The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  I was present when [Bergoglio] met a military officer from the Morón Air Base. I was asked to bring him and the soldier some food, to his office. [Bergoglio] was telling him that the kid had to reappear. When the meeting was over, he rang the bell for me to go and collect the trays. When I got there he asked me to see the officer out. I thought that was unusual, because he always saw guests out himself. When I went back to his office to get the trays, he was vomiting. He said: “Sometimes when you’re done talking to those people, you’ve got to throw up.” He told me it was a chess game: one bad move and you’re toast. Three days later, Sergio showed up, really badly beaten.

  Along with “Quique” Martínez Ossola and Carlos González, La Civita was one of three of Bishop Angelelli’s seminarians from La Rioja studying at the Máximo. After they fell under suspicion from the military, Bergoglio agreed with Angelelli in 1975 that they should complete their studies in the college.

  When news reached him of Angelelli’s suspicious death, Bergoglio cut short a meeting of provincials in Central America, arriving back at the college late at night some days later. He went straight to see the three seminarians, who were distraught and afraid. “We heard the footsteps and nearly died of fright,” remembers La Civita. “We had already been thinking how we could escape. He knocked on the door, said, ‘It’s Jorge, don’t be scared.’” After consoling them, he gave them a series of instructions: always to walk around together; not to use the main staircase, but the elevator; and if they saw people they didn’t know, to make their way to a particular room and phone him.

  For their safety, Bergoglio did not let them join the other students doing apostolic work in the barrios of San Miguel but enlisted their help in what they came to realize was a refugee-hiding operation. “We helped Bergoglio attend to people who presented themselves as students or as young people on retreat, but who we guessed were fleeing from persecution,” recalls Quique. He remembers handfuls of people being hidden at any one time, perhaps thirty in total. They never knew much about them, because Bergoglio told them not to ask questions, but the riojanos worked it out. “We knew because we were asked to take meals up to such-and-such a person, who was in a part of the college where people weren’t allowed, because that’s where people on silent retreat stayed,” says La Civita. “There was a whole floor. On one side people were actually doing retreats, on the other side were the ones in hiding.”

  A number of the refugees were Paraguayan and Uruguayan. Gonzalo Mosca, a radical on the run from the Uruguayan dictatorship, went to Buenos Aires but discovered that the police had orders to arrest him. He called his brother, a Jesuit in the Argentine province, who contacted his provincial. Bergoglio collected Mosca from the center of Buenos Aires and drove him out to the Máximo. “If they stop us, tell them you’re going on a spiritual retreat,” he told him. Mosca stayed for four days; Bergoglio came to his room each afternoon, armed with a radio and Borges stories. He fixed a flight to Puerto Iguazú—“Father Jorge not only accompanied me to the airport, but actually saw me onto the plane,” Mosca recalls—from where he was taken over the River Paraná and looked after by the Jesuits in Brazil, who arranged his papers and flight to Europe. Looking back, Mosca is astonished at his courage. “If they had caught us together, we would both have been put away.”16

  La Civita remembers the provincial taking in a priest who had been threatened by a right-wing group called Tradition, Family and Property after he spoke out in a homily against the killing of the Pallottine fathers. “One day before lunch Jorge came and told us that Vicente had to get out of the country because there was an order to arrest him. He said the one who had received the order would not act on it for forty-eight hours, but then he would have to. He said he had to get Vicente out to Uruguay.”

  These operations took place under the nostrils not just of the army chaplains, but of the army itself. A military base was close by the Máximo; from 1977 the air force owned the observatory inside the college grounds; and just outside the iron gates, the soldiers patrolled. Sometimes they would camp close by and carry out operations in the area. Angel Rossi, a Jesuit novice at the time, remembers a 1977 raid on the novitiate house—which was a few streets from the Máximo—by soldiers claiming to have heard shots; the novices were held at gunpoint against the walls while the rooms were turned over.

  The Máximo itself was never raided, although one night it came very close. It was toward the end of 1977, when around twenty soldiers passed through the iron gates and surrounded the college with trucks. Father Scannone, seen as a liberation theologian and therefore suspect, had his heart in his mouth as he heard the boots in the corridors outside. But the soldiers didn’t go inside the rooms. Bergoglio gently, but with impressive self-confidence, told them to go back to their barracks, that they had no right to be in the college. They left.

