The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  In the highly politicized Church of the early 1970s, however, the pro-Peronist people-theology Jesuits inevitably clashed with liberals and Radicals in the Society, and with Marxist liberationists like Yorio. In a 1974 Stromata article Yorio took it for granted that socialism was the political expression of the Gospel, and Marxism its partner in bringing it about, while the ERP and the montoneros—middle-class students or graduates engaged at this point in large-scale terrorist operations—were the means by which the “poor” defended themselves from unjust oppression. Yorio noted approvingly that “the Peronist special formations and other armed groups inspired by Marxism are an attempt to respond to this need of an armed force that can guarantee the reality of a popular socialism.”17

  The irony was that the embracing or justification of revolutionary warfare by middle-class Catholics like Yorio was nothing if not elitist. As Richard Gillespie notes in his classic study of the montoneros, Soldiers of Perón, “The launching of the urban guerrillas was an initiative ‘from above,’ the decision of small groups of militants rather than a response to a widespread popular demand.” Despite their initial success in attracting recruits in the early 1970s, the guerrillas were never able to transform their “special formations” into anything close to a mass movement, while representing—to a far greater extent than the Red Brigades in Italy or the Bader Meinhof in Germany—a major threat to the peace and stability of Argentine society. Their campaign of terrorism and the genocidal policy with which the armed forces responded to it after 1976 look, in retrospect, like a civil war between two middle-class factions, which the poor, the ordinary folk—Gera’s ignored majority, Bergoglio’s pueblo fiel—watched as bystanders from the sidelines.

  * * *

  SHORTLY after the new provincial moved into the Jesuit curia on Bogotá Street in the historic center of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio had a visit from the general, Father Arrupe. In August 1973 they went to La Rioja, where Bergoglio had been just four months earlier, to visit the Jesuit missionaries there—they ran four parishes, tending to the destitute in remote areas—but had a secondary mission, entrusted to them by Pope Paul VI, to lend public support to Bishop Angelelli. Their arrival, heralded in the press, was not easy. Arriving by plane from Córdoba, pilot and passengers were told to stay on the runway. After what seemed an eternity, the bishop eventually arrived in a car to take them off the plane and out by a back entrance. It turned out that the same thugs hired to stone Angelelli in Anillaco had been sent to the airport to jeer at Arrupe.18

  Pope Francis—who spent a long time praying before Arrupe’s tomb in September 2013—told his interviewer Father Spadaro that Don Pedro “had the right attitude and he made the right decisions.” During many hours on that visit they formed a close bond that would last over the difficult years ahead. Arrupe encouraged him to carry through the renewal of Jesuit formation, to focus on priorities at a time of dwindling resources, and to encourage vocations by giving the province a sense of unity and identity.

  Carlos Pauli, then a young teacher at La Inmaculada school, recalls a weekend in 1974 when Bergoglio came to give the staff a retreat in a local farmhouse belonging to the college. They were amazed at his youth, but also at his pep talk, which explained the distinction between ideology and Christian hope, and how the latter was incarnate in the ordinary, “non-enlightened” Argentine pueblo fiel. “He showed how ideologies instrumentalize the poor, and seek a kind of total explanation of reality, whereas Christian hope is beyond all ideologies because it makes room for God to act,” Pauli remembers. “It was a very tense time politically, and it was incredible to hear this kind of language from a senior churchman.”

  That was also the message in his first address to the province in February 1974, when Bergoglio invited the Jesuits to overcome their “sterile intra-ecclesiastical contradictions” in order to embark on “a true apostolic strategy.” It was a robust speech that warned against fruitless conflicts with the bishops, enervating conflicts between “progressive” and “reactionary” wings, and of Jesuits pursuing their own ideas rather than God’s plans. He deployed the subtle discernments of the Second Week of the Exercises to teach that the will of God is not to be identified with a person’s own vision or project of the good. “The only real enemy,” he told the Jesuits, “is the enemy of God’s plan. The real problem is the problem raised by the enemy in order to impede God’s plan. This is the key that will enable us to distinguish what is essential from what is secondary, what is authentic from what is false. This is the foundation on which our unity and our apostolic discipline depend.”

