The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  * * *

  THERE, but for Yorio’s interior crisis, the story might have ended. It didn’t because he entered a vortex of posttraumatic grief and stress that got worse with the passing of the years. The long incarceration was the final stage in a gradual stripping of his sense of self. He had lost his identity as a Jesuit and theologian; he had lost the community that incarnated his theological ideals; he had been, as he saw it, forced to leave the Jesuits because of false rumors that the general in Rome appeared to believe. Then he had been spurned by bishops and deprived of his license as a priest, before losing his human dignity and freedom in a cell over many months, after which he was exiled. As existential displacements go, it was extreme. “I think it was conditioned by the suffering he had to undergo,” Bergoglio told the 2010 inquiry, when he was asked about Yorio’s belief that he had been betrayed.

  In Rome, Yorio reconstructed the events to try to make sense of them, and over time came to pin his anger on his provincial. Yet the criticisms he makes in his long 1977 letter to Father Moura in the Jesuit curia in Rome are a very long way from the accusations in the Mignone book. What frustrates Yorio in that letter is the injustice of being driven out of the Society by false accusations made by faceless opponents, and finally an order from the general without the chance to defend themselves. In all of this, says Yorio, “the provincial did nothing to defend us and we had begun to question his honesty. We were tired of the province and feeling totally insecure.” They were upset that Bergoglio “told us about pressures, but not what they were, and without him actually accusing us of anything and without offering us a concrete way out.” Those are the worst charges Yorio makes against Bergoglio in the letter, which ends with a series of pleas to try to understand what had happened. Yorio was bewildered, and saw himself, at that stage, as a powerless victim.

  Over time, that bewilderment was turned to anger by the narrative later emerging from human-rights circles. The investigations into disappearances ordered by President Raúl Alfonsín in the mid-1980s had exposed the complicity of some of the bishops and military chaplains, and a simplistic dualism had entered the discourse of the left. The narrative split the Church, and Argentine society, between sheep and wolves, between angels and demons. On the side of “good” were those brave martyrs like Angelelli and the bishops who had spoken out, while the other bishops were tarred, to different extents, with the crime of betraying their flock, of acquiescence and collaboration. In this scheme, there were only opponents and guilty bystanders.

  This narrative allowed former guerrilla sympathizers to keep alive the illusion of a popular revolution frustrated by the forces of reaction, and to shirk their own role in the chaos and carnage. It was also an account that left no space for those who—like Bergoglio and most bishops—had no sympathy for the dictatorship and had worked quietly, and sometimes heroically, to save lives. Living in Montevideo after the fall of the Argentine dictatorship, Yorio saw his own story reflected in Mignone’s angry tale of betrayal. “What will history say of those shepherds who handed over their sheep to the enemy, without defending them or rescuing them?” Mignone had asked. Yorio now saw Bergoglio as an entregador, a betrayer. Like Verbitsky after him, Mignone never questioned Yorio’s evidence for this assertion. And Bergoglio never at the time sought to defend himself.

  Mignone’s account was taken up by some of the liberationists within the Jesuits who saw Bergoglio as a reactionary. Juan Luis Moyano, who died in 2006, had been a Jesuit student in Yorio’s base community in Ituzaingó in 1972 and was tortured and imprisoned in Mendoza in 1974. Bergoglio sent him to Germany to study, from where he went to Peru for many years, nurturing resentment against his provincial. He remained in contact with Yorio and assumed his account of Bergoglio. Brought back to Argentina in 1991, he became one of Bergoglio’s detractors, supplying quotes to Verbitsky as the “anonymous Jesuit” who backed Yorio’s accusations by citing Bergoglio’s meetings with Admiral Massera as evidence of his sympathy for the dictatorship. By the late 1990s, the demonization of Bergoglio had reached the point where Yorio came to believe something quite preposterous—that his provincial had actually put his name on a list that he gave to the torturers.

  That is certainly not what he believed at the time. But in Yorio’s 1977 letter you can see the idea taking shape. The letter elicits sympathy, but also reveals the narcissism that suffering can induce. His headstrong conviction of the rightness of his base community and his work among the poor appeared to blind him to the headache he was causing for his provincial. The letter shows no understanding of Bergoglio’s efforts to do the right thing for them in spite of huge opposition to them from within the Jesuits and the bishops, and from Rome. To blame his provincial for not offering them a “concrete way out” seems rich, when the option to obey their provincial was there all along. It would have meant recognizing that they were Jesuits under obedience and living in the residences with others whose views they did not share—but they could have continued their work in the villa. Even when that concrete option was no longer available, when they had chosen to leave the Jesuits but had not yet found a bishop, Bergoglio offered them a refuge and place of safety.

  To paint Bergoglio as an angel, however, would be to reverse the scheme. His confusion both before Yorio’s detention and after his release shows a man troubled by self-doubt and weighed down by huge conflicting pressures; he is very far from the authoritarian, decisive figure he himself has painted. It would be extraordinary if, in navigating the elaborate tangle of conflicting loyalties and allegiances in the province at the time, he had made no mistakes. But whatever they were, he neither betrayed the two Jesuits nor did anything to facilitate their capture; even in Yorio’s own account, he is a diligent, caring provincial trying to move them in the best direction while respecting their freedom; and who, after their capture, moved heaven and earth to secure their release.