  Inside the college, there was a group of around thirty priests, including the military chaplains, who could be described as conservative Jesuits sympathetic to the dictatorship. Professors such as Yorio linked to the Third-World priests had been removed, and the faculty was by 1976 firmly in the anti-Marxist “theology of the people” school of Fathers Gera and Scannone. But the political tensions remained strong, and an atmosphere of caution had reached into the classrooms. La Civita was taken aside after theology class one time after making a reference to John’s Gospel that smacked of Marxism. “Look, Miguel,” the professor told him, “when you want to talk about that come to my room: I think the same as you but watch what you say in class, because there are botones [snitches].”

  La Civita describes Bergoglio as an “eel” because “he had this amazing ability to maneuver in that environment.”

  In the judicial evidence he gave in 2010, Bergoglio said he went to “people who could make things happen: some of them linked to human-rights organizations, some not,” and “to priests who I supposed to have links to the police and the armed forces.” Pressed a number of times to say who they were, the cardinal avoided giving names: “friends, acquaintances,” he said, adding later, “some were Jesuits, some lay people, some were friends of Jesuits.”

  Bergoglio’s contact with Admiral Emilio Massera came through the ex–Iron Guard leaders in the Salvador University (USAL). Massera, who had been appointed navy chief by General Perón before Perón’s death, had political ambitions to succeed him as the movement’s leader. In 1976 and 1977 he sought to co-opt former leaders of Peronist groups to build a political base, among whom was Francisco “Cacho” Piñón, the USAL rector. Piñón took advantage of the approach to secure an agreement from Massera to protect the university and its personnel. The quid pro quo was an invitation from USAL to Massera to give a speech and receive an honorary degree on November 25, 1977, at which the Jesuits were represented by the Máximo’s rector, Father Víctor Zorzín.

  Although some of the ex-Guardia leaders would later be seduced by Massera, Piñón was not one of them; he had no more sympathy than Bergoglio for the admiral’s tedious political theories, which he shared at length in his lecture that day. The honoris causa degree was purely to protect the USAL. “Bergoglio totally understood that keeping a university from being ‘intervened’ in the dictatorship was not a little girls’ game,” says the ex-guardián Julio Bárbaro. Bergoglio did the same for the Jesuits. Miguel Mom Debussy, a Jesuit student in the Máximo in the 1970s who occasionally drove Bergoglio’s car, says the provincial told him he met Massera to discuss the sale of the Jesuit observatory next to the college, which had become a financial drain. There was no deal—in the end the air force bought the observatory—but the meeting enabled a vital contact. “He did it to protect the students and the novices,” says Debussy, who later left the Jesuits.

  Massera’s role in the dirty war condemned him, after the fall of the dictatorship, to life imprisonment. The fact that Bergoglio had met with him was seized on by the left as evidence that the former provincial had been a “collaborator.” But as those close to him at the time, such as Alicia Oliv
eira, point out, he was as appalled by the national-security ideology of the dictatorship as he was by the Marxist-nationalist ideology of the montoneros, despite each dressing in Catholic clothes. On the other hand, Bergoglio would have a relationship with anyone—especially if it could save lives.

  Without those relationships, he could achieve none of his objectives. For the same reason, the nuncio lunched with General Videla, and the head of the bishops’ conference arranged Admiral Massera’s 1977 audience with Pope Paul VI. Many said afterward that the bishops should have spoken out instead. The bishops say they saved more lives by keeping these links. It is arguable either way, but in 1976 and 1977 the dictatorship still had popular legitimacy and the most common assumption was that to be arrested you had to be involved with the guerrillas. No one at that time was asking bishops to issue statements against the regime, while hundreds were begging them to intercede with the authorities through private channels to save lives. A public repudiation of the regime would have made that advocacy impossible.

