The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  One day Bergoglio appeared with four cows, four pigs, and six sheep. He had many more mouths to feed at a time of rising prices and squeezed donors, and had twenty-five empty fertile acres around the college. Trees were pulled up behind the college to make way for sheds and barns. The land was fenced off and dug for vegetables, and shelters were built to house livestock: eventually there were (according to one of the students whose job was to keep a tally) 120 pigs, 50 sheep, 180 rabbits, 20 cows, and a number of beehives.11 A Jesuit brother took a jalopy to the market each afternoon to collect products past their sell-by date. On their return, the students chose what was fit for humans and what went to the pigs.

  The farm, born of need, served a higher end. It brought students from middle-class backgrounds into the lives of workers. They had taken a vow of poverty, Bergoglio told them, and poor people worked: “it is the law of all, which makes us equal to others.” Only by sharing the lives of the poor, he said, could they discover “the true possibilities of justice in the world” as opposed to “an abstract justice which fails to give life.”12 In addition to six hours of classes a day and studies, the students had manual tasks most weekdays. Inside were the kitchen, the laundry, and the endless corridors and bathrooms that needed cleaning. Outside, they took on tasks under the supervision of the Jesuit brothers who ran the farm day to day. Students collected honey, milked cows, and cleaned out the pigsty, where they often met the rector in his plastic boots. “It was a mucky job and many objected,” recalls Guillermo Ortiz, who today runs the Spanish-language section of Vatican Radio. “But they couldn’t complain against Bergoglio because he would put his boots on like the rest of us to get down in with the hogs.”

  The hours spent on work during priestly formation were very important to their rector, recalls Gustavo Antico. “He went over each of the jobs he gave us and helped us with them, completely naturally.” Manual work helped students develop a fundamental Ignatian principle: “not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine.”13 It meant, Pope Francis explained years later to Father Spadaro, “being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others” and “being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the Kingdom of God.” It was about avoiding both pusillanimous obsession with detail and grandiose, unrealistic projects.14

  The farm was also key to the Jesuits’ local apostolate. It helped to feed not just the college but the poor of the surrounding barrios. As the 1980s economic downturn bit into local jobs and salaries, Jesuit students sent out by the rector on house visits reported many families eating barely once a day. “Bergoglio said, ‘We can’t sit around with our arms crossed while people are hungry and we lack nothing,’” recalls Alejandro Gauffin.15 They commandeered a huge cooking pot, gathered an army of volunteers, and lit a fire in a field under a tarp, which grew into the Casa del Niño, feeding four hundred children a day, and a similar-sized operation next door in San Alonso. Most of the food came from the college farm and was the same as that served in the Máximo’s dining room. “We never went hungry because there was a lot of it, but it was the same food, mostly a kind of guiso (‘stew’) that the simple people around us ate,” recalls Miguel Yáñez, who saw this as totally consistent with their option for the poor. But some of the professors grumbled: “they were used to another standard.”

  The farm was also an aid to contemplation. “He took me outside where the community kept sheep and pigs,” remembers María Soledad Albisú, later a nun, who had Bergoglio as her spiritual director at this time. “He told me this was a good place to pray and that God is to be found in the lowliest things.”16 Working with the animals and the land taught patience, tenacity, and humility, and opened up the many Scripture stories involving herds of hogs and flocks of sheep, while for the novices and scholastics—many of whom were graduates of prestigious Jesuit schools—being knee-deep in pig muck brought alive the startling meditation at the beginning of The Spiritual Exercises: “Thus for our part,” writes Saint Ignatius in the “Principle and Foundation,” “we should not want health more than sickness, wealth more than poverty, fame more than disgrace, a long life more than a short one … desiring and choosing only what conduces more to the end for which we are created.”