  Bergoglio went on to identify their temptations as Jesuits as a certain “avant-gardism” and “elitism” as well as “a fascination for abstract ideologies that do not match our reality.” In a veiled reference to Gera and Scannone’s “people’s theology” he welcomed “a healthy allergy” developing among Argentine Jesuits to “theories that have not emerged from our national reality.” And he laid out his God’s-holy-faithful-people hermeneutic as a vaccine against the prevailing ideologies and political violence, inviting the Jesuits to see that if they were sincere about putting the people first, they would align themselves with its values.

  This believing people neither separates its religious faith from its historical aspirations nor does it confuse the two in a revolutionary messianism. This people believes in the resurrection and the life: salvation, work, bread, everyday understanding in their families. For their country, what they believe in is peace. There are some who think that this is not revolutionary. But the people themselves, who are asking for peace, know full well that this peace is the fruit of justice.19

  Bergoglio’s first reform had three key elements: integrating and consolidating people and property, redeploying Jesuits to the periphery, and encouraging vocations while renewing formation. Each objective served, in its way, his overall goal of depoliticizing the province and refocusing it on the Jesuits’ pastoral mission.

  The first priority was to integrate a scattered and disunified province. Valuable properties in Mendoza and Córdoba—including the building where he had spent his novitiate—were sold to cover the USAL debt prior to its handover. The decision to relinquish the USAL was encouraged by Father Arrupe, who believed that at a time of diminishing manpower it made little sense to run two Catholic universities in Buenos Aires (the Jesuits also had the Catholic University, UCA) in addition to those in Córdoba and Salta.

  The lay people to whom the provincial handed over the USAL were former leaders in the Guardia de Hierro, which had disbanded following Perón’s return and election in October 1973 and would be officially dissolved after his death in July 1974. Not only did Bergoglio trust them—they were charged with creating a university on Jesuit principles, in tune with Argentine popular values—but his close relationship with them smoothed the transition. This was a time for “creative courage” and for “wisdom to know how to detect the real enemies and their plans,” he told USAL’s newly established civil association during the handover in May 1975, before praising them as “the only possible guarantee of the preservation of the Universidad del Salvador’s identity.”

  The handover took until March 1975. The Jesuits would continue to offer pastoral support but would neither teach in nor run the USAL. But they supplied the vision. At the request of the new directors, Bergoglio drew up a charter committing the university to a three-point mission statement, “History and Change,” which is unmistakably his: the prime mover of change must be the faith of the people, “despised by the arrogance of the enlightened, which has characterized it as credulity and alienation,” while the future is brought about by “deepening the path already traveled” rather than the “servile imitation of foreign models or the abandonment of what is ours.”

  Yet what Bergoglio saw as depoliticizing the USAL others saw as politicizing it in a different way. Both the Jesuit left—priests like Yorio and Sily—and liberal establishment Jesuits such as Father Fernando Storni, a Radical Party s
ympathizer, regarded the USAL handover to Bergoglio’s “friends in the Guardia” as a betrayal for which they never forgave him.

  Another decision that provoked opposition was the closure of the Jesuit “insertion” communities that had sprung up in O’Farrell’s period as provincial. Bergoglio wanted to consolidate the existing residences, but he also believed in the young and old mixing; by dissolving the small communities, he sought to bolster the life of residences and increase the Jesuits’ sense of belonging at a time of decreasing numbers. But it was also a way of bringing back into the fold the outliers—Third-Worldists who were critiquing bishops and egging on guerrillas—whose priesthood and religious life were at risk. By the end of 1974 he had dissolved all but the one led by Yorio, who was challenging his decision.