  Every life saved was precious but overall the results were meager. The papal nuncio, Pío Laghi, in 1977 lamented to a US diplomat how each branch of the armed forces passed off inquiries to another, and how it was almost impossible to find anyone to claim responsibility for a disappearance. The bishops, he said, had asked for explanations about thousands of cases, but had been given information on just a few dozen. Tracking down desaparecidos was no small task. For the first two weeks, while the prisoners were in police stations or army bases being “sorted” according to the threat they were reckoned to represent, there was a chance of springing them—if you could find out soon enough where they were. But once they had entered the clandestine detention centers, that chance became vanishingly small. Of the five thousand prisoners thought to have passed through the largest detention center, the Navy Mechanics School, known as ESMA, only a few hundred survived (among them Yorio and Jalics). When the survivors later told what had gone on there, it was clear why the army had not wanted to let them live.

  Apart from Globulin, Albanesi, and Yorio and Jalics, and possibly one or two others, Bergoglio had few successes in rescuing the victims of this butchery. His old friend Esther Ballestrino de Careaga once brought to him a woman whose two sons had been abducted—both were communist militants who were involved, as were Esther’s children, in the ERP. “She was a widow, and her sons were all she had left,” Bergoglio recalled in 2010. “How she cried! It was a scene I will never forget. I made some inquiries but got nowhere, and I often reproach myself for not doing more.”

  Nor could Bergoglio save Esther herself. She was one of the three founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who held their first rally in front of the Casa Rosada in April 1977. In June, Esther’s daughter Ana María was disappeared, but amazingly was returned alive in October. Esther took her and her other two daughters to live in Sweden. But once there, she felt guilty at abandoning the Madres and returned to Buenos Aires, saying she would carry on until all the others were returned alive. The Madres group—which had expanded to include two French nuns and relatives of the disappeared, among them a young man called Gustavo Niño—met each week at the church of Santa Cruz. In December they were planning to make public their first list of eight hundred desaparecidos.

  Niño’s real name was Lt. Col. Alfredo Astiz. He was one of Massera’s thugs who had infiltrated the group by feigning to have a desaparecido brother. After joining the Madres in the square, and attending a number of meetings at the church, he arranged the death squad that took them away. It was one of four army stings between December 8 and 10, 1977, which included the abduction of the two other Madres founders, Azucena Villaflor and María Ponce.

  Bergoglio was devastated. He tried without success to reach members of Esther’s family, and desperately sought help from human-rights organizations as well as the archdiocese, who told him they had no news. He went with fellow members of the nuns’ congregation to the French embassy, who made energetic representations to the junta.

  Years later they learned that, even as they pleaded for information, the tortured corpses of the Santa Cruz dozen, as they became known, were floating in the south Atlantic.

  * * *

  UNLIKE “Pancho” Jalics, Oswaldo Yorio never reached a place of peace or forgiveness before dying of a heart attack in Montevideo in the winter of 2000. When the journalist Olga Wornat interviewed the sixty-five-year-old former Jesuit in the Uruguayan capital just weeks before his death, she met a man in broken health whose face still crumpled with hurt. “I have no reason to think he ever did anything to free us,” Yorio had told Horacio Verbitsky in 1999, “but rather the opposite.” To Wornat, Yorio made a far more appalling accusation: “I am sure that he gave the list with our names to the Marines.”17

  Yorio was still broken not just by the five months he spent chained and blindfolded in a cell twenty-five years earlier, not knowing if each day would be his last, but by an enduring bitterness against his former provincial, whom the year before he had lived to see made the archbishop of Buenos Aires. To Catholic friends in the left-wing, human-rights world such as Professor Fortunato Mallimaci, he insisted to the last that Bergoglio was devious, power-obsessed, and duplicitous. It was a narrative that had developed over twenty years, with encouragement from Mignone and Verbitsky, and revolved around the same premise: Yorio as innocent victim, and Bergoglio as a dangerous reactionary engaged in a double game.

