The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Viewed from the CIAS, conversely, Bergoglio’s Máximo looked like an old-fashioned boot camp for parish priests, with a whiff of anti-intellectualism about it, like one of Peronism’s plebeian slogans, “Sandals yes, books no.” It is striking how often the criticism of Bergoglio was expressed in enlightenment terms of progress-regress. Consider, for example, a former director of the CIAS in Buenos Aires, later a provincial, describing with horror the Máximo under Bergoglio:

  It was a very closed regime. You can’t believe it, he introduced Argentine Jesuits to popular religiosity. He took them all to the barrios, and turned the Máximo into a parish, even though we already had a parish nearby. As rector of the Máximo he was an academic but he managed also to be a parish priest. He created a whole load of chapels. And he encouraged a style of popular religiosity among the students, who would go to the chapel at night and touch images! This was something the poor did, the people of the pueblo, something that the Society of Jesus worldwide just doesn’t do. I mean, touching images … what is that? And the older ones, praying the Rosary together in the gardens. Look, I’m not against that, but I’m not in favor either. It’s just not typical of us. But it became normal at that time.

  An American Jesuit based in Peru, whose view of Bergoglio was informed by leftist CIAS Jesuits such as Juan Luis Moyano (who also spent many years in Peru) and Oswaldo Yorio, claimed in a history of the Society of Jesus in Latin America that Bergoglio had taken the Argentine province “back to pre–Vatican II values and lifestyles.” As a result, wrote Father Jeffrey Klaiber, SJ, “the Argentine province did not march in unison with the rest of the Society of Jesus in Latin America.” However, “not all Jesuits shared Bergoglio’s conservative views,” he went on, citing the CIAS. The remark is revealing of the reputation that in some Jesuit circles remained fixed long after Bergoglio had become a bishop: both province and provincial as irredeemably conservative, with only the CIAS holding out bravely on behalf of the forces of enlightenment and progress.35

  The Argentine province was out of step with the Jesuits, both worldwide and in Latin America. “We were very aware that elsewhere Jesuits lived differently, were more politicized,” recalls Yáñez. Bergoglio sent Jesuits on mission abroad—among them, for example, was Renzo De Luca, whom Bergoglio dispatched to Japan and visited in Nagasaki—but those in formation were kept in San Miguel, and the best minds stayed to teach there rather than abroad. The Argentine juniors, for example, did not take part in the meeting of the Southern Cone Jesuits organized by Father Fernando Montes, the Chilean provincial who had studied with Bergoglio at the Máximo in the 1960s. Montes was typical of how other Latin-American provincials viewed the Argentine Jesuits at the time. As rector, says Montes, “Bergoglio privileged popular religiosity and the work of the young people in popular parishes while neglecting the research centers, in particular the CIAS.… It was a kind of popular religiosity very close to the people, to the poor, very Latin American, but more Peronist than modern.”

  Whether or not this was an express aim, the effect of the Bergoglio-Swinnen provincialate was to insulate the Argentines from the turbulence of GC32’s Decree Four, which in Latin America was used to justify Jesuits backing socialist movements and speaking out against dictatorships that defended the interests of the wealthy. In Chile, for example, where Salvador Allende’s socialists had been ousted by a conservative military dictatorship, the Jesuits followed the example of the Chilean bishops’ Vicariate of Solidarity in opposing the regime of General Augusto Pinochet in favor of human rights—a stance they were able to take, in part, because of the Church’s constitutional separation from the state. In Central America, where military regimes defended landowner interests, Decree Four meant Jesuits sympathizing with revolutionary struggles seeking to overthrow them—and in some cases losing their lives in the process. But Argentina in the 1970s was not El Salvador or Chile; only a dogmatic observer could claim that the “people” were represented by the guerrillas, or that the military dictatorship, despite the horrors it committed, did not have, at first, widespread popular support.

