The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Argentina’s decadelong cycle of violence began in 1969, when students and workers were killed by the army during a protest in Córdoba. The cordobazo, as it became known, was the catalyst for the Argentine guerrilla groups, which had begun two years earlier following a meeting in Havana, Cuba. There Castro’s socialist government agreed to supply funds, arms, military training, and intelligence support for guerrilla armies, as well as sanctuary for fugitives of these “armies of national liberation” across the continent. The guerrilla cadres each organized by the four Argentine delegates eventually coalesced into the two that were responsible for most of the mayhem in the 1970s: the Trotskyite ERP (Popular Revolutionary Army) and the Montonero Peronist Movement (MPM), known as the “montoneros”. Between them the ERP and the montoneros had around six thousand active members by the mid-1970s and an urban terrorist strategy that became deadlier over time. In the decade between 1969 and 1979, the guerrillas carried out more than eight hundred murders and 1,748 kidnappings, let off hundreds of bombs in the middle of cities, and carried out dozens of assaults on army and police bases.

  The montoneros were mostly male students or graduates from upper- and middle-class families who had been radicalized by Marxism but tutored by MSTM priests. The three original founders, former Catholic Action militants, had been taken by Father Mugica to the shantytowns, introduced to liberation theology, and led by stages into revolutionary Peronism.

  Mugica himself balked at the use of violence, but the young men were taken to that next step by Juan García Elorrio, an upper-class ex-seminarian who had been one of the Argentine delegates in Cuba in 1967. His journal, Cristianismo y Revolución, mixed a Marxist power analysis—the army’s exclusion of Peronism was designed to maintain the oligarchy in exclusive privilege—with the nationalist idea of a second war of independence, this time against international capital and its local lackeys, “the oligarchy.” But the key radicalizing factor was faith. García Elorrio held out the figure of Camilo Torres, the Colombian ex-priest guerrilla who died in 1966 with a rifle in his hands, as the model of messianic sacrificial love.6

  Father Mugica and the Third-World priests did not assist the guerrillas or actively support their violence, but regarded their actions as justified or inevitable. The montoneros launched themselves in 1970, on the anniversary of the cordobazo, with the brutal kidnapping and execution of the former president, General Aramburu, who had led the purge of Peronism in 1955. When the first montoneros were killed, Mugica disobeyed his bishop by presiding at their funerals. Father Hernán Benítez, ex-Jesuit and former confessor to Eva Perón, praised the montoneros in the pages of Cristianismo y Revolución. Violence was per se neither good nor holy, Benítez wrote, but nor was it unbiblical. “We must fight for the liberation of the oppressed even if it means assuming the sin of violence.”

  Over the next three years, as the kidnappings and murders stepped up in pace and intensity, the army engaged in complex negotiations with Perón over lifting the proscription of his party and preparing for civilian rule. Hundreds of young militants in Catholic Action circles and the Peronist Youth signed up with the montoneros for training, convinced that their hour had come, while thousands of others pledged their support.

  As long as the armed forces were in power and Peronism was proscribed, it was possible to justify guerrilla violence as a means of securing democratic elections. But by the time those elections were finally called, in 1973, political violence no longer needed a justification: it was hitched to a runaway train.

  * * *

  NOT long after the cordobazo, just as the guerrillas and the Third World Priests’ Movement were beginning their period of militancy, Jorge Bergoglio was ordained a priest in the chapel of the Colegio Máximo by a retired bishop. It was December 13, 1969, five days shy of his thirty-third birthday.

  There were only a handful of others being ordained with him. Almost all of those with him in the busy novitiate in Córdoba a decade before had fallen away. A dozen had left in 1969 alone—to marry, or join the social struggle, or both—and even more would leave the following year, when the province had no new entrants at all.

