The Council’s sixteen documents remain the Magna Carta of modern Catholicism, rich in biblical and scriptural insights, recapturing the vitality and engagement of the early Church. Properly absorbed, they would make the Church more missionary—more credible and convincing—by purifying it of worldliness. Renouncing the attachment to power and prestige in favor of a new dependence on the Holy Spirit would release new energies for the evangelization of the world.
Yet the documents were not always well absorbed. The Council’s purpose was to equip the Church to transform the modern world, pointing it outward, for mission. Yet the very notion of the Church changing—after so long resisting the idea of the world changing—was unsettling. The Council was an aggiornamento, an updating, of the Church to meet the needs of the times, but that was often mistaken—by both progressives and reactionaries—as a mandate for modernization, that is, adapting the Church to the modern world by making it more like the modern world.
The problem, as Benedict XVI pointed out in one of his last speeches as pope in February 2013, was that “the Council that got through to the people was that of the media, not that of the Fathers.” The changes were filtered through a political lens, as a struggle between different factions, with the media taking the side of those perceived to be wanting a rupture. Before the Council, many in the Church had confused what was essential and unchanging—what Jesus had entrusted to the Church to preserve—with what was in reality traditional, or contingent on a particular age. After the Council, the danger was reversed: what was essential could come to be seen as empty custom, and what was new to be seen as per se good. Hence the rows: some blamed the Council for changing too much, while others fumed that it had changed too little. As the Church divided, the authority of the papacy shrank. Groups of Catholics acquired their own magisteriums, by which they judged others.
In the late 1960s, the crisis crystallized around the issue of birth control. When Pope Paul VI opted to uphold the ban on artificial contraception, after electing to ignore the findings of an expert committee he had appointed, his encyclical letter Humanae Vitae sparked a rebellion and furious debates about authority versus individual conscience. An exodus began, especially among the Western middle classes, as huge numbers joined a new and expanding congregation known as “nonpracticing Catholics.”
The crisis was felt not just in declining church attendance but in priesthood and religious life. If the growing numbers of men and women leaving orders to marry speeded trends already evident in the pre-conciliar Church, the sharp drop in numbers of entrants showed the damage from post–Vatican II turbulence.
The Society of Jesus, which went out first and fastest to implement the Council, was hit hard by declining numbers. Worldwide, the thirty-six thousand Jesuits in 1965 made up the largest, best-organized, and most expert body of priests in the Church, a third of whom taught over a million students in almost five thousand schools, colleges, and universities across the world. By the 1970s Jesuit numbers had dropped by a third. New vocations—men entering the Society—in some places dried up altogether.
The loss of vocations reflected, at least in part, the Jesuits’ uncertainty about their new mission. Like other orders, the Jesuits were invited to drink again from the wells of their founders—a process described as “returning to the sources,” or ressourcement. But there were intense disagreements about what that meant.
The Jesuit renewal worldwide was led by Father Pedro Arrupe, elected general for life at the close of the Council in 1965 by a gathering of the world’s Jesuit provinces (a mixture of elected delegates and provincials) in Rome. General Congregation 31 (GC31) agreed that “the entire government of the Society must be adapted to modern necessities and ways of living” and that the spiritual heritage of the Jesuits was “to be purified and enriched anew according to the necessities of our times.” The passionate, visionary Don Pedro was a Basque medic, had Ignatius’s hook nose and warm smile, and, having seen the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima, Japan, was no stranger to crisis.
As the Council ended, Father Arrupe asked the provincials to carry out a belt-and-braces survey of the purpose of the Jesuits in the modern world. Three years and four hundred responses later, the mission was clear: they were called to stand with the poor in their desire for justice and peace.
Traveling the world over the next years, trying to hold the Society together amid defections and threats of splits above all in Spain, Arrupe urged his brethren to go back to the sources of Ignatian spirituality. The Spiritual Exercises were rediscovered afresh, not as hoops to jump through but as a school of prayer; Ignatius’s Autobiography was revealed for the first time in its authentic text; and the nineteenth-century rulebooks could finally be shelved to make space for the original Constitutions. Discernment would no longer be something Jesuits read about but something they practiced for themselves.
Jorge Bergoglio became closely involved in this renewal while reading theology at the Colegio Máximo between 1967 and 1970. There he formed a close bond with Father Miguel Angel Fiorito, the pioneer of Jesuit spiritual renewal in the Argentine province, who restored the original method of doing the Exercises as an individually guided retreat. As well as being dean of philosophy, this introverted, white-haired metaphysician, at that time in his late forties, became Argentina’s leading authority on Saint Ignatius’s rules for discerning spirits. “In one way you could say he was the spiritual director of the Argentine province,” says Father Miguel Yáñez, SJ, who these days teaches in Rome.