  Yet in the mid-1980s, following the collapse of the military junta and the Sábato commission revelations, it was all too easy to forget that context. The simple view, promoted by human-rights groups in Argentina and the international media, was that the military junta had killed thousands of innocent people and that the Church had stood by and let it happen or encouraged it. If there was a strong sense of shame among Catholics about the Argentine Church’s role in the dictatorship, for Jesuits in Latin America and elsewhere, who saw themselves as part of a prophetic social justice/human-rights vanguard, the idea that their Argentine confrères were “complicit” in a genocidal regime was mortifying. This is why the specific accusations against Bergoglio in Mignone’s book Church and Dictatorship were so damaging. “Mignone’s claims about Bergoglio had a great impact,” agrees Pérez del Viso.

  The book was devastating because Mignone’s personal credibility and integrity were beyond question: he was a deeply Catholic human-rights activist with strong international ties, especially in the United States, whose daughter had been disappeared while working as a catechist in a slum. Yet Mignone’s J’accuse, aimed at the Church in general and certain individuals in particular, for failing to speak out against the atrocities, assumes that had the Church done so, the tortures and the abductions could have been prevented. It was a simple, appealing narrative that spoke to the moment. But the book itself was undermined by its ferocity and crudeness. Mignone’s stance was that of courtroom lawyer rather than historian, mixing half-truths with facts, and simplistically splitting the world into complicit or heroic. As a result, the book played well to the gallery but failed to provoke the wider debate about the links between Church and state that Mignone wanted to see.36

  It was nonetheless effective in increasing the opprobrium directed at the time at the Argentine Church in general and Bergoglio in particular, and helps explain why the CIAS critiques were accepted so uncritically in Rome and elsewhere in Latin America. Argentina’s “difference” was a problem to the Jesuits, and especially to the general’s regional assistant for Latin America, a Spanish-born Jesuit who had been Peruvian provincial in the 1970s, Father José Luis Fernández Castañeda. The prejudices of Kolvenbach’s advisers were obvious when they visited the Máximo during the 1980s. “There was a real difficulty outside in understanding the Argentine model,” recalls Velasco. “They said, ‘Those guys are right-wing,’ so they were expecting us all in soutanes and saying Mass in Latin, which we weren’t.”

  Rome’s view of the Bergoglio-Swinnen regime had been shaped by constant complaints by the CIAS Jesuits—Father Fabbri, for example, wrote often to Rome—that the Máximo regime was “un-Jesuit” and that Swinnen was Bergoglio’s puppet. Swinnen in March 1983 tried to move the CIAS community to the Jesuits’ house in the center, close to Congress, so that it could have a role lobbying politicians, but the CIAS Jesuits said they had not been consulted and complained to Rome. The newly elected general, acting on the advice of Fernández Castañeda, backed the CIAS against the provincial. It was a sign of what was to come next.

  As Swinnen’s period as provincial drew to a close, Kolvenbach decided to intervene in the Argentine province to impose a new direction. He sent out an adviser to oversee the consultation process that produced a terna, or three-name list of potential provincials. When the consultors’ terna reached Kolvenbach, he rejected all three names. He then summoned Swinnen and Father Víctor Zorzín, the Jesuit who at that point headed the Conference of Argentine Religious, to Rome. Zorzín’s name was not on the terna but had been suggested to Rome by the CIAS Jesuits. When they reached the Borgo Santo Spirito, Kolvenbach interviewed them separately. He told Swinnen that Zorzín would be provincial. “There was no other issue discussed on our visit,” Swinnen recalls.

  Zorzín, who had been socius, or assistant, to the provincial before Bergoglio, Father O’Farrell, now named as his socius Father Ignacio
García-Mata, CIAS director until stood down by Swinnen, and one of Bergoglio’s fiercest critics. Rome was imposing the status quo ante.

  “It may sound crazy,” says Father Rafael Velasco, until recently rector of the Jesuit-run Catholic University in Córdoba, “but you can read this as Peronist versus anti-Peronist: the gorilas [fanatical anti-Peronists] were in the CIAS, and the pueblo was with Bergoglio and the others.” The parallel is intriguing. When Perón was ousted in 1955, a progressive elite—a mixture of liberals, conservatives, and the left—overturned in the name of progress and modernity a charismatic leader considered a demagogue. There is even a parallel between what followed under Zorzín and the gorila military governments of the late 1950s: a cleansing, in which everything associated with the deposed regime was reversed. “It was an emphatic shift,” recalls Nardín, “which out of immaturity sought to destroy what came before in order to assert itself.” Another Jesuit contemporary describes how “the new line was to do everything now contrary to what you did before” and describes how the pastoral mission to the barrios around the Máximo was gradually dismantled.

