That was not the whole truth. Yorio was a politically committed theologian, active in the Third World Priests’ Movement (MSTM), a friend of Father Carlos Mugica, and a revolutionary Peronist who believed in the montonero cause. Nor did Bergoglio mention that Yorio was part of the group around the previous provincial, Ricardo O’Farrell, which had fostered egalitarian living-out experiments and had been directly responsible for the redesign of Jesuit formation so that it no longer included “bourgeois” humanistic studies. In short, Yorio represented the post-conciliar Jesuit chaos that Bergoglio had been elected to supersede.
In 1970 a mix of theology students and professors, led by Yorio and Jalics, went to live in a base community in a poor area of Buenos Aires. The Ituzaingó community was an avant-garde experiment in nonhierarchical, politically engagé living that was highly controversial at the time in the Argentine province: some had subjective interpretations of their celibacy vow, while others were said to be involved with the guerrillas. In Yorio’s twenty-seven-page 1977 letter to the Jesuit curia in Rome giving his account of the years leading up to their abduction, he acknowledged that “for a number of the theologians [the Ituzaingó experiment] led to them rethinking their vocations and leaving the Society,” but always, he said, after proper reflection and with the agreement of the provincial.
The provincial, O’Farrell, ordered the community to close and gave Yorio a role researching theology and politics. Yorio moved to the Jesuit community in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano, which housed the Jesuits’ institute, the Center for Social Research and Action (CIAS), where he was often invited to give talks on liberation theology to religious orders. Unhappy with Jesuit residential life, however, Yorio at the end of 1972 persuaded O’Farrell to allow him, with Fathers Jalics, Dourrón, Rastellini, and Casalotto, to create another base community, this time in an apartment on the calle Rondeau.
Again there were rumors about their links to the guerrillas and breaking their vows. Following his election as provincial in mid-1973, Bergoglio for the time being approved the mission and told them not to worry about the rumors. In November 1974, a Jesuit student who had been with Yorio in the Ituzaingó community, Juan Luis Moyano, was arrested and tortured for suspected guerrilla links after being “disappeared” from a villa in Mendoza in western Argentina. Bergoglio managed to get him out and sent him abroad for study.
At the end of 1974, Bergoglio had a series of meetings with the four Jesuits (now minus Casalotto, who had left to join the diocesan priesthood), which included a two-day retreat that Yorio recalled in his letter as being “very fruitful.” Bergoglio had decided to close the community as part of his provincial restructuring and asked if they would accept, under obedience. The Jesuits said they were available—the word has a technical meaning in the Society of Jesus of an interior disposition for mission, one of the key tests of obedience—but wanted to challenge the decision to dissolve the community, arguing that it was an apostolic success. It was agreed that Bergoglio would send Rastellini on mission to Jujuy, that Yorio would make a representation to Rome arguing against the decision to dissolve the community (it would take over a year to get a verdict from the general, Father Arrupe), and that in the meantime the three Jesuits would move to another community. Yorio made another decision at this time—to accept Bergoglio’s invitation to take his final vow, which he had postponed, in mid-1976.
In early 1975, Yorio, Jalics, and Dourrón moved to a house in the Barrio Rivadavia, alongside Villa 11.14 in Bajo Flores where Yorio had begun working. There, Jalics ran retreats while the other two acted as curas villeros, managing a team of catechists, one of whom was the woman who later that year joined the guerrillas. At this time montonero violence and the death squads were each stepping up their operations, and the villas miseria—the guerrillas’ base—had become extremely tense places.
The Argentine bishops in February 1975 ordered liberationist professors to cease teaching in the Villa Devoto and other seminaries, and the Colegio Máximo followed suit: in March, Yorio was relieved of his teaching post there in a letter from the rector, which in 1977 he described as curt and disrespectful.