  Watching him that day sprawled facedown in a white vestment on the stone floor of the chapel were his brothers Alberto (who had also tried a Jesuit vocation but left) and Oscar; his sister María Elena; his first-grade teacher, Estela Quiroga; and his mother, Regina, who surprised her son by coming forward at the end of the Mass to kneel for his blessing. Also present was his grandmother Rosa, by now thin and frail, who handed him a letter she had written in case she died before this moment, which Pope Francis has kept to this day folded in his Breviary. “On this beautiful day in which you can hold in your consecrated hand Christ our Savior and on which a broad path for a deeper apostolate is opening up before you,” she wrote, “I leave you this modest gift, which has very little material value but very great spiritual value.” It was her “testament,” written in a mixture of Spanish and Piedmontese, part of which reads:

  May my grandchildren, to whom I gave the best of my heart, have a long and happy life. But if one day pain, illness, or the loss of someone they love should afflict them, let them remember that one sigh before the Tabernacle, where the greatest and most venerable of the martyrs is kept, and one glance at Mary at the foot of the Cross, will cause a drop of balm to fall on the deepest and most painful wounds.7

  To prepare for ordination Bergoglio had gone on an eight-day retreat. It was a chance to scroll through his life thus far and meet God hidden in it all, to give thanks for the graces received and to ask pardon for those he had refused. In one prayer session of, he later recalled, “great spiritual intensity,” he penned a personal credo (meaning “I believe”).

  I want to believe in God the Father, who loves me like a child, and in Jesus, the Lord, who infused my life with his Spirit, to make me smile and so carry me to the eternal Kingdom of life.

  I believe in the Church.

  I believe in my life story, which was pierced by God’s loving gaze, who on that spring day of 21st September, came out to meet me to invite me to follow Him.

  I believe in my pain, made fruitless by the egotism in which I take refuge.

  I believe in the stinginess of my soul, which seeks to take without giving.

  I believe in the goodness of others, and that I must love them without fear and without betraying them, never seeking my own security.

  I believe in the religious life.

  I believe I wish to love a lot.

  I believe in the burning death of each day, from which I flee but which smiles at me, inviting me to accept her.

  I believe in God’s patience, as good and welcoming as a summer’s night.

  I believe that Dad is with the Lord in Heaven.

  I believe that Father Duarte is there, too, interceding for my priesthood.

  I believe in Mary, my Mother, who loves me and will never leave me alone.

  And I believe in the surprise of each day, in which will be manifest love, strength, betrayal, and sin, which will be always with me until that definitive encounter with that marvelous face which I do not know, which always escapes me, but which I wish to know and love. Amen.8

  The quirky credo showed how deeply ingrained, by now, was his sense of identity as a Jesuit, one who was both—as the Jesuits put it—“flawed and called.” On the eve of ordination he had the three things a person most needed to thrive: the knowledge he was loved, activity that was meaningful, and a future in which to hope. He was in a state of what Saint Ignatius called consolation, with direct heart-knowledge of God’s presence and a sense of the essential goodness of the world.

  Jorge’s awareness of his sinfulness—a core egotism and stinginess—had led him not to self-loathing but to a deep confidence in God’s tender care for him. Nor was there any doubt in his mind that, fifteen years after the event, he had been chosen on that spring day in 1953. Despite the loss of his father and his confessor, he did not feel alone. From a decade of daily pra
yer, attendance at Mass, immersion in Scripture, examining his conscience, and sitting before the Eucharist had come a deepening awareness of being carried by those he could no longer see or touch. And he had learned, in that time of turbulence in the Catholic world, to trust the Church and religious life, confident that the Holy Spirit was working through them to bring him home, eventually, to God.

  Following graduation in theology at the end of the following year, 1970, he went to Spain for his tertianship, the last stage in a Jesuit’s formation that would prepare him for final vows. Bergoglio spent his in Alcalá de Henares, a turreted city to the east of Madrid where Ignatius had spent time in the 1520s studying and giving spiritual exercises. For five months, between September 1970 and April 1971, Bergoglio lived with a dozen recently ordained Jesuits from Spain, Latin America, the United States, and Japan in a college considered an early-Jesuit jewel. There he studied the newly rediscovered Constitutions, and for the second time in his life he sank into the monthlong Exercises: it had been twelve years since he had done them in the novitiate, but this time both he and the Society as a whole understood so much more about how they should be done. Outside the retreat, they visited patients at the small Antezana hospital, where Saint Ignatius had once acted as cook and infirmarian, and a women’s prison known as La Galera.