  Jalics took a different path from Yorio. For some time he, too, was convinced they had been betrayed, and blamed Bergoglio for failing to defend them. In spite of his angry feelings, he prayed intensely to forgive the Jesuits he thought had betrayed him. In the United States he decided to remain a Jesuit after all, and beginning in 1978 he went to live in a retreat house in Wilhelmsthal, Germany, where since then he has given The Spiritual Exercises. In 1980, on a thirty-day retreat, realizing that his healing was being held back by a desire for vengeance, he burned a store of documents he had been keeping from the era. It was an important step. Eight years later, at a meeting in Rome, he broke down sobbing in front of his superior. Released at last from the past, all bitterness left him.

  Then came a further realization: no one had betrayed them. On visits to Buenos Aires in the late 1990s to give retreats, he met with Bergoglio several times. By then it was clear that he and Yorio had been abducted on that day because the catechist who became a guerrilla had given up their names during torture.

  In 2000 Father Jalics and Archbishop Bergoglio celebrated Mass publicly together, and, report those present, fell into each other’s arms in a heartbreaking act of reconciliation. Thirteen years later, the world’s media beat a path to Wilhelmsthal, looking for comment from a white-haired eighty-six-year-old Jesuit on events that had occurred in a far-off country nearly forty years before. A few months later, in October, Jalics met Francis in the Casa Santa Marta.

  FIVE

  THE LEADER EXPELLED

  (1980–1992)

  IT WAS 10:15 A.M. on the second morning after Francis’s election, and the young man at the reception desk at the Jesuits’ headquarters on the Borgo Santo Spirito in Rome, a few hundred yards from St. Peter’s Basilica, was dealing with what he assumed to be another hoax call. This one had said, “Good morning, it’s Pope Francis, I’d like to speak with the father general,” and rather than say, “Sure, and I’m Napoleon,” Andrea asked curtly, “May I ask who’s calling?”

  Ever since Francis’s election, said Father Claudio Barriga, SJ, who recounted this episode in an e-mai
l to fellow Jesuits, the phone had been ringing incessantly, and a few of the callers were lunatics. “There’s no problem,” this caller assured Andrea. “Seriously, I am Pope Francis. Who are you?” The young man gave his name and the pope asked how he was this morning. Fine, fine, said Andrea breathlessly, but pardon me, un po’ confuso. It now dawned on him that the caller was who he said he was. When Francis gently asked again to be put through to the father general (“I would like to thank him for the beautiful letter he sent me”), Andrea relented. “Forgive me, Your Holiness, I will connect you right now.”

  Brother Alfonso, Father Aldolfo Nicolás’s Brazilian secretary, took the call. “Holy Father, congratulations on your election!” he said. “We are all praying very much for you!” At the other end of the phone Francis was laughing. “Praying for what? That I carry on or go back?” “That you carry on, of course!” Brother Alfonso answered, as he entered Nicolás’s office and passed him the phone, hissing: “It’s the pope!” The general, almost as thrown as Andrea downstairs, switched helplessly between calling him “Pope,” “Holiness,” and “Monsignor” as Francis thanked him for his letter, said he was looking forward to meeting, and promised to call again to make a date.

  He did, and that Sunday afternoon at 5:30 p.m. the first Jesuit superior general ever to meet a Jesuit pope found Francis at the door of the Casa Santa Marta. Francis gave Nicolás a fraternal hug, insisted on him using the informal Spanish tú form, and made the affectionate if improbable request that Nicolás should treat him like “any other Jesuit.” “There was calm, humor and mutual understanding about past, present, and future,” Nicolás said afterward in an internal communiqué, adding: “I left the Santa Marta convinced that it will be worth collaborating fully with him in the Lord’s Vineyard.”1

  The healing had begun.

  In a letter a week later to the 17,200 members of his order worldwide, Nicolás told them Pope Francis “feels deeply Jesuit” and this was evident in his papal coat of arms and his letter to Nicolás. The Society of Jesus, he said, needed to affirm its support for the holy father and offer him all their assistance. Then came a curious paragraph:

  We are aware that our efforts are limited and that we all carry the burden of a history of sin that we share with all humanity (GC 35, D. 1, n.15). But we also experience God’s radical call inviting us to consider all things and look to the future in a new way, as Ignatius did in Manresa. This is the time to appropriate the words of mercy and goodness that Pope Francis repeats so convincingly and not to allow ourselves to be swept away by distractions from the past, which may paralyze our hearts and lead us to interpret reality with values that are not inspired by the Gospel.2

  Distractions of the past? Nicolás knew how deep the wounds ran. In all the years Bergoglio had been coming to Rome as bishop, archbishop, and cardinal, he had never stayed at or even visited the Borgo Santo Spirito, as Jesuit bishops usually do, nor spoken to Nicolás’s predecessor as general, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach. Nicolás knew that there were Jesuits of a certain vintage—both inside Argentina and elsewhere—who mistrusted Bergoglio, saw him as a retrograde, divisive figure; and he knew that this toxicity could damage the Jesuits’ relationship with the new pope, giving journalists a major story. He needed to build bridges with Francis and heal the wounds, beginning with an effusively warm letter that he had made sure reached him on his first day. To Nicolás’s obvious delight, Francis’s immediate, personal response by phone, letter, and their meeting on March 17 showed that the pope wanted the same.