A dry, rigorous man of disconcertingly few words, Fiorito was much loved by those who managed to get close to him, including the future provincials of Argentina and Chile. As their spiritual director, he “made us go back to the Ignatian sources of discernment,” recalls the Chilean Fernando Montes: “It was Fiorito who sparked it all off.” The Argentine province’s future leaders (novice masters, rectors of the Máximo, and provincials) of the 1970s and 1980s—above all Jorge Bergoglio, Andrés Swinnen, and Ernesto López Rosas—formed a group around Fiorito, helping him produce his new Boletín de Espiritualidad (“Bulletin of Spirituality”) off the college presses.
The third issue in 1968 contains the first of many articles by Bergoglio, “The Theological Meaning of Election,” which treated the struggle between God’s choosing and the one chosen. It showed how deeply he had absorbed Saint Ignatius’s discernment rules, as well as his focus on the renewal of Jesuit formation. Jorge was a deeply committed pupil of Fiorito’s and was closely linked to him. His Uruguayan contemporary, Francisco López, recalls Bergoglio telling him that he was preparing with Fiorito to be novice master. When, in 1968–1969, the novice house—now down to just one or two newcomers—was moved from Córdoba to San Miguel, it was set up in a rented house, the Villa Bailari, and Bergoglio became the assistant to the new novice-master, Father Alfredo Estrella.
The Fiorito group took seriously the idea of ressourcement, a renewal that involved a return to the “primitive charism” of the first Jesuits and adapting it to modern times. This was very different from another version of renewal that involved rejecting that heritage as passé and uncritically embracing contemporary ideas. Bergoglio’s understanding of the difference between the two was shaped by a French theologian Yves Congar, who had influenced Pope John XXIII’s decision to call the Second Vatican Council. Congar’s classic 1950 text, True and False Reform in the Church, looked back over Church history to work out why some reformers who usually started out with good aims—to counteract abuses and corruption, restore holiness and zeal—spun off into schism and division, while others produced great fruits in renewed holiness and unity. What was the difference?
Congar found that true reform was always rooted in pastoral concern for ordinary faithful people: it was oriented to, and shaped by, the periphery, not the center. In other words, it valued tradition—the Catholic constants such as eucharistic worship, a teaching magisterium, devotion to the saints, and so on—which were valued by the ordinary faithful, rather t
han the avant-garde elites. True reform sought to make the Church more true to itself and was on guard against attempts to align it with contemporary secular movements (such as nationalism in the sixteenth century or Marxism in the twentieth). Its fruits were a greater zeal and fidelity, as well as unity. True reform attacked the spiritual worldliness that stopped the Church from looking like and acting like Christ. This, in Bergoglio’s reading, was the early Jesuit story—a reform that had revitalized the Church by restoring its poverty, holiness, missionary focus, obedience to the pope, and unity—and it would be what, as a Church leader from his thirties on, he dedicated himself to.
That meant combating false reform, the converse of the true reform and its abiding temptation. False reform was driven by ideas in self-enclosed groups distant from the ordinary faithful. It rejected links and tradition, and was vulnerable to or aligned with contemporary ideologies, producing reactions that ended in division and sometimes schism. This was the story of avant-gardism: enlightened elites who saw themselves entitled to impose or lead reforms according to particular ideas or ideologies, which always produced a reaction, either from those with other ideas, or from defenders of the status quo. With false reform, the Church became a battleground of competing elite projects, and what followed were disunity and the loss of identity.
This was close to being a description of the Argentine Jesuits in the late 1960s and early 1970s, divided between a “progressive” group of theologians living out in base communities and committed to Marxist versions of liberation theology, whose actions and views horrified another group of (generally older and more conservative) members of the province. The divisions reflected broader Jesuit debates over identity. But they also mirrored splits in the Argentine Church generally in the wake of the Council, fueled by a growing political divide.
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BERGOGLIO’S other inspiration was the application of the Second Vatican Council to Latin America by its bishops meeting in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968. The declaration by the Latin-American bishops’ confederation (CELAM) gave the Church in the continent its own distinctive voice, above all in what it called the preferential option for the poor.
The Medellín document expanded the Christian understanding of liberation as freedom not just from sin but also from sinful social structures that kept the majority poor. This was the origin of the term liberation theology. At a 2010 inquiry, Bergoglio explained:
The option for the poor comes from the first centuries of Christianity. It’s the Gospel itself. If you were to read one of the sermons of the first fathers of the Church, from the second or third centuries, about how you should treat the poor, you’d say it was Maoist or Trotskyist. The Church has always had the honor of this preferential option for the poor. It has always considered the poor to be the treasure of the Church. During the [third-century] persecution of the deacon Lawrence, who was the administrator of the diocese [of Rome], they told him to bring all the treasures of the Church. A few days later he appeared with a throng of poor people and said: “These are the treasure of the Church.” At the Second Vatican Council the Church was redefined as the People of God and this idea really took off at the Second Conference of the Latin-American bishops in Medellín.3
There were political implications of this new stance. The Church no longer had permission to be politically aligned with social and economic elites. But while it deplored institutionalized violence and unjust social structures, the Medellín document warned against both Marxism and liberalism as contrary to the dignity of the human person, and categorically opposed armed revolution, which it warned “engenders new injustices.” Medellín also took a strong stand, with Humanae Vitae, against artificial methods of birth control, which the document saw as a neo-Malthusian attempt by the rich to curb the numbers of poor.