There was a group of senior Jesuits in the Máximo with right-wing political convictions who remained highly critical of Yorio and his colleagues. “In the Colegio Máximo there were rumors that I was a montonero chief and I had women,” Yorio recalled to Wornat. “Francisco Jalics various times told the Jesuits in writing what they were exposing us to.” Bergoglio knew the rumors were untrue, but the senior Jesuits had the ear of the bishops and of the Jesuit curia in Rome, and Bergoglio—as Yorio acknowledges in his letter—was under pressure from many quarters to dissolve the community and pull the Jesuits out of the villa.
Bergoglio, however, continued to support the Barrio Rivadavia Jesuits. The problem came to a head with Yorio’s final vow. A Jesuit is invited to make the vow once Rome has received a recommendation from his provincial with the support of the consultors, who have in turn received favorable written evaluations (called informationes) about their suitability from Jesuits who know him well. In July 1975 Bergoglio told Yorio that the informationes he had received had been negative: at the root of the objections, the provincial told him, appeared to be a false impression in many people’s minds of what had gone on at the time of the Ituzaingó community. He had commissioned other Jesuits to write a new informatio on him, but it, too, had come back negative. The consultors could not agree to recommending Yorio.
This was a major blow. If Yorio had made the final vow, it would be far easier to protect both him and the community from the fierce criticisms. Yorio’s 1977 letter shows his provincial at this time under enormous strain and unsure what to do next.
Father Bergoglio told us … that the pressures were very great, and that he could not resist them.… He asked us to pray, to think, and that he would do the same, and that we should keep meeting. We had two or three meetings. He spoke to us about dissolving the community.… He told us he didn’t know what to do, and that he feared committing an injustice.… He asked us not to speak with other Jesuits in the province (still less with the consultors) because the province was in a very delicate situation and that this would create a problem of division.… He told us to be patient and that for the good of the province we should keep all this confidential and that together we should seek a solution.
Yorio, Jalics, and Dourrón began to see that it was going to be hard to remain both in their base community and in the Society of Jesus. They wrote to Bishop (soon to be Cardinal) Eduardo Pironio, former archbishop of La Plata and now head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Consecrated Life in Rome, giving an account of their community and offering what Yorio described as “a sketch of a structure of religious life in the event we were unable to continue in the Society.” What he proposed was a new kind of avant-garde Ignatian institute that explicitly rejected the idea of obedience to religious superiors. According to Bergoglio’s deposition in 2010, the two Jesuits had also sent the draft constitutions to three bishops they thought might be sympathetic to them.
In December 1975, Yorio recalls, “the forces of the extreme right [Triple A] had machine-gunned one priest, and they had abducted, tortured, and left for dead another one. They both lived in villas miseria. We were receiving warnings to take care.” Jalics went to see Bergoglio, who promised, says Yorio, “to speak with people in the armed forces to tell them we were innocent.”
Yorio also sought support for his position within the Jesuits from his former CIAS colleagues in Belgrano, many of whom shared his liberationist views. This was precisely what Bergoglio had sought to avoid—a confrontation between left and right within the Society at a moment of high political tension in the country. In February 1976, in a tense meeting, Bergoglio told them that the general, Father Arrupe, wanted a solution, and that they needed to decide either to leave the Society or obey, which meant dissolving the community and going to live in the residences. The issue was not their work in the villa, as s
ome later claimed; Bergoglio supported their work among the poor, just as he backed the work of another Jesuit, Father “Pichi” Meisegeier, who had replaced Father Mugica in Villa 31 next to Retiro station. Bergoglio wanted Yorio and Jalics in a Jesuit residential community (as Father Pichi was), not to give up their work in the slum.20
Yorio said they needed time for a proper discernment. Bergoglio suggested they apply to Rome for a leave of absence. They agreed, and gave him the papers to hand directly to Father Arrupe when he left for Rome a few days later.
