The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Zorzín had moved the Jesuit curia from the Máximo back into the city. López Rosas, one of the Fiorito group who had been novice master under Swinnen and who was now rector of the Máximo, invited Bergoglio to give classes on pastoral theology on Mondays. Bergoglio would stay over the previous Sunday night, dining with the students, for whom he was an awesome figure. Rafael Velasco, one of the students at the time, recalls their “huge admiration” for Bergoglio. His two book collections of articles were considered essential reading for the students, and they looked forward to these weekly visits.

  This was Bergoglio’s most fertile intellectual period. As rector, he had published an article a year in the journal he had helped to found in 1968, the Boletín de Espiritualidad; but after stepping down in 1986, he published an average of three articles a year over the following three years. He also published sporadically in Stromata, the Jesuits’ theology journal. Meditaciones para Religiosos (1982), his first collection of articles and talks, was followed by Reflexiones Espirituales (1987) and Reflexiones en Esperanza (1992).

  No one had relationships, within the province, as deep and wide as Bergoglio’s, and no one had anything close to his authority. His third collection of addresses and articles, Reflexiones en Esperanza, which came out in 1992, shows that even in the late 1980s Bergoglio was called on to make presentations at major provincial events: he gave, for example, a long and moving speech on the occasion of the canonization of the Jesuit martyrs of Paraguay in May 1988.38 Even officially demoted from all positions of authority in the province, he remained for most Jesuits their guiding light.

  * * *

  ON April 11, 1987, at the instigation of the Argentine curial cardinal, Eduardo Pironio, the first World Youth Day outside of Rome was held in Buenos Aires. Pope John Paul II, donning a poncho, was greeted by uproarious crowds, preaching reconciliation amid the storm of mutual recriminations and accusations over the dirty war. Bergoglio met the pope for the first time at a meeting organized by the nuncio with Christians of different denominations. “I had a brief exchange with the Holy Father,” he recalled in 2005, “and I was impressed especially by his gaze, which was that of a good man.”39 Bergoglio was one of hundreds of priests who heard confessions and distributed Communion on the Avenida de Mayo: the city had seen nothing like it since the iconic days of the International Eucharistic Congress that Bergoglio had heard so much about from his grandmother Rosa.

  But Argentina was more fractious and restless in the late 1980s than in 1934. Young army officers staged a series of rebellions that Easter in protest at the treatment of the armed forces by the courts, while former ERP militants attacked a military barracks eighteen months later, leaving dozens dead. It was obvious by the elections of May 1989 that President Alfonsín was fast losing grip: hyperinflation wiped out salaries and mobs sacked supermarkets. The Peronist candidate that year, Carlos Menem, was a son of Syrian immigrants from the impoverished province of La Rioja. He sported sideburns and paraded on horseback with a vague promise to make things better. Following Menem’s victory in the May 1989 elections, Alfonsín ignominiously departed, months ahead of schedule, in the hope of averting further chaos.

  On the eve of those elections Bergoglio gave the inaugural lecture of the 1989 academic year at the Universidad del Salvador on the need for a new “anthropology of politics.” It was the skeleton of what would have been, had he written it, his doctoral thesis: a sophisticated, if at times to a layman impenetrable, exploration of Guardini and Saint Ignatius. It is possible to find in this lecture the basis of his future addresses as cardinal at the Te Deum services in the cathedral on Argentina’s national day, May 25, which he would use to help build a new civic culture.