  The second objective was to deploy Jesuits to Argentina’s outlying areas to evangelize among the poor in line with the vision of Medellín. In some respects this was the counterpart of the closing of the insertion communities—to send out to the periphery those who had grown too comfortable in the residences. He expanded missions in far-flung places of desperate poverty, such as the five parishes in La Rioja, and opened others in San José del Boquerón, in Santiago del Estero, where Jesuits had been missionaries before their expulsion in the eighteenth century. He also sent men to the native village of Santa Victoria in Salta, in the far north of the country along the Bolivian border, and to remote missions in Jujuy and Tucumán—in each case, working among the very poorest. In order to reach more places, he created a roving team of a dozen priests who would “mission” together in one place for some months before moving to the next. As novices began to arrive, they would be sent to those missions for their “experiments.”

  In the late 1970s, he sent young Jesuits to shore up the Society’s ministries in Ecuador. When this met with the objection that the Argentine province was short of men, Bergoglio’s response, recalls Father Albistur, was, “We Jesuits are not about holding on to people; we’re about sending people on mission to wherever the need is greatest.”20

  Closer to home, Bergoglio created a new apostolate in the worker barrios surrounding the Colegio Máximo, which expanded in the late 1970s as new vocations began to arrive. He also gave his support to the work of Jesuits in the villas miseria of Buenos Aires—Yorio in Bajo Flores, as well as Father “Pichi” Meisegeier, who worked with Mugica in Villa 31 next to Retiro station—despite the fact that, as he would tell a 2010 inquiry, “at that time it was assumed that priests who worked with the poor were zurdos (‘commies’).” Even when the Triple A death squad began picking off shantytown priests, Bergoglio did not pull them out. But after Mugica was gunned down outside his church in May 1974, Bergoglio told them not to go around alone and to stay in after dark.

  The third priority was vocations. Bergoglio formed a team under Father Jorge Camargo to organize discernment retreats for young people, going from school to school. The results were soon apparent. The 1970s were a time of rising vocations in the Argentine Church in general, as young people turned away from politics, but the Jesuits were especially favored: five novices in 1975 rose each year to reach fourteen in 1978, after which they oscillated between twenty-eight and thirty-four a year, levels exceeding even the early 1960s. As the pipeline filled back up, Father Camargo was asked by the Jesuit curia in Rome to share the province’s secrets.

  At least part of the recipe was Bergoglio’s articulation of a renewed vision of Jesuit life based on the early, missionary days of the Society. He not only attracted new vocations but kept them: annual departures in the late 1970s and 1980s dropped to just a trickle. He named as novice master another close Fiorito collaborator, Father Andrés Swinnen, and visited the novices at least once a week, encouraging them to pray for vocations—something he urged on the whole province. He also asked them to say novenas—a traditional Catholic prayer cycle—for vocations of Jesuit brothers, who were at that time dying out: there were about thirty, mostly in their seventies. By the 1980s, twenty-three had joined.

  Bergoglio relied not just on his own strategic efforts, but on the Lord of Miracles—a popular Salta devotion—to whom he pledged that once new vocations reached thirty-five in a year, he would send them on pilgrimage to the shrine. When that number was reached in September 1979, just as Bergoglio’s time as provincial was coming to a close, he dispatched to Salta a platoon of shiny new novices.21

  * * *

  BERGOGLIO was one of 237 delegates from ninety provinces in five continents summoned to Rome for the 32nd General Congregation of the Society of Jesus. Unlike almost all previous such assemblies, GC32—held over thirteen weeks between December 1974 and March 1975—had been called not to elect a new general but to consolidate the Jesuits’ post-conciliar renewal.

  Father Arrupe hoped thereby to quell the rebellions in Spain, where restorationists had lobbied Rome to create a new autonomous province dependent directly on the Holy See that looked much like the nineteenth-century Society. Pope Paul VI had rejected their petition, but the ultras continued to be active, especially in Rome, where they had the ear of senior officials and a presence in the Jesuit-run Gregorian University. On the eve of the general congregation, they had created a new network, Jesuitas en Fidelidad (“Jesuits in Fidelity”), which was lobbying against both GC32 and Arrupe.