  The messages we received from above went wholly against what we had been living and doing in the Máximo: there was to be no more regular discipline, no more manual work.… This disorder soon translated into the parish: they no longer went to look for the children, the apostolic horizon was lost, and some Jesuits in formation began going out with catechists. Little by little the apostolate was abandoned, and in just a few years the churches were reduced to the bare minimum, among other things because there was a policy of “cleansing” the bergogliano Jesuits. And once there were no more of them, they sacked the lay people who remained faithful to Bergoglio’s project—that was the most painful and scandalous thing of all.

  That sad scene suggested another, even more uncomfortable parallel, from two centuries earlier. At that time, too, there was a thriving inculturated Jesuit apostolate among the poor in Argentina that increased the dignity of human lives and produced great fruits, but whose independence was resented, and that was eventually suppressed on the orders of the general in far-off Rome.

  * * *

  IN order to create space for the new provincial regime, Bergoglio agreed with Zorzín in May 1986 to take a sabbatical in Germany to explore a doctorate on Romano Guardini. He first spent two months learning German in the Göethe Institut in the Rhine town of Boppard, lodging with an elderly couple. Then he went on to the Jesuit Faculty of Theology near Frankfurt, Sankt Georgen, which boasted an excellent Guardini collection. With the professors there, he planned to work up a thesis topic.

  Guardini (1885–1968) was one of the twentieth century’s most creative Catholic minds, a German priest-philosopher influential on the Second Vatican Council whose deep thinking about modernity had fascinated Bergoglio ever since he read The Lord as a novice. Guardini was a huge figure in the 1950s who influenced American Catholic luminaries such as the monk poet Thomas Merton and the novelist Flannery O’Connor, as well as the great German-speaking theologians of the twentieth century such as Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, and Walter Kasper. He was also widely quoted and admired by Pope Paul VI (who tried to make him a cardinal) and Pope John Paul II, and especially by Guardini’s compatriot Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, who knew him personally. Guardini saw the drama of the modern age as a pendulum swing between heteronomy (placing authority outside oneself, in another human being or institution) and autonomy (placing authority in oneself), and proposed that true happiness and freedom were only possible in theonomy—recognizing God as the authority for human life, setting each human being free to become a whole person in “I-thou” relationships.

  There were affinities: Guardini was the son of Italian émigrés who studied chemistry, and who remained faithful—despite intense pressures, not least from Nazis—to his “inner authority.” Bergoglio’s specific interest was in Guardini’s early (1925) text Der Gegensatz (“Contrast”), a critique of Marxist and Hegelian dialectics that Bergoglio believed could be useful for conceptualizing the dynamics of disagreement. Guardini’s discussion drew on the work of a nineteenth-century Tübingen theologian, Johann Adam Möhler, who argued that in the Church contrasting points of view (Gegensätze) are fruitful and creative, but can become contradictions (Widerspruch) when they fall out of the unity of the whole and develop in opposition to the body. This was precisely the distinction drawn on by Yves Congar in his discussion of true and false reform in the Church that had so influenced Bergoglio. His desire to explore Guardini’s Gegensatz, in other words, was of a piece with his core underlying interest in politics and institutional reform, and helped to shape what as cardinal he would promote as a “culture of encounter.”