Argentina’s bishops took the Medellín program and adapted it to Argentina in their 1969 Declaration of San Miguel. The declaration lamented the collapse in priestly vocations, the questioning of authority, as well as the mounting social protest, but it embraced the new direction set by Medellín, calling for a Church that “honors the poor, loves them, defends them, and embraces their cause” while offering a mea culpa for the way the Church often “appears wealthy.”
One part of the document, written by Father Lucio Gera, was the genesis of a peculiarly Argentine version of post-Medellín theology that strongly influenced Bergoglio and other Jesuits around him. While it called for justice, deplored oppression and exploitation, and stood up for the rights of workers, the document rejected Marxism as “alien not only to Christianity but also to the spirit of our people.” This was certainly not a conservative, pre-conciliar view. But nor did it frame el pueblo in sociological or Marxist terms, as liberation theology was then doing. The San Miguel declaration saw the people as active agents of their own history; startlingly, it asserted that “the activity of the Church should not only be oriented toward the people but also primarily derive from the people.” The vision of San Miguel was of a Church with a clear option for the poor, but understood as a radical identification with the ordinary people as the subjects of their own history, rather than as a “class” engaged in a social struggle with other classes. Bergoglio shared that San Miguel vision.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the other version of liberation theology proved attractive to many post-conciliar Catholics, especially in educated middle-class milieux where the Marxism was dominant. Marxist dependency theory had a clear account of why Argentina and other countries remained poor despite foreign investments and exports: the more closely third-world economies are tied to foreign capital, wrote Eduardo Galeano, author of the wildly popular 1971 anticolonial epic Open Veins of Latin America, the more dependent and impoverished they become. The alternative to the export-led, developmentalist model of growth promoted by Latin-American governments of the time was a Cuban-style socialism that, so the theory went, could insulate a developing economy from the harsh winds of international capitalism and distribute in favor of the poor.
In Argentina, that narrative was taken up by a new Peronist left, which sought to blend this Marxist analysis with the broad worker base of Peronism. Still the largest party, and still excluded from the ballot box, its leader, Juan Domingo Perón, was quick to spot the shifting political wind, and from his exile in Spain he recast his movement now as a form of anticolonial revolutionary struggle. Although he never actually endorsed the revolutionary version of Peronism, Perón did little to discourage attempts by activists like John William Cooke, leader of the Peronist “Resistance” in Argentina, to turn his movement into an Argentine version of Cuban socialism.
At the same time that socialism and Peronism were getting into bed with each other, increasing numbers in the Church were seduced by Marxism. A 1967 manifesto by a group of developing-world bishops called on the Church to reject the market economy, describing wage labor as slavery and socialism as Christian love in practice. The “Manifesto of Third World Bishops” was taken up at once in Argentina, where it was signed by 320 priests, among whom were nine Jesuits. From that ferment emerged the Third World Priests’ Movement or MSTM, which at its height in the early 1970s had a membership of around 10 percent of Argentina’s clergy and perhaps a quarter of young priests, while hundreds more sympathized without being affiliated.
The best known of its members was Father Carlos Mugica, a charismatic, tennis-playing priest from a wealthy, conservative family who ministered in a shantytown alongside Retiro station in downtown Buenos Aires. Like many well-to-do Catholics at the time, Mugica embraced Peronism out of intense guilt over the Church’s ties to the anti-Peronist post-1955 regimes, which led many working-class Argentines to loathe the Church. “Many of us priests felt that we were marginalized from the people and we made the decision to act ‘from the people and with the people,’ walking with the people,” he wrote. “That’s how the process began, with priests in the slums, with the priest directly present in his people.”4
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sp; Mugica and the Third-World priests had a messianic view of Peronism as a force of popular liberation, while seeing politics through a socialist prism. For the MSTM, the people were Peronist, and therefore the Church, in order to be with the people, should be, too. Yet the political agenda was more Castro’s than Perón’s. The MSTM’s aim, it declared in 1969, was “the socialization of the means of production, of political and economic power, and of culture.” Two years later the MSTM said that Peronism was the means to achieve that. “The revolutionary Peronist movement,” it declared in 1971, “will necessarily lead to the revolution which will make possible an original and Latin-American socialism.”5
The MSTM mixed this socialist discourse with a call for changes in Church doctrines and practices such as obligatory priestly celibacy. This put them at odds with most of the bishops on both counts. The Church hierarchy in the 1960s was, if anything, closer to the armed forces than before, each seeing the other as guardians of the common good. Faced with protest in both society and Church, they tended to close ranks.
The Argentine Church soon reproduced within its ranks the broader political divisions of the country. Catholics were increasingly divided between those backing social revolution and those who looked to a military government as a defense against communism. The split would lead, in the mid-1970s, to one group of priests appeasing the consciences of guerrillas who killed for the sake of the revolution, while another group reassured those who captured and tortured the guerrillas that they were defending Western Christian civilization.
The Great Reformer Page 13