The most influential Guardia intellectual in the USAL was Amelia Podetti, whom Bergoglio met in 1970, and who introduced him to left-wing nationalist thinkers like Arturo Jauretche and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz. She taught the ideas of both at the university and later at the Colegio Máximo, while editing Hechos y Ideas, a Peronist political journal that Bergoglio read. Until her premature death in 1981 she was one of a group of thinkers—among them the Uruguayan philosopher Alberto Methol Ferré—who saw the Church as key to the emergence of a new Latin-American continental consciousness, la patria grande, which would take its place in the modern world and become an important influence on it. This was Bergoglio’s intellectual family—a Catholic nationalism that looked to the pueblo, rather than to the state, and beyond Argentina to Latin America; and which saw Medellín as the beginning of a journey to the continent becoming a beacon for the Church and the world.
* * *
BERGOGLIO was given another major responsibility in 1972 when he was appointed a consultor, one of five Jesuits named to advise the provincial, Ricardo O’Farrell. A year later, Bergoglio was made provincial after O’Farrell was forced to stand down early in the midst of a crisis in the province. The crisis had many dimensions, but one very clear symptom. In the early 1960s, there had been more than 400 Jesuits in the Argentine province, including more than 100 in formation, 25 of whom were novices. By 1973 the province had 243 Jesuits including 9 in formation and only 2 novices. Those numbers were bad even in relation to other Jesuit provinces at the time.
The Argentine province was unsure of its identity, and increasingly divided. Progressive experiments and reforms under O’Farrell had exposed divisions among the Argentine Jesuits over how to implement the renewal called for at the 1965 Jesuit gathering in Rome, General Congregation 31. Father Orlando Yorio recalled taking part in many provincial meetings between 1969 and 1972 “in which there appeared major insoluble problems arising from positions and expectations that were opposed to each other.”9 Yorio, a friend of Father Mugica’s, was the unofficial leader of a group of Third-Worldist Jesuits. O’Farrell allowed Yorio, together with Franz Jalics, who was among the first signatories of the MSTM declaration, to live in a new kind of “insertion” community in the barrio of Ituzaingó, initially with six theology students.
O’Farrell’s encouragement of the Third-Worldist group was scandalous to a religious order that was deeply embedded in the Argentine establishment. The Society ran two of the country’s most prestigious schools whose graduates occupied leading positions in society, or themselves became Jesuits, linked by blood and natural affinity to judges and generals and business leaders. Many of the Jesuits were from army families, and there were four Jesuit military chaplains resident in the observatory behind the Colegio Máximo. They did not take kindly to the idea of Jesuits in the villas miseria encouraging or theologically justifying the guerrillas, and regarded the MSTM’s criticism of the Church hierarchy as intolerable.
Another point of contention was the Salvador University in Buenos Aires, created by the Jesuits in 1956. O’Farrell had named a commission of five Jesuits to reform the USAL administration, but with little success. A generous grant scheme to allow poor people to study had resulted in low attendance, and the professors were on meager salaries, creating a further social justice dilemma. As well as hemorrhaging money—the university had a debt of US$2 million—it had become ungovernable. There were complaints about laxity—a number of Jesuits had left to marry students—while its student body was dominated by the Marxist and Peronist left, which organized repeated sit-ins and strikes. A number of the professors—including the two liberationist Jesuits, Sily and Yorio—were close to the MSTM and the guerrillas, while two priests who acted as chaplains to the montoneros—Mugica and Alberto Carbone (on whose typewriter the montoneros wrote their first communiqué)—gave courses there.
O’Farrell’s reform of the Jesuit formation syllabus, which he entrusted to the group led by Yorio (after appointing him vice-dean of theology at the Máximo in 1969), was for many the tipping point. Yorio’s mélange of philosophy and theology, known as the curriculum, was heavy on sociology and Hegelian dialectics, and suppressed the juniorate period of humanities studies, considering it bourgeois. Yorio’s many critics—among them Bergoglio—saw this reform not as a return to Ignatian sources but an ideological assault on them.
