that they could be published. But with Borges’s offer, a publisher was easily found.