  The days of class and manual work were framed by prayer. Early mornings were cordoned off for individual contemplation, followed by Mass in the morning and community prayer in the evening. Twice a day, noon and evening, the bell summoned everyone to the chapel for a fifteen-minute silent examen, or review of the graces and sins of that day, seeing where God was present, giving thanks, and saying sorry. Like Saint Ignatius, Bergoglio set great store in the examen, describing it as “the way for us to seek the truth about ourselves before God.”17 The spirituality of the Exercises permeated the Jesuits’ life in other ways: in talks and retreats led by Bergoglio, Fiorito, and others, and in regular meetings with spiritual directors. “We were all formed in the conviction that there is great power in prayer and that as Jesuits we can help others through The Spiritual Exercises,” recalls Ortiz. “Every decision or choice had to be prayed over and discerned,” agrees another of the Jesuit scholastics at the time, Fernando Cervera. “He taught us that every decision had a consequence, which had to be weighed.”

  It was a missionary spirituality, in which the concrete needs of people often interrupted the schedule of prayer. When Rossi was on his annual eight-day retreat one year he was summoned by Bergoglio on the fourth day. “He said to me, ‘You’re very comfortable praying, eating and sleeping, but outside the college there is a woman with four children who is homeless, so leave the retreat and get her a roof over her head, and when they have a home, you can go back to the retreat.’” Rossi had no idea how to do that, but over the next few days he learned—with Bergoglio’s help. “He knew what doors to knock on,” says Rossi, who never forgot the lesson. “I went back once I had completed the ‘mission.’”

  * * *

  DOZENS of students fanned out over the barrios of the town on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, going from house to house in San Miguel, collecting children for Mass and giving catechesis in the fifteen chapels run by the Jesuits. Yáñez recalls a typical weekend:

  Saturday morning I was in charge of the bees, someone else had the vegetable garden—we each had our tasks: the sheep, the pigs, whatever. That was the morning. In the afternoon, we had lunch and then went to the barrios to gather up the children for the catechism. We usually had a lot of organizing to do—the summer camps, for example, or the Day of the Child celebrations when we got three thousand children together and each one got a toy, mostly new ones. There were a lot of us; we were very organized and highly motivated. For example, two of us during the year were assigned to talk to the toy manufacturers to ask for donations—they saw what we were doing and they wanted to help. For the summer camps, we took about five hundred young people—first the boys, later the girls—to the seaside at Mar del Plata, where the fishmongers gave us a whole load of food for free. Sunday mornings, we had Mass in the different communities, then catechesis, house visits and then back to the college for a longer siesta, sport, study—our time was free. And in the evening we got the guitars out, played cards, with Bergoglio there, just like anyone else. It was a very intense, very organized week. I had a great time.

  Patriarca San José embodied Bergoglio’s vision of a radical apostolate geared to the peripheries. Rather than put up a sign with Mass times outside the church and wait for people to come, he sectioned the area off into zones, assigned dozens of Jesuit students to each one, and sent them out through dusty or muddy streets to visit households (“no corner was left untouched,” says Rossi). “It was a Copernican revolution,” recalls another student, Renzo De Luca. “We had to go and really knock on the doors and say: ‘Look, here’s the Catechism. Send us your young people.’ You had to have a lot of nerve to invite them to church while it was obvious that they had the
bare minimum to eat. Yet people responded to our call.”18

  Bergoglio told the students to “get into the barrio and walk it,” starting with the young people—the others, he said, would follow in their own time—and to spend time with the elderly and sick, paying close attention to the needs of the poorest, whether for food, medicine, or blankets. The Jesuits still recall their rector’s many exhortations. “Our vocation asks that we be pastors of large flocks, not strokers of a few preferred sheep,” was one. “It is better that on the Lord’s Day he should find us with war wounds from having gone to the frontier than pudgy and pale from having stayed behind” was another.19 On Sundays, Bergoglio waited outside the church, greeting people and hearing their confessions before Mass. His homilies were simple, direct, funny, and engaging: penetrating, never too long, based on three points, and punctuated by back-and-forth banter with the congregation.