In 1972, a group of senior Jesuits in the Argentine province petitioned Father Arrupe to remove O’Farrell as provincial, and he agreed: O’Farrell would step down in 1973 after just four years of his six-year term. The consultors were tasked with drawing up a terna, a list of three names, of who might succeed him. In the course of Bergoglio’s travels and discussions with 184 priests and 46 brothers in more than fifteen Jesuit communities, many of them reached the conclusion that it was the young consultor himself who should be elected. O’Farrell’s natural successor, Father Luis Escribano, had been killed in a car accident when returning from Córdoba, and the generation above was too divided—hence the desire to skip a generation. Among the depleted ranks of the younger Jesuits, Bergoglio was the standout leader.
The province’s sage, Father Fiorito, was Bergoglio’s promoter. In his work on the Exercises, Fiorito had been promoting a renewal that was true to the original charism of the Jesuits, one that could unite the province following years of experimentation and division and attract new vocations. Fiorito was not himself a natural leader, but he knew one who was. He had seen Bergoglio’s natural gifts—wisdom, astuteness, courage—firsthand, as well as his knowledge of Jesuit primary sources and his capacity for spiritual discernment.
The province turned to Bergoglio, recalls Father Ignacio Pérez del Viso, because they perceived that “too much promotion of social justice could lead us to forget the religious dimension” and that “his solid roots in spirituality would allow him to keep a balance.” It was his first mandate for reform. Yet Pérez del Viso was not the only one concerned about Bergoglio’s inexperience. Not only was he young, but he had never even been the superior of a Jesuit house. Only in mission territories would Jesuits ever choose a provincial who had never been a superior. Being in charge of novices was one thing, but what experience had he of neurotic people, sick people, alcoholics, or relationship conflicts? It was too much to put on one so green. Yet people insisted that “we were in a special moment that required a young and decisive helmsman like Bergoglio,” he recalls.
“Bergoglio was our piloto de tormentas (‘storm pilot’),” is how another Jesuit, Father Fernando Albistur, puts it.10
“I was only thirty-six years old,” Pope Francis later told his interviewer Father Spadaro. “That was crazy.”
* * *
TO draw up the terna, the consultors in June 1973 went on a retreat in La Rioja led by its bishop, Enrique Angelelli.
A few weeks before, on May 25, the military regime had abdicated, turning over the government to civilian rule, after the Peronists obtained more than 50 percent of the votes in the March elections. The way was now set for Perón’s return in June and elections in October, which he won with a massive majority. As part of the army’s relinquishing of power, 370 prisoners detained for terrorist offenses were set free—part of a fruitless bid to draw a line under the growing guerrilla violence.
With Perón’s return, the montoneros temporarily abandoned their armed struggle, but the ERP only intensified its campaign. In the same month that the Jesuits were on their retreat in La Rioja, sensing that the moment was ripe for revolution, the ERP carried out three murders, five kidnappings of businessmen, and a number of major arms seizures. Perón’s return on June 20, meanwhile, showed just how violently split his movement had become: right-wing Peronists fired on left-wing Peronists at Ezeiza airport, resulting in the deaths of 16 and 433 wounded. It was a mild skirmish compared with what was to come. By early 1974 the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) death squad had begun its activities, a covert attempt by the Peronist government to meet guerrilla vio
lence with mayhem of its own.
Tensions were also running high in La Rioja, where there were a number of Jesuit missionaries. The Jesuits were close to Bishop Angelelli and wanted to support him in his increasingly fraught support for landless workers. The day before the consultors’ retreat the bishop had gone to say Mass for the missionaries and people in one of his parishes, Anillaco, where he was met by a lynch mob of angry farmworkers sent by local landowners. The bishop had backed a bid by unions to take over water reservoirs on land vacated by a family who had returned to Italy, which led to the landowners denouncing them as communists. Although Angelelli escaped on this occasion, he was a marked man and would be killed by the army not long after the coup in 1976.