  Yorio’s specific grievance—plugged with relish by Verbitsky after Yorio’s death—was that Bergoglio had willfully or at least knowingly left Jalics and him “unprotected” in the months after the coup. No one today claims, as Yorio did to Olga Wornat, that Bergoglio actively betrayed the two priests; the evidence, as Jalics came to see, was that the priests were seized on May 23, 1976, because of their links to a catechist-turned-guerrilla who had under torture identified them as people she had worked with. Yet Yorio’s relatives and Verbitsky insist that Bergoglio’s sins prior to the abduction were those of omission. Through a series of actions, they claim, he left the Jesuits prey for the ESMA squad that descended that day on their house in the Bajo Flores area of Buenos Aires. Those actions include, they allege, Bergoglio failing to defend them from false accusations that they were connected to the guerrillas, and arranging their departure from the Jesuits just at the moment that they were most exposed. “He put them in a risky position and didn’t try to avoid it,” claims Orlando’s brother, Rodolfo Yorio.18

  To foreigners, this sounds like, at worst, a crime of negligence, but in Argentina the allegation has a dark resonance. Emilio Mignone’s 1986 book Church and Dictatorship, which made public Yorio’s allegations, had an authority deriving not just from his highly respected work in CELS but his experience of having a disappeared daughter. Mónica Mignone was a catechist in the same villa as Yorio and Jalics, and was abducted just a week before they were. While searching for her, Mignone père was distraught that the many bishops he knew well from his Catholic Action days were unable to secure his daughter’s release; and the book is an angry denunciation of the Church’s failure to speak out against the regime on behalf of victims. Mignone finds the reason why in a cozy connivance between Church and army built up over many years. Bergoglio’s alleged behavior toward the two Jesuits is part of a long litany of sins of complaisance or connivance used by Mignone to buttress his book’s central claim that the armed forces “took charge of the dirty task of cleaning the Church’s inner patio, with the acquiescence of the prelates.”19

  This charge—that bishops took advantage of the dirty war to extirpate liberation theology by acquiescing in the deaths of its exponents—has offered the Argentine left a satisfying explanation of why the bishops didn’t take a firmer line against the junta. As many left-wing narratives do, it places the Church (with the exception of “good” bishops like Angelelli) on the side of the regime against the people.

  The evidence, however, doesn’t support it. One wing of the clergy—the militar
y-chaplain vicariate led by Bishop Tortolo, along with Bishop Bonamín and certain military chaplains, such as the sinister Cristián von Wernich, later indicted for murder and kidnapping—certainly saw the eradication of Medellín-type theology as part of a wider crusade against subversion, and were complicit. But this was never true of most bishops or Church leaders, and it does not explain their initial reluctance to break with the regime. The evidence points, rather, to a gradual awakening, and an increasingly coherent opposition by the bishops, in the late 1970s, to the junta’s ideology and methods.

  In Bergoglio’s case, the specific Mignone/Verbitsky accusation is that he gave a “green light” to the marines to abduct Yorio and Jalics because—although this is never stated directly—he wanted them dead because he disagreed with their theology. The evidence for this claim, which was always rejected by Mignone’s CELS colleague Oliveira and many others in the world of human rights such as Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, was picked over by a judicial inquiry in 2010 and, following Francis’s election, by journalists and his Argentine biographers. All have come to the opposite conclusion: that Bergoglio’s actions had no impact on the arrest of Yorio and Jalics, that they had knowingly exposed themselves to considerable risk despite his pleading and offers of protection, and that following their arrest he (among many others) went to extraordinary lengths to secure their release. Reviewing all the documents and oral testimonies relevant to the case, a long roll call of eminent judges, jurists, and human-rights organizations such as Amnesty International have reached similar conclusions.

  So how did Yorio come to the view that Bergoglio had betrayed them, and die believing it?

  * * *

  BERGOGLIO had known Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics since the early 1960s. Jalics, a Budapest-born naturalized Argentine who belonged to the Chilean province, in the late 1960s taught Bergoglio fundamental theology and was, for a time, his spiritual director, which Bergoglio later described as his special gift. Yorio, who was from Buenos Aires, entered the Jesuits in 1955, was ordained three years before Bergoglio, in 1966, at the age of thirty-four, and taught him Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate. In the 2010 judicial inquiry Bergoglio described Yorio as having an “exquisite sensitivity linked to an above-average intellect” and remembers his theology classes as sabrosas—lively and enjoyable. He also described Yorio and Jalics as “good religious” who had a balanced, orthodox position on liberation theology, within the parameters set by the Holy See.