  The lecture argued that Argentina was highly politicized yet lacked a narrative of what politics was for—to improve lives and harmonize different visions and interests, using power as service for the building-up of the common good while avoiding the temptations of utopianism and nostalgia. His deep reading of Guardini—especially Contrast and The End of the Modern World—had clearly paid off: the lecture sought to supplant a Hegelian dialectic of clashing opposites by what he calls “a mutual interaction of realities.” It ended with a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “Whoever does not believe in God will not believe in the people of God.… Only the people and their future spiritual power will convert our atheists, who have severed themselves from their own land.”40

  By the time of his lecture tensions were building over Kolvenbach’s attempt to detach the province from Bergoglio. The problem was twofold: first, Bergoglio remained the reference point for the entire younger generation of Jesuits; second, the way that the new direction was being imposed caused resistance among the younger Jesuits, which in turn only made them more devoted to Bergoglio—rather in the way that gorilismo, or fanatical anti-Peronism, embedded support for Perón in the 1950s. The province’s problem, says Rafael Velasco, was that “almost everything turned on its identification or not with a particular model, which was in turn identified with a person, who was Bergoglio.” Like Argentina’s politics, reduced to the Peronist/anti-Peronist dichotomy, the Argentine Jesuit province was paralyzed by a dispute between two visions, one of which was embodied in a person.

  The challenge the provincial, Zorzín, faced in implementing Kolvenbach’s unpopular policies became clear soon after Bergoglio returned from Germany.

  A meeting of Jesuit procurators in Rome was due to take place in September 1987. A procurator is elected by his own province with a specific mandate: to report on the state of the province, to reflect with the other procurators on the state of the Society, and to vote on whether to call a general congregation. The election of a procurator does not involve a Jesuit standing, or even offering himself as a candidate (which would be seen as quite inappropriate): he is simply elected by the provincial congregation, whose members are themselves elected by a vote of at least two-thirds of the province.

  To the fury of the provincial leadership, Bergoglio was elected procurator in March. The CIAS Jesuits suspected he had returned early from Germany precisely to make himself available for the ballot. Whether or not that is true, the vote showed that Bergoglio continued to enjoy the popularity and esteem of the province, while signalling the unpopularity of Kolvenbach’s intervention and the policies of the new provincial. Bergoglio’s election as procurator “was a clear protest against Rome,” says Velasco. “It was saying to them: ‘you put who you want, we will continue do our own thing.’ It was a very clear signal.” As procurator, Bergoglio was tasked with writing a report on the state of the province to the procurators’ congregation, which gave him a platform from which to critique his opponents. He would also have had, once in Rome, time with the general to discuss the report. It was the best opportunity Argentine Jesuits had to try to change the direction of their province. But Rome wasn’t going to be deflected.

  * * *

  THE sudden adoption of foreign formation models—especially the texts and approaches of the Spanish Jesuits—was causing unhappiness. “We got given a lot of the language of indigenismo when we hardly have any native peoples,” recalls Nardín. “That wasn’t our drama. Ours was the inclusion of immigrants from the interior.” Indigenismo was the next wave of liberation theology applied now to native peoples. Bergoglio criticized it in his 1988 talk on the Jesuit martyrs, when he referred to “indigenista Marxism that denies the importance of faith in the transcendent sense of the culture of a people, while reducing culture to a battlefield.”41

  The Spanish approach now being imposed at the Máximo had no time for the teología del pueblo or popular religiosity. It was foreign, rationalist, and sub-Marxist—the opposite of what Puebla represented. The fact that these materials patronized and misunderstood Argentina served only to illustrate, for the younger Jesuits, Bergoglio’s warnings about detached ideologies.

  Despite the new orthodoxy there was also an incoherence, a lack of purpose and clarity, in the provin
cial government. Whatever Bergoglio’s limitations, the Argentine Jesuits say that he at least had a vision around which they could rally, whereas what followed was incoherent, uninspiring, and poorly implemented. “We had a province myth, then we didn’t,” recalls Velasco. “We had a project, then suddenly we didn’t.… We needed an identity, a project, to know our own horizons.”

  In September 1988, the general, Father Kolvenbach, visited Argentina for a week’s meeting with the Latin-American provincials in San Miguel at the end of which he celebrated his fortieth year as a Jesuit by lunching with the CIAS community. That evening he concelebrated Mass at the church of El Salvador, next to the college, before returning to Rome the following morning. Remarkably, he never even met with Bergoglio. Whatever took place between Kolvenbach and Bergoglio at the procurators’ meeting the year before, it had not brought them closer.