Ten days after the meeting, Bergoglio returned from Rome with a letter from Arrupe ordering that the community be dissolved within fifteen days, and the three Jesuits be removed from Argentina—Jalics to the United States, and Yorio and Dourrón to another province. It was a dramatic order, one that suggested that Arrupe believed the rumors about their involvement with the guerrillas. Bergoglio told Yorio that “he had told the general that this order was tantamount to expelling us from the Society, but that the general’s mind was firm in the matter.”
Aggrieved, the Jesuits took three days to decide to leave the Society and set up their own religious institute. Their dismissal was approved on March 19. With talk of an imminent coup, Bergoglio urged them again to leave the villa for their own safety—they were “too exposed to the paranoia of the witch hunt,” as he put it years later—and offered them rooms in the provincial curia on Bogotá Street until they found a bishop. They thanked him but refused. “He told them they had to leave, that it was very risky,” recalls Alicia Oliveira. “But they wouldn’t budge. They wanted to stay.” It wasn’t just Bergoglio warning them, but Father Rodolfo Ricciardelli, who coordinated the priests in Villa 11.14. He had heard the same rumors, and asked everyone doing social and pastoral work to leave the villa, for their own sakes and for the sakes of the people there. Yorio, Jalics, Dourrón, and a group of catechists chose to remain.
The three priests now found themselves passed between bishops like hot potatoes. Yorio had earlier shown his idea for a new religious institute to an old friend of the Jesuits, the archbishop of Santa Fe, Vicente Zazpe, but he hadn’t wanted to get involved. Now they found that other bishops took the same view. Bergoglio asked another friend, a Salesian bishop, to take them, but Miguel Raspanti of Morón would only take Dourrón alone.
At this point it dawned on them what to others might have seemed obvious: that on the eve of a military coup, three ex-Jesuits suspected—however falsely—of guerrilla connections, who had disobeyed their provincial and wanted to create a new, nonhierarchical community in a shantytown, were unlikely to have bishops falling over each other to invite them to their dioceses. In Yorio’s own words, they realized “it would be impossible to get a bishop unless the problem of the secret accusations could be clarified, and that in the meantime our priesthood and our lives were now in great danger.”
Yet still they stayed in the villa, even after four women catechists—among them Mónica Mignone, Emilio’s daughter—were abducted from there in mid-May, never to reappear. They even stayed when Archbishop Aramburu, learning on his way to Rome to be made a cardinal that the three had left the Jesuits, withdrew their licenses to practice as priests in his diocese. (When they informed Bergoglio, he told them they could still say Mass in private with the faculties he had given them.) A week later, on May 23, dozens of marines descended on the villa and arrested Yorio and Jalics along with eight catechists—Dourrón was on his bicycle, and just avoided being caught.
* * *
THE catechists were released after questioning, but Yorio and Jalics were taken to the clandestine ESMA center. For a number of days they were held in cells with hoods over their heads, their hands tied behind their backs, and their legs chained to a cannonball. They were given no food or water, and left to urinate and defecate over themselves while being insulted, threatened with the electric cattle prod, and interrogated after being injected with a serum.
Outside, Bergoglio moved fast. He notified Bishop Tortolo, Cardinal Aramburu, the nuncio, and the general in Rome, and from his army chaplain contacts worked out where Yorio and Jalics were being held. Bergoglio was convinced that the army would realize their mistake and release them. “We moved straightaway, but I didn’t think it would last so long,” he recalled in 2010.
Inside the ESMA, the army had indeed realized their mistake. After the interrogation was over, the officer in charge came to speak to the priests. They were told, recalls Yorio, that “there had been serious charges made against us. That imprisoning us had created a big problem for them, because there had been a very strong reaction in the Church and in many sectors of the country. That I was a good priest. But that I had made a mistake: to have gone to live with the poor. That this was a materialist interpretation of the Gospel. That when Christ spoke of the poor, he meant spiritual poverty.”