  It was Jorge’s first time in Europe, and a chance to encounter in the flesh places he knew well from books, not just those linked to Saint Ignatius and the early Jesuits but also the Castilian frontier towns whose cobbled streets still spoke of Golden Age mystics, saints, and playwrights. One of his fellow tertians, Jesús María Alemany, accompanied him on many of these excursions to Madrid, Salamanca, Segovia, and Avila. The Spanish Jesuit was struck by the Argentine’s simplicity, love of soccer, and spiritual depth, and remembers him as self-effacing, affable, austere, yet sociable, with firm convictions.

  Shortly before Christmas, Bergoglio and the other tertians repeated the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience they had made at the end of their novitiate, promising to die in the Society of Jesus in the service of the Lord and of others. He was now “considered apt to be a Jesuit” and would be invited, back in Argentina, to take the final vow. He spent Christmas in Pamplona with the family of another of the Spanish tertians, José Enrique Ruiz de Galarreta, who remembers the Argentine as formidably clever and engaging company. From Pamplona they went exploring the Roncal Valley in the Pyrenees, close to the French border. Afterward, Bergoglio spent some weeks on pilgrimage to two landmarks in Saint Ignatius’s journey: his birthplace of Loyola and the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat near Barcelona.

  Back in Argentina, at the end of April 1971, Bergoglio made his final vow of “special obedience to the Pope in respect of the missions” in the presence of the provincial, Father Ricardo O’Farrell, representing the general. He then moved to a side chapel in order to make further private vows added by Saint Ignatius to forestall ecclesiastical careerism and spiritual worldliness. Bergoglio promised never to amend the Constitutions in respect of poverty, except to make them more strict; never to “strive for ambition” for any high office in the Church or the Jesuits; and made a final promise that, even if made a bishop, he would still take advice from the Jesuit general. The vows had been designed in the sixteenth century, thinking of the centuries ahead and anticipating that Jesuits might be tempted to be bishops. But not even the farsighted Ignatius contemplated one being made pope.

  * * *

  STRAIGHT after his final vow, Bergoglio was made novice master, a key role in the province. After the drought of 1970, the trickle of vocations that followed—three in 1971, four in 1972—needed nurturing. His experience as assistant to the previous novice master and his work with Fiorito on the spiritual renewal of the province made him an obvious candidate. But entrusting the care of novices to a thirty-five-year-old was still unusual.

  Bergoglio’s new novitiate, unlike his own before the Council, gave the novices space to become aware of their inner spiritual motions, while having a strong apostolate among the poor. He was inspired by the Jesuit French mystics, especially the seventeenth-century Louis Lallemant who, like Bergoglio, had a gift for spiritual direction and formation. As had Fiorito and Bergoglio in the late 1960s, Lallemant sought in his own time to retrieve the “interior spirit” from the more regimented strain of formation that won out in the century after Ignatius’s death, which stressed obedience to rules and human effort to cultivate the virtues. Lallemant saw this as a distortion of Saint Ignatius who, he writes in his Spiritual Doctrine of 1665, “lays greater stress on the interior law which the Holy Spirit writes in the heart, than on the constitutions and exterior rules.” Bergoglio believed, like Lallemant, that “the sum of the spiritual life consists in observing the ways and the movements of the Spirit of God in our soul, and in fortifying our will in the resolution of following them.”

  The interior freedom that Bergoglio encouraged was supported by an austere and humble environment: the wearing of cassocks, work in the gardens, ministering to the sick, and apostolate among the poor, as well as the regular practice of the examen and a timetable punctuated by prayer. Father Angel Rossi remembers his novitiate at this time with great fondness. It was austere, prayerful, and purposeful, “very serious, but not closed in any way,” he says. “There was a certain discipline, but in no way was it conservative.”

  Bergoglio lived with the novices at the Villa Bailari until his nomination as provincial in July 1973. It was not far from the Máximo, where at this time he was also made vice-rector and professor of pastoral theology—the most practical kind, designed to equip priests in their ministries, which included topics such as the administration of the sacraments, homiletics, pastoral care, and ethics. He was now, as he had foreseen he would be all those years ago in Chile, a formator of young souls, who had the solemn task of projecting an idealized version of a Jesuit.