  Francis’s opportunity for reconciliation with the Society of Jesus took place on July 31, 2013, the Feast of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, when he celebrated Mass with two hundred Jesuits at their awesome baroque church in Rome, the Gesù. Nicolás spoke afterward of “the simple reality of a gathering of brothers, ‘friends in the Lord,’” which the event evoked. Francis lit a votive candle to Saint Ignatius, and stopped at the altar of the great missionary Saint Francis Xavier. He also visited the chapel of Our Lady of the Way, patroness of the Jesuits and the title of a fresco that was dear to Saint Ignatius and his early companions. But what really moved those present was his visit after Mass to the tomb of Father Arrupe, the Jesuit general who had died in 1991, ten years after being paralyzed by a stroke and losing his speech. John Paul II had seized the opportunity at that point to intervene in the Society of Jesus, and Francis was one of those who knew how much Arrupe had suffered in the years that followed. “It was an intense moment of deep prayer and gratitude,” Nicolás wrote to the Jesuits. “It was obvious that the pope would like to have remained longer.”3

  But what neither he nor most of the press reports mentioned was the penitential tone of Francis’s homily. He prayed that he and all of them would receive “the grace of shame” for their failures, adding that Jesuits are taught to look upon the crucifix and “feel that very human and very noble sentiment that is shame for not measuring up.” It was both a personal reflection and a universal message for all Jesuits; but maybe there were old men whom he particularly wanted it to reach. Some were in Argentina, others were in Rome, a few were elsewhere. Some were dead.

  In August, after the Vatican had emptied in advance of the tourist tsunami, Francis met the forty-seven-year-old editor of the prestigious Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica at the Casa Santa Marta for a six-hour interview over three meetings. Father Antonio Spadaro was taken up in the lift, and shown into Room 201, where there was a sitting room with desk and chairs adjacent to the pope’s little bedroom. Francis waved him in. “You have to be normal,” the pope told him, smiling. “Life is normal.”

  Spadaro had to set down his notebook to rely on the recorder. Switching seamlessly between Italian and Spanish, roaming over a huge range of topics, Francis was a volcano of ideas, concepts, and references, yet serene and rooted. Spadaro found almost everything about him to be a surprise: “his way of speaking, his availability, his openness, his immediacy, his depth, his politeness.” In one of the meetings, as they went over his answers, taking it in turns to read each paragraph out loud, Francis brought him an apricot juice and poured it for him. Spadaro never much liked apricot juice, “but from that moment it has been dear to me.”4

  “A Big Heart Open to God,” a twelve-thousand-word interview published simultaneously in fifteen Jesuit journals across the world in September 2013, was by far the most significant interview ever given by a pope. The only comparable precedent was Benedict XVI’s book-length interview, The Light of the World, which had briefly dominated the news when it came out in November 2012, when Benedict XVI had said the use of a condom can be “a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility” in the context of AIDS in Africa. But the rest—even his saying very clearly that he would resign if he felt physically unable to continue—had been ignored as predictable, because that is how the media saw him. The Jesuit interview with Francis, on the other hand, was a bombshell, in part because the media had decided that everything he did or said spelled change. The New York Times, which had an advance copy, honed in on Francis’s comment that the Church had become too “obsessed” with “too few things”—contraception, homosexuality, and abortion—in a story that went viral within minutes. “A lot of people felt the Church had been focusing on those things, but to hear a pope say it so bluntly and so candidly was a real shock to people,” says Father James Martin, SJ, of America magazine, which published the interview in the United States.

  The pope was recasting the Church as tender mother rather than harsh judge. In its most quoted part, Francis said he “saw clearly that the thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity.” He then used a startling image.

  I see the Church as a field-hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wound
s, heal the wounds.… And you have to start from the ground up.

  The Church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.… In pastoral ministry we must accompany people, and we must heal their wounds.

  How are we treating the people of God? I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The structural and organizational reforms are secondary—that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude. The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost.

  Francis’s metaphor of the Church as a battlefield hospital almost certainly came, consciously or not, from the lazaretto in Manzoni’s The Betrothed, the Italian epic his grandmother Rosa used to read to him as a child, which was on the pope’s desk when Spadaro interviewed him.

  The lazaretto was a hellish, makeshift place outside the walls of Milan where thousands of plague-stricken patients were brought to recover or mostly die, following a war-induced famine. Run by intrepid, self-denying friars who cared for throngs of sick in appalling circumstances, the lazaretto is used by Manzoni to great effect as a backdrop to the novel’s heartrending scenes: it is where the lovers are reunited, and where Father Cristoforo—a humble, tender, fearless son of Saint Francis—is found at the novel’s end, plague-weakened yet expending his remaining energies in the service of others. As a metaphor for the Church as channel of mercy, rather than regulator and rule maker, it was extraordinarily powerful.5