  For three months Bergoglio lived in the Jesuit community at the university of Sankt Georgen, reading deeply and widely in a way he had been unable to do since his student years. He applied himself assiduously during the next four months in intense study that later bore fruit. But he was miserable. The prospect of this man of action embarking on doctoral research at the age of fifty was anyway improbable, but, more to the point, Bergoglio was a deeply rooted and connected person who needed community. Lonely and homesick, he would stroll in the evenings to the cemetery, from where he could see the Frankfurt airport, and wave to the planes bound for Argentina. He was filled with nostos algos, the yearning for his place—not just his geographical home of Buenos Aires, but his place as a Jesuit leader and reformer that had been his life for the previous fifteen years. His displacement ran deep, and by December he would be home again.37

  A profound experience in prayer had encouraged him to return. He had made a pilgrimage to the Bavarian city of Augsburg where, in the Jesuit church of Sankt Peter am Perlach, he contemplated a Baroque-era painting from the early 1700s known as Maria Knotenlöserin, “Mary, Untier of Knots,” which was the object of a local devotion. The painting’s story goes back to a feuding married couple who had been on the verge of a bitter separation. The husband, Wolfgang Langenmantel, had sought help from a local Jesuit priest, Father Jakob Rem, who prayed to the Virgin Mary “to untie all the knots” in the Langenmantel home. Peace was restored and the marriage was saved; and to give thanks for the miracle their grandson commissioned the painting and donated it to the church.

  At first glance, it is nothing out of the ordinary: the painting shows the Virgin, surrounded by angels and protected by the light of the Holy Spirit, standing on a serpent with the child Jesus in her arms. But the middle of the painting is striking: an angel to Mary’s left is passing her a silk thread full of knots that she unties, handing on the unknotted thread to an angel on her right.

  Father Rem’s prayer to the Virgin had been inspired by an ancient formula of Saint Irenaeus: The knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. Obedience was precisely Bergoglio’s knot. It is the key vow for Jesuits, and one he strongly believed in; it was what made mission and unity possible. Yet what he had been given was not a mission, but a means of getting him out of Argentina because he was an obstacle. What obedience did he owe?

  Obedience comes from the Latin obaudire, to “hear” or “listen to.” The vow is meant above all to free the heart from the ego in order to listen to God, and to submit freely to His will: the Virgin is the perfect model of such obedience. What was God’s will, now, for Bergoglio, in the middle of his life? He knew it wasn’t to sit in a library for three years, tweaking footnotes. He was a leader, a reformer, a pastor, a missionary. But how could he obey that call and his superiors at the same time? In Guardini’s terms it was a conflict between heteronomy—placing ultimate authority in the Society of Jesus—and theonomy: looking to God as his Superior. The challenge, as ever, was to discern what was of his ego—what in 1969 he had named as that broken, stingy part of him, that sought to control and to cling—and what was of God, in whose obedience lay his true freedom.

  During those hours in the bare stone church chilled by the coming Bavarian wint
er, he passed in prayer his knot to the angel, who passed it to the Virgin, who gently untied it and passed it to the other angel, who took it to Buenos Aires, where Bergoglio followed.

  It would cause tension, but he had to return. Beyond the call to be a Jesuit was the deeper call, that primordial obedience. God, as ever, was running before him, primereando, like blossoms on almond trees.

  He took back with him a load of Maria Knotenlöserin prayer cards. In the 1990s, after a local copy of the painting—known in Spanish as María Desatanudos—was hung in a church in Buenos Aires, it took off in an extraordinary way, leading Bergoglio later to say he had never felt so much in the hands of God.

  * * *

  “HOWEVER interested he was [in Guardini], deep down he knew he had to serve in other ways,” says Father Gómez, who was in the Colegio del Salvador when Bergoglio suddenly returned in December, his arms full of photocopies. The socius, Ignacio García-Mata, had earlier received a call to say he was coming back; surprised, the provincial, Víctor Zorzín, assigned Bergoglio a room in the Colegio del Salvador, the prestigious school that occupied a whole block of Callao Street in the noisy heart of Buenos Aires where he had taught for a year after his two years at La Inmaculada. Bergoglio would teach some classes while pursuing his doctoral research. Guillermo Ortiz, who as a novice had tried to impress Bergoglio by his children-gathering abilities, was at this time doing his own regency at the Salvador and found himself on the same floor and sharing a bathroom with his former rector. “He was cheerful or at least appeared to be,” he recalls. “But I felt they were punishing him for something.”