Recalling the consultors’ retreat thirty years after that murder, Cardinal Bergoglio in 2006 described “unforgettable days, in which we received the wisdom of a pastor who dialogued with his people” during which they had learned of “the stoning which that people and their pastor endured, simply because they followed the Gospel.”
Later that year, when Bergoglio was in Rome to take a course, he accepted an invitation from the Israeli government to go on pilgrimage in early October to the Holy Land. Yet almost as soon as he arrived in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem’s Arab quarter, the Yom Kippur War (when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel) broke out. He spent a day and a half visiting the Old City, including the Holy Sepulcher, Ein Kerem, and Bethlehem, but was afterward confined to his hotel. There he spent six days reading books on Saint Paul’s letters to the Corinthians he borrowed from the library of the Jesuits’ Pontifical Biblical Institute in West Jerusalem, as the air filled with the drones of planes and sirens. The rector of the Institute at the time was Father Carlo Maria Martini, the future cardinal archbishop of Milan, whom Bergoglio probably met here for the first time.11
* * *
IN the early 1970s, Bergoglio began to use an expression that captured a key and enduring element in his thinking. In his 2012 radio interview with Father Isasmendi, the then cardinal recalled that in the events of 1970 and 1971
There was a lot of talk at that time about “the people,” el pueblo, but you didn’t know what they meant when they used the term. The politicians talked about el pueblo, the intellectuals talked about el pueblo, what el pueblo was calling for … but what did they mean? We priests must talk to a “people,” but a very special people. In the Bible we appear as a “holy people”; Saint Peter talks about a “holy people rescued by the blood of Christ” and invites us to be faithful to that call.… The people who follow Jesus always look to Jesus, and the Virgin, and have a basic fidelity pointing in that direction, and so little by little I started to talk about the holy people of God, the faithful people. The expression that I really like is santo pueblo fiel de Dios, “God’s holy faithful people.”
While reading Denzinger’s Enchiridion—a widely used compendium of church traditions—Bergoglio had been struck by an early-church formula of Christian faith: that the faithful people was infallible in credendo, in its believing. The Vatican II document, Lumen Gentium, had recast the Church not as an institution so much as a people, the “People of God”; from Denzinger he had grasped that the “people” was also a repository of faith. As Bergoglio later wrote: “When you want to know what the Church teaches, you go to the Magisterium … but when you want to know how the Church teaches, you go to the faithful people. The Magisterium will teach you who is Mary, but the faithful people will teach you how to love Mary.”12
In his first talk as provincial, Bergoglio would use this notion to reject ideologies. From now on, the idea would appear constantly in his writings. The pueblo fiel were both vaccine and antidote, the hermeneutic of a true reform.
Although this was his own thinking, it is also redolent of a specifically Argentine post-conciliar strain of liberation theology known as the teología del pueblo, or “theology of the people.” For many years it was little known, and not seen as a liberation theology at all outside Argentina, where it was associated above all with three priests: Lucio Gera, Rafael Tello, and the Jesuit Juan Carlos Scannone.
Gera was the pioneer. A teacher at the Villa Devoto seminary in Buenos Aires, he was one of the official invited theologians at Medellín and was a key contributor to the bishops’ San Miguel declaration in 1969. He and Tello were initially part of the discussions that led to the MSTM but left over what they regarded as its unacceptable embrace of Marxism.
In the years 1972 and 1973, before he was made provincial, Bergoglio, along with Scannone, was on the editorial board of the Jesuits’ widely respected theology journal Stromata, which in the early 1970s held a series of important symposia at the Colegio Máximo on the big themes of the day: dependency, socialization, and liberation. Because spirituality, rather than theology, was his specialist area, Bergoglio did not contribute to the journal or to the discussions following the papers, but these two streams of liberation theology were swirling around him. Both started from the Church’s reflections at Medellín on the historic quest for liberation, but whereas liberation theologians at the time used Marxist categories for analyzing and transforming reality, the Argentine theologians around Gera started with the culture and religiosity of el pueblo, which naturally resisted both Marxist and liberal ideologies.