  Over the next two years, 1988 to 1990, the province increasingly polarized and turned in on itself. As tensions mounted over the new formation and the abandonment of the apostolate, a frustrated provincial leadership began to see discontent as dissent. Bergoglio was increasingly blamed for stirring this up, although he did and said little. His supporters say the provincial was seeking to make him the scapegoat for the widespread unhappiness in the province. This reading appears to be supported by the CIAS Jesuit who kept the minutes of the consultors’ meetings at the time, who recalls that “in every one of them we spoke about him. It was a constant worry, what we were going to do with this man.” It was a painful period, involving the kind of breakdown that can occur in families, even religious ones. Father Juan Ochagavía, a Chilean Jesuit who was one of Kolvenbach’s key advisers, recalls that “there were many wounded sensibilities” in the Argentine province at the time.

  Eventually, the expulsion of Bergoglio and those seen as his devoted followers came to be seen as the solution to the tensions. In April 1990 the rector of the Máximo, Bergoglio’s former collaborator Ernesto López Rosas—presumably acting on orders—suddenly turned on him, removing him from his teaching post. Students in Bergoglio’s popular pastoral theology class were told he would no longer be teaching it. He was asked to surrender his Máximo room key. Thereafter he would never return to the college which had been his home for most of the previous twenty-five years.

  Those identified as his close followers were now sent abroad. “All the Jesuits who in their moment had strong ties to Bergoglio, who tended to be very able people, were sent to Europe to do, if possible, a degree or doctorate,” recalls Zorzín’s associate, García-Mata. Among the “exiles” was Miguel Yáñez, who these days teaches moral theology at the Gregorian University in Rome and sits on Pope Francis’s commission on sex abuse.

  Bergoglio himself was sent to the Jesuit residence in central Córdoba. His supporters were told not to contact him. By ostracizing him, the province’s leaders hoped to unite the province, but that is not what happened. In the 1990s, vocations plummeted again to single figures and departures in some years returned to double figures, as in the crisis days of the early 1970s.42 The divisions within the province deepened during García-Mata’s period as provincial (1991–1997), for which Bergoglio, who was made a bishop in 1992, could no longer be blamed. After García-Mata’s term ended a provincial was brought in from Colombia in a bid to heal the divisions. When Father Alvaro Restrepo, SJ, was asked many years later what had gone wrong, he said with great diplomacy but accurately that “it was a problem of leadership. Argentines are very affectionate, they like to offer themselves, they need a leader. And at a certain point there were different leaderships.”43

  * * *

  BERGOGLIO spent two years—June 1990 to May 1992—in Room 5 of the Jesuit Residencia Mayor in the heart of the pretty colonial mountain town of Córdoba. There he said Mass, heard confessions, gave retreats, read books, and penned letters—some of which, like those he wrote to the Salesian Don Cayetano Bruno, were long reminiscences—as well as the many meditations that in 1992 were published as Reflexiones en Esperanza (“Reflections in Hope”). His main day-to-day role was as confessor. He spent many hours listening to the pain and shame of students and professors of the university, as well as the people from the barrios who came to the city center because their own priests were too busy saying Mass on Sundays to hear their confessions. Bergoglio had never before given so much time to being a channel of forgiveness and mercy. It softened him, kept him close to the pueblo fiel, and put his own troubles in perspective.

  Yet this was a sharp time, a purgative time, he later told Father Spadaro, “of great interior crisis.” He had entered a midlife suffering, a stripping-back to the bare branches of his being. As Carl Jung might put it, his ego was being fried, and he had to wait until it was over. Saint Ignatius describes this as desolation: the sadness of abandonment, when the presence of God is barely palpable, when one finds oneself thoroughly listless, lukewarm, sad, and as though cut off from one’s Creator and Lord, as he puts it in The Spiritual Exercises. For a time Bergoglio slept badly and ate little; he grew agitated and fragile, and spent hours staring out of a window. “We thought he was sick,” recalls Father Carlos Carranza. Concerned, the doctor who tended to the Jesuits brought him a medal of the Virgin of Guadalupe from the basilica in Mexico City. “When I gave it to him,” recalled Selva Tissera, “Bergoglio got so emotional his eyes filled with tears and he put it round his neck.”44