  Bergoglio built institutions to improve the lives of the people in the barrios of Manuelita, Constantini, and Don Alfonso. Through donations, the Casa del Niño came to occupy a building capable of feeding two hundred children at a time in the dining room and fifty at a time in the crèche, and gave food, medical care, and schooling for more than four hundred children daily. Other buildings went up: there was a night school for adults who had not finished high school, a technical school to learn trades, and scholarships to enable children to go on to college. “We really made a difference,” recalls Yáñez. “Today those kids are teachers and doctors, or they’ve got degrees and have really got on in society.” The summer camps for children near Mar del Plata were paid for with donations that the Jesuits gathered during the year. “To take a child who has never seen the ocean and who has never had a vacation was a way of giving them dignity, of treating them as a human person,” recalls Fernando Albistur. “Even today there are those young people who are now married who have children who come up to you in the parish and say, ‘Thanks to you I saw the ocean, I saw the beach, I had a vacation once in my life.’”20

  Bergoglio told the students how, in meeting the concrete needs of the poor, Christ was teaching them something important. He had learned this, he said, from a woman called Marta, who had a large, penniless family and was the kind who survived by asking for things; it was easy to tire of her requests. One Sunday evening, when she approached Bergoglio and said her family was hungry and cold, he told her to come back the next day to see what he could do. “But Father,” said Marta, “we’re hungry now, and we’re cold now.” He went to his room, took a blanket off his bed, and found her food. The point Bergoglio had learned was that Christ spoke through the poor, and meeting their needs was not something that could be deferred for one’s own convenience.

  When the students returned to the college, Bergoglio would be waiting for them, tapping his plastic watch if they were late—he valued punctuality—and checking the soles of their shoes for evidence of barrio dust. The students reported on people’s needs and he would organize help. “He used us as bridges,” recalls Rossi. “Mostly when we went back with what they needed they had no idea he was behind it.”

  During the week, in pastoral theology classes and meditations, Bergoglio asked the students to reflect on their experiences. He insisted that they were not going to teach, but to be taught by, the pueblo fiel; the Jesuits’ capacity for inserting themselves into the culture they were sent to evangelize was “the decisive test” of their faith. “How difficult it is, and how lonely it can feel, when I realize I must learn from the people their language, their terms of reference, their values, not as a way of polishing my theology but as a new way of being that transforms me,” he told them.21 A major part of that learning was to respect and understand popular forms of piety: asking the saints to intercede, praying the Rosary, going on pilgrimages to shrines, reverently touching statues. Bergoglio encouraged his students to do the same. His idea, recalls Rossi, was that “here we have poor people, and because they are poor they rely on faith, and because they have faith, they are our center. Their faith, their culture, their way of expressing their faith—that’s what we must value.”

  In October and November 1985, two more chapels were inaugurated in Patriarca San José parish: one in San Alonso, the other not far from the college. A journalist sent to cover the second—a vast church in the colonial style named for the Jesuit Paraguay martyrs—described processions of joyful people carrying flower-decked wooden images and flags, listening to speeches under umbrellas. She was astonished by the transformation of a neighborhood that had been notorious for its poverty, street gangs, and neglect. Newcomers were no longer pelted with stones; children were nourished and schooled; the elderly and the sick were cared for; the parish’s chapels overflowed; all was clean and tidy. Around the church, “instead of ditches full of garbage, you saw flowers and cut lawns, painted doors, and baskets to hold rubbish bags; not a single defaced wall, or signs of aggression—just a fraternal human family, proud of itself, and celebrating.” She was struck by the “intelligent and serious” Jesuit students she met who had catalyzed this makeover, so different from the ones she had known a decade earlier who had idolized Che Guevara and scorned the Church’s past as bourgeois. The article was headlined: “The Miracles of Father Bergoglio.”22

  In a lengthy article in 1980, referring for the first time in his writings to GC32’s Decree Four, Bergoglio laid out the “criteria of apostolic action” for Jesuits promoting justice. The action, he wrote, must be rooted in the concrete demands, as well as the culture and values, of the pueblo fiel, and so avoid the approach of the enlightened classes (whether liberal, left-wing, or conservative) who were “for the people, but never with the people.” Their action must fit within the history and spirituality of the Jesuits. And it must start from a direct contact with the poor, seeing concrete acts of mercy as acts of justice, and then reflecting on that encounter.