Who is el pueblo? In a 1973 article that ran in Stromata the following year, Gera defined it in terms of the despised and marginalized majority, from whom comes the desire for justice and peace. For Gera, el pueblo is an active agent of history, not, as liberals and Marxists view it, a passive mass needing to be made aware. “The people have a rationality,” wrote Gera. “They have their project; we don’t give it to them.” The role of theologians was not to impose categories, he argued, but to interpret the people’s project in light of its salvation history. Gera put it starkly. “Either theology is the expression of the People of God or it is nothing.”13
Scannone elucidated other key differences between a Marxist-influenced liberation theology and the teología del pueblo. Where the first saw the people as an essentially socioeconomic or class category (the proletariat, the landless peasants) in opposition to a dominant class or bourgeoisie, the second saw the people as a historic and cultural, even symbolic category, that includes those who share in the common project of liberation, whatever their status. The first saw the history of the Latin-American people as one of oppression until the socialist revolution appeared on the scene; whereas the second sees in its culture and history a process of liberation that began long ago, even if awaiting its full expression. The “sapiential rationality” of this “popular culture” is not that of the Enlightenment, “nor does it correspond with the canons of modern technological and instrumental reasoning,” Scannone argued. “But that does not make it any less human, rational, and logical, nor any less usable for theology.”
Scannone and Gera’s theology was suspicious not just of enlightened elites seeing history through the prism of their ideologies, but wary of elitism of any sort. Whether in liberalism, Marxism, or clericalism, Gera saw an elite attempt to arrogate the power to determine how the “people” should think or act, and therefore a denial of the “prophetic charism” that a Christian people has by virtue of their belonging to Christ. “Renouncing elitism in the area of possession and ownership is not enough,” wrote Scannone. “We must also renounce the elitism in the area of knowledge that we now find among the enlightened elites of both the left and the right.”14
Bergoglio did not take direct part in these debates; he was not a theologian and was wary of being ensnared by labels. But his own view of history, both national and Christian, pointed him in the same direction. In the idea of “God’s holy faithful people” Bergoglio had what theologians call a hermeneutic—an interpretative key, or yardstick—that would allow him to reform and unite the province, beyond ideology, by focusing very directly on the poor. It was neither conservative—he did not share the pro-elite Catholic nation stance of the pro-Onganía bishops—nor c
lerical: he did not believe that the clergy, or the bishops, or Rome were in possession of the truth that they distributed downward, but that the Holy Spirit was revealed through a dialogue between the pueblo fiel and the universal Church. It was a radical stance, an option for the ordinary people, the fishermen and shepherds to whom God revealed Himself in Jesus Christ two thousand years ago.
Although a non-Peronist could in theory support people theology, its adherents were natural Peronists. They identified with the popular Catholic nationalist tradition, as opposed to a liberal, conservative, or socialist viewpoint, and saw their task as walking with the Peronists as the expression of the people. Typical of the people-theology Jesuits was Ernesto López Rosas, the author of an important work on the Christian values of Peronism.15
Not only was Bergoglio close to the Guardia, but in February and March 1974—via a friend, Colonel Vicente Damasco, who was a close collaborator of Perón’s—he was one of a dozen experts invited to contribute his thoughts to a draft of the Modelo Nacional, a political testament that Perón conceived as a means of uniting Argentines after his death. (It was finished before he died, but then ignored by his widow Isabel, who sidelined Colonel Damasco.)16 When Perón died in July, Bergoglio celebrated a Mass, and sent a letter to the province mourning the general, pointing out that he had been democratically elected three times and was therefore “anointed” by the people. Yet Bergoglio’s respect for and identification with Peronism as the vehicle for the popular values of the pueblo fiel did not make him a party activist. The pueblo fiel preceded Perón, indeed had shaped him and his movement, and delegated to him the task of government; the pueblo fiel was therefore a standpoint also from which to critique Peronism—whether the revolutionary version of it created by the middle-class guerrillas or its later incarnations.
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