  * * *

  TOGETHER with his fellow Jesuit, the theologian Father Jacinto Luzzi, Bergoglio in 1971 began giving spiritual support to leaders of a Peronist movement called the Guardia de Hierro (“Iron Guard”), in the Jesuits’ Salvador University (USAL). When this link came to light after Francis’s election, it was assumed that the Guardia was inspired by a Romanian fascist organization of the same name. In fact, it was named after the Puerta de Hierro (“Iron Gate”) in northeast Madrid where Perón lived in exile. And far from being right-wing, it was committed to keeping alive the original, worker-based, social-justice Peronist platform of the 1940s.

  Originally part of the Peronist Resistance formed in the early 1960s to coordinate responses to the army’s anti-Peronist purges, the Guardia objected to the leftward lurch of the Resistance under John William Cooke. Its leaders went to Madrid in 1967 and 1968 to meet Perón, who convinced them to become political foot soldiers, building up cadres and leaders by organizing in the barrios and teaching Peronist doctrine. By 1973, the Guardia had around four thousand fully formed members and some fifteen thousand activists, mostly in Greater Buenos Aires and Rosario. From around 1970, as part of the tidal wave of support among young people for Peronism in those years, the Guardia acquired many adherents in the USAL.

  The Guardia was one of almost twenty different organizations that in the late 1960s made up the huge network of militants known as the Juventud Peronista (“Peronist Youth”), which was mobilizing for Perón’s return. Within the JP, there were both large left-wing revolutionary groups (dominated in the 1970s by the montoneros) and small right-wing ones, and others in the intermediate, or “orthodox,” area in between, of which the Guardia was the largest and most important.

  Unlike the upper-middle-class montoneros, the guardianes came from the organic Peronist milieux of working-class and lower-middle-class Argentines, and could therefore claim, unlike the guerrillas, to be a genuine people’s movement. The Guardia were highly critical of the montoneros’ Marxist and violent deviations from authentic Peronism, which they saw as not just immoral but a strategic p
olitical error that would cost lives for no purpose. But in 1971, when Bergoglio got to know them, they were coming to terms with the painful truth that the montoneros’ wild popularity among young people was a result of Perón’s strategic blessing.

  Within the Salvador University, there were three political groupings, each with their own Jesuit chaplain. The conservative one, favorable to the Onganía military dictatorship, seen as a bulwark against communism, was close to Father Alfredo Sáenz; a second, linked to Father Alberto Sily, was the montonero group, which favored armed revolution; while the third group, who looked to Bergoglio and Luzzi, was made up of the guardianes: traditional or orthodox Peronist activists and intellectuals preparing the ground for Perón’s return.

  Julio Bárbaro, one of the Guardia’s leaders at the USAL who went on to be a Peronist deputy, recalls that Bergoglio and Luzzi were among the few priests who understood the Guardia and supported its commitment to an authentic, nonviolent, pueblo-oriented Peronism. “Bergoglio was completely different from the Third World [MSTM] priests,” he recalls. “While they went into politics to make up for what was lacking in their faith, he stayed close to his faith and from there sought to enrich politics. He said what mattered was not ideology but witness.” While he shared intellectual interests with the guardianes, he was always a pastor, Bárbaro adds. “If you were Peronist and you approached him, he supported you, gave you catechesis, sought to deepen your faith. It wasn’t a political involvement as such. He was a priest who happened to be Peronist, rather than a Peronist priest.”

  The guardianes offered a natural political and intellectual home for Bergoglio, who both influenced and was influenced by them. He introduced them, for example, to the French novelist and radical essayist León Bloy, whom Francis quoted in his first homily (“He who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil”) and whose purist, radical, and orthodox Catholicism was a good fit with the Guardia’s Peronism. Among other books on the Guardia’s reading list were classics on political and military strategy, including ones by the British military theoretician Basil Liddell Hart, pioneer of the so-called indirect approach. Some of his precepts help to explain Bergoglio’s own tactics: avoiding direct confrontation, while gradually weakening the enemy’s resistance in indirect ways, then moving suddenly, when least expected.