  The new awareness that resulted, says Bergoglio, would eventually bring about structural change, avoiding the sterile “we-should-ism”23 of those who pursue justice in the abstract. The specific Jesuit task, he said, was to train and encourage lay people through The Spiritual Exercises, and to create institutions of belonging. A sign of the vitality of a project was its capacity for bringing together lay people committed to it. Above all, said Bergoglio, Jesuits must bring about change through inculturation. That meant never acting on the poor, as ideological elites did: in converting hearts and structures, they must not commit the injustice of betraying the culture of the people, nor their legitimate values and aspirations.

  The example of Our Lord saves us: He became incarnate in the people. Peoples have habits, values, cultural references which are not easily classified.… To adjust our ears to hear their desire for change requires humility, affection, the habit of inculturation, and, above all, a rejection of any absurd pretension to be become the “voice” of the people, imagining perhaps that they don’t have one.… The first question any pastor seeking to reform structures must ask is: What is my people asking of me? What is it calling on me to do? And then he must dare to listen.24

  * * *

  BERGOGLIO’S ideas about inculturation echoed an emerging theme within Latin-American theology. He had been part of the preparations for the third continent-wide Latin-American bishops’ council (CELAM) meeting at Puebla in 1979, whose concluding document had affirmed the option for the poor while definitively rejecting the Marxist-influenced version of liberation theology. One account of Puebla, which passed into media reports at the time, saw only an attempt by conservatives led from Rome (Pope John Paul II and his ally, the secretary-general of CELAM, Colombian archbishop Alfonso López Trujillo) to clamp down on liberation theology, resisted by the Latin-American bishops defending Medellín. But that missed the other, more important story of Puebla: the recognition that an option for the poor meant an option for their distinctive popular culture and religiosity.

  Bergoglio saw Puebla as a huge breakthrough. It now became possible to look at Latin America throug
h its own cultural tradition, preserved above all in the spiritual and religious resources of the ordinary faithful people rather than through the lens of imported or elite ideologies. If those resources were liberated, Bergoglio believed, Latin America could free itself from those ideologies as well as from the economic imperialism of money, both of which held Latin America back by destroying “the Christian originality of the encounter with Jesus Christ which so many of our people still live out in their simplicity of faith.”25

  The story of Puebla is partly, then, the story of the rise of the Argentine school of post-Medellín theology. The document’s rich passages on the evangelization of culture and popular religiosity were drafted by the pioneer of the teología del pueblo, Father Lucio Gera, as well as a Chilean theologian in the same line of thinking, Father Joaquín Allende. At Puebla they took Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi—which had itself been influenced by Gera—and applied it to Latin America, citing it ninety-seven times in the concluding document.

  Another key contributor to the redaction of the Puebla document was Alberto Methol Ferré, a Uruguayan thinker on the CELAM staff who would have a major influence on Bergoglio’s ideas about the historic destiny of the Latin-American Church. Bergoglio first met Methol Ferré in 1978 at a lunch with the USAL rector, Francisco Piñón. These River Plate theologians and intellectuals—including the current head of the Vatican’s Commission for Latin America, the Uruguayan Guzmán Carriquiry—formed a short-lived group called Juan Diego de Guadalupe, which met regularly in Argentina in the run-up to Puebla. Bergoglio, recalls Carriquiry, “came and went” from these meetings but followed them closely.