  In powerful people—leaders like Bergoglio—desolation teaches what the Exercises describes as “true knowledge and understanding” that of our own power we can do nothing “but that all this is a gift and grace from God our Lord.” Desolation is visited on us, said Saint Ignatius, “so we are not to build our nest where we do not belong.”45 Bergoglio knew these rules better than anyone, but knowledge of the spiritual purpose of what he was enduring was of no help at all in escaping its pain. He could only watch the province he loved be dismantled and implode into factionalism, and the next generation of its leaders—men he had nurtured and guided—scattered to the four winds. It was an experience of powerlessness that brought him like nothing before in his life into the perspective of the poorest.

  Like them, he could only be patient, trust in the Lord, and take each day as it came, allowing himself to be molded, trusting that it would one day bear fruit. In 2003, he told a politician who needed to stand down and was terrified of the decision: “Manuel, you’ve got to live your own exile. I did. And afterward you’ll be back. And when you do come back, you’ll be more merciful, kinder, and you’re going to want to serve your people more.”46

  After six months in Córdoba he wrote down a series of notes, published later as “Silencio y Palabra” (Silence and Word), intended to assist “the discernment of a religious community that was passing through difficult circumstances.” The community was obviously the Argentine Jesuit province, and what makes the discernment doubly fascinating was that the spiritual forces he saw at work in its crisis were the same as Pope Francis would later seek to combat in the Church as a whole.

  Bergoglio began by recognizing the impossibility of human solutions to some crises, the way “visceral impotence” imposed the “grace of silence.” He noted that Saint Ignatius identified the temptations of ambition and lack of poverty as the main causes of intra-Jesuit division, the temptation being to filter God’s plans through one’s own predetermined schemes and methods. These two causes were in turn accompanied by attitudes of mistrust and suspicion, descending into triumphalism and spiritual worldliness. Triumphalism, wrote Bergoglio, is a way of avoiding the Cross through attachment to “progress (or the appearance of it), the technification of the Spirit, the ‘Coca-Cola-ization’ of religious life.” Allied to this was the temptation identified by the theologian Henri de Lubac of spiritual worldliness—the most insidious temptation of all for religious people (“more disastrous,” wrote De Lubac, “than the infamous leprosy that disfigured the dearly beloved Bride at the time of the libertine popes”). Spiritual worldliness was putting on
eself at the center. It was what Jesus saw the Pharisees doing, when they gave glory to themselves.

  In the second part of the article Bergoglio considered how to respond to a temptation that appears sub angelo lucis—the bad spirit in the guise of an angel. Only Jesus can force a bad angel to show itself, and create room for God’s light; and the means of his doing so are the ones he showed: “keeping silence, praying, and humbling ourselves.” It was a reflection rooted in the Third Week of the Exercises, which contemplates Christ’s Passion and specifically how the divine nature goes into hiding, that is to say, how Christ as divine does not destroy his enemies, although he could do so, but allows himself in his sacred human nature to suffer most cruelly.47

  Bergoglio considers how this means enduring the “primordial rage” unleashed against those perceived to be weak, when the guilt and inadequacies of the accusers are off-loaded onto a scapegoat; and how it means taking up the Cross like Jesus, voluntarily embracing it and acknowledging our sins, yet avoiding the self-pity and pride of victimhood. The Cross would eventually oblige the devil to reveal himself, because the devil mistakes gentleness for weakness. “In moments of darkness and great tribulation,” writes Bergoglio, “when the ‘tangles’ and the ‘knots’ cannot be untied and nothing is clear, then we must say nothing: the gentleness of the silence will make us look even weaker, and it will be the same devil who, emboldened, will show himself and his true intentions, no longer disguised as an angel of light but boldly and shamelessly.”