  Arrupe chose Bergoglio to head them off because he was in Church law the superior of their leader, Nicolás Puyadas, a Spanish Jesuit who had joined the Argentine province in the mid-1960s. As soon as he became provincial Bergoglio—who had as little patience with restorationists as he had with Marxists—dispatched Puyadas to Europe, where in early 1974 he published an anti-Arrupe tract. In the run-up to GC32 the Jesuits in Fidelity were distributing the book in preparation for a planned protest. In the presence of two witnesses, Bergoglio ordered Puyadas under pain of obedience to leave Rome, which the Spaniard was forced to do in order to remain a Jesuit. Together with his old Máximo colleague and now Chilean provincial, Father Fernando Montes, Bergoglio then headed to Termini rail station, where they successfully persuaded other ultras arriving from Spain to return home.

  A more important challenge came from Pope Paul VI, who addressed the delegates at the opening of GC32 on December 3, 1974, with what was essentially a love letter with an emphatic warning. Paul VI was close to the Society, admired it, and saw it as key to implementing the Second Vatican Council. Much in his passionate speech is a reminder of the Jesuits’ charism. “Wherever in the Church—even in the most difficult and extreme fields, in the crossroads of ideologies, in the social trenches—there has been and is now conversation between the deepest desires of human beings and the perennial message of the Gospel, Jesuits have been and are there,” he told them. Bergoglio would later describe it as “one of the most beautiful addresses ever made to the Society by a pope.”22

  Yet it contained an urgent plea for the Jesuits not to abandon their core mission as apostolic priests under obedience. They must adapt to the age, he said, without succumbing to its temptations—skepticism, individualism, rationalism, love of novelty—nor losing their identity. Expressing alarm at the way the Jesuit renewal had in many places gone off the rails, he passionately underlined the importance and urgency of the decisions facing their future and urged them to get back on track.23

  Some of the delegates were mystified by the address, others distressed that, while they had come to Rome to discuss poverty and justice, the pope seemed obsessed with discipline and doctrine. But for some of those present, including Bergoglio, it struck a chord. He recognized in the pope’s analysis an accurate discernment of what had gone wrong in the Argentine province as well as elsewhere. In Congar’s terms, Paul VI had been laying out a vision of true reform and warning them against a false version of that reform that would only lead them down blind alleys. Paul VI’s allocution “in many ways shaped how Bergoglio saw the Society,” says Father Swinnen, novice master at the time.

  Pope Paul’s warnings were prophetic. Although GC32 c
onsolidated the Jesuit renewal, the agreement for which it is best remembered took the Society down a new and divisive track. Decree Four incorporated the pursuit of social justice as a key part of everything Jesuits did. The original purpose of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century had been the “defense and propagation of the faith.” Now, at GC32, this became “the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement.”

  The decree had been driven not, as many supposed, by the Latin-American delegates, but by a group of French-speaking Europeans and Canadians, for whom it was vital to see the struggle for justice not as something outside religion but integral to it. For the Latin-American delegates, who had lived with the idea at least since Medellín in 1968, the decree offered, in that sense, little new. But unlike Medellín, Decree Four appeared to have few safeguards against being turned into an ideology; it was the fruit of a last-minute amalgamation of two texts, and vulnerable to a selective reading. Bergoglio saw two risks with it: one was of forcing Jesuits into bed with political movements pursuing justice (by what other means or agency were “unjust structures” to be tackled?); the second was the loss of identity of which Pope Paul had warned. Where did evangelization and priesthood fit in? Which came first? What stopped a Jesuit from being merely a political campaigner or social worker?

  Whatever the other Latin-American delegates made of it, “Bergoglio did not have much sympathy for that Decree Four,” recalls Father Swinnen. “When he was speaking to the novices he didn’t quote it.”

  The Jesuits spent the next twenty years working out the ambiguities: in the deaths of Jesuits at the hands of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America as well as in the sudden closures, especially in Spain and Mexico, of “privileged” schools. Jesuits came to be seen as rebels, identified with the “loyal opposition” within the Church, standing with the left in politics and often against Pope John Paul II, always in the name of justice.