They were told they would soon be released, recalls Jalics in his memoir, yet “despite this commitment we were then for some inexplicable reason kept in custody for five months, blindfolded and handcuffed.” The publicity surrounding their capture had made it impossible for them to be “disappeared,” but equally impossible for them to be released. Yorio and Jalics were moved to a house in the barrio of Don Torcuato, where they remained until October. They were not tortured and there were no further interrogations; they could go to the bathroom, and were fed. But they remained blindfolded and in chains through five long months, powerless over their fate.
Once it was clear that they were not going to be released soon, Bergoglio sought to apply pressure from many different directions to ensure they did not “disappear.” A large number of people were witnesses, at this time, to his anxiety for them and his efforts on their behalf. To Jalics’s family Bergoglio wrote on September 15, urging them not to give up hope. Alluding to his disagreements with Jalics, the provincial reassured them that “the difficulties that your brother and I have had between us concerning the religious life have nothing to do with the current situation.” He added, in German: “Franz is a brother to me.”
How Yorio and Jalics came to be released remains unclear. Mignone claimed it was Pope Paul VI’s direct calls to the commander in chief of the army, General Jorge Videla. It may have been Jalics’s brother in the United States personally contacting Jimmy Carter, at that point campaigning for president, who called Videla. Or it may have been the Jesuit general, Father Arrupe—whom Bergoglio had contacted at once following the kidnappings—leaning on the Argentine embassy to the Holy See; or Cardinal Aramburu speaking three times to Videla. Most likely, it was a combination of all of these. The 2010 judicial inquiry concluded that their release was “a consequence of steps taken by the religious order to which the victims belonged and the interest shown in them by leading members of the Catholic Church.”
Bergoglio’s efforts on behalf of the priests were considerable. He managed to arrange two interviews each with the navy chief, Admiral Emilio Massera, and with General Videla. Convinced, by piecing together various bits of evidence, that the navy held them, “I told [Massera] those priests were involved in nothing at all strange,” Bergoglio told the 2010 inquiry. But the naval chief on that occasion gave nothing away, promising only to investigate. After two months, having heard nothing, Bergoglio succeeded in getting another interview. It lasted less than ten minutes and was “very ugly,” he recalled. By now certain Massera had them and was lying, Bergoglio was exasperated. He told him, “Look, Massera, I want them to appear.” He then got up and left. It went better with Videla:
I don’t remember the exact date, but I calculate that the first audience was about two months after the kidnapping. He was very formal: he made a note, and said he would find out. I told him that it was said the navy had them. The second time, I found out which military chaplain was going to say Mass at his house, the residence of the commander in chief. I asked [the chaplain] to tell [Videla] that he was ill, and that I would be replacing him. That Saturday, after Mass, I asked to speak to him. There he gave me
the impression that he was going to be more concerned and take things more seriously. It wasn’t violent, like with Massera.
Yorio and Jalics were eventually released in October 1976 after a drugged ride in a helicopter that left them asleep on a remote stretch of ground outside Buenos Aires. “They had had to set us free because it was common knowledge that the navy had abducted us,” Jalics recalled. “But now that we were free, they could kill us in the street to stop us talking.”
When Bergoglio took Yorio’s call, he took precautions in case the line was tapped: he told them not to say where they were but to send someone who knew their location.
Jalics was sent to join his mother in the United States. Meanwhile, Bergoglio met Yorio at his mother’s apartment with Bishop Jorge Novak of Quilmes, who agreed to accept Yorio as a priest in his diocese. Bergoglio then paid for Yorio to be sent to Rome to take a course at the Jesuit-run Gregorian university. All of this, Yorio recalled, the provincial carried out “with great diligence and care” and “my bishop was very grateful.” Yet “he could give me no explanations of what had occurred before [my arrest]. He made haste to ask me please not to ask him because at that moment he felt very confused and wouldn’t know what to say. Nor did I say anything. What could I say?”
The Great Reformer Page 21