The strategy the archbishop agreed with Marcó meant that—in addition to his homilies and public pronouncements—Bergoglio would speak primarily through his actions and gestures, gradually increasing his exposure. Although he resisted at first, Bergoglio allowed Marcó to bring in photographers to capture the annual feet-washing ceremonies, which generated front-page pictures. The press also began covering San Cayetano and Bergoglio’s pastoral visits to prisons and hospitals. “We did something unheard of before then,” Marcó recalls. “We actually interested the media in religious stories.”
Marcó organized annual Christmas drinks for journalists at the curia, where they could meet Bergoglio informally. The first of these, on December 23, 1999, was given extra interest by reports circulating the previous day of the archbishop’s death. The story—based on a misfiled obituary—had reached a number of radio stations before being scotched. “Someone really wants this and obviously couldn’t wait,” Bergoglio jested to the journalists.27
Marcó also introduced key correspondents to his boss one by one, developing relationships that could later be called upon. One of them was Horacio Verbitsky, the guerrilla turned journalist who that year interviewed Yorio. In April 1999 he described Bergoglio as “the most overwhelming and conflictive church personality in decades, loved by some and hated by others”—citing as evidence for the hated part the same left-wing Jesuit sources. But he made no new allegations. Marcó brought Verbitsky to meet Bergoglio, who gave the journalist access to the curial archives and an interview in which he explained the efforts he made to free the Jesuits. Verbitsky for a time conceded that there were positives in the archbishop’s favor, but did not retract the allegations. “I’ve asked them to ignore it, not to get involved,” Bergoglio told Clelia Podestá when she asked him why his clergy and spokespeople didn’t set the record straight. “These things die on their own.” For a time they did, until Verbitsky returned to the attack in 2005.28
In 1967 Clelia Luro—then a separated woman with six children—had been at the center of a major church scandal when her affair with a progressive bishop was exposed. Jerónimo Podestá, the bishop of Avellaneda, resigned, and later left the priesthood and married her. Both Clelia and Jerónimo became well-known campaigners for (among other liberal causes) a married priesthood. Although there is no doctrinal obstacle to it—there are married Catholic priests among former Anglicans and in the Eastern churches—John Paul II strongly objected, and would bang the table whenever the subject was mentioned. When Podestá, who hadn’t entered the cathedral for over twenty years, came to see Bergoglio in 2000, they spoke for two hours, and when he was dying a few months later, the archbishop came to give him the last rites. Bergoglio and Clelia remained in touch thereafter (she died in 2013): she wrote to him almost weekly, and he would always reply by ringing her up. “When Podestá was dying, Bergoglio was the only Catholic cleric who went to visit him in hospital, and, when he died, the only one who showed public recognition of his great contribution to the Argentine church,” recalls Margaret Hebblethwaite, who knew Luro.29
The media could see that despite his allergy to the limelight, the new archbishop was carving out new territory for the Church in public life, a posture that was not deferential to government yet far from disengaged. Just how “political” the new archbishop could be had become clear at the Te Deum on May 25, 1999. The traditional thanksgiving had always been a ceremony of consensus, when the institutions of Church and state came together in solemn prayers for Argentina: the archbishop’s job was not to speak but to bless the government of the day on behalf of the nation. But Bergoglio turned that on its head: the Te Deum became a challenge by the Church to the government on behalf of the people. With God’s blessing came accountability.
Standing only feet from the current (Menem) and future (de la Rúa) presidents and the cream of Argentina’s political class, Bergoglio delivered a lengthy and biting address that combined Old Testament prophecy with the soaring rhetoric of a US presidential inauguration. Warning of a coming social disintegration while “diverse interests maneuver, alien to the needs of all,” he reminded the nation of Argentina’s genius and creativity, but also of its tendency to fratricide. “The silent voices of so many dead clamor from heaven begging us not to repeat the errors,” he said, referring to the dirty war, and “only if we hear them will their tragic destiny have meaning.” Deploying John Paul II’s critique of free-market idolatry—the neoliberal myth that market forces alone could deliver prosperity for all—he challenged the politicians to see the social emergency building around them, and to open the state to civil society. To be a citizen, he said, was to be called to a good, to a purpose, and to turn up. Yet unless “all have a place at the table, not just a few,” the social divisions would widen and, rather than take part in the building of a nation, people would turn on each other. It was time, he said, to take notice of the eruption of community and neighborly initiatives—“a whirlwind of participation seldom seen in our country”—that pointed to a people in solidarity, determined to rise again.
In words almost identical to those he had used in addressing the Jesuits in 1974, he went on to speak of his pueblo fiel idea: “our people has soul,” he said, “and because we can speak of a soul, we can speak of a hermeneutic, of a way of seeing, of an awareness.” Just as he had urged the Jesuits to abandon ideology and take on the values of the pueblo fiel, so he now called on politicians to spurn “those who claim to distill reality into ideas, the talentless intellectuals, the unkind ethicists” and to drink from the cultural reserves of the wisdom of ordinary people. This, he said, was the “true revolution”: to recover the values that made Argentines great: their love of life but acceptance of death, their solidarity in the face of pain and poverty, the way they celebrate and pray. Turning specifically to the politicians, he called on them to renounce their individual and partisan interests and hear the call of the people for greater participation in civic life. “We are all invited to this encounter,” he concluded, “to realize and share this ferment that while new is also the revivified memory of our greatest history of sacrificial solidarity, of social integration and struggle for freedom.” The speech ended with the reiteration of his four principles.30
It was high altitude rhetoric of a kind no longer heard from Argentine statesmen, let alone bishops. The criticism was not long in coming—that Bergoglio was interfering in the temporal, arrogating what belonged to Caesar. Yet anyone familiar, as was Bergoglio, with the seventeenth-century Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez, whose ideas underpinned Argentine nationhood and democracy, would see it differently. Here was the Church assuming its proper role as the moral conscience of the community, which had delegated (and could withdraw) its consent to the government to rule on the community’s behalf. It was not to the institution of the Church that Bergoglio was demanding that the state defer, but to the ordinary people in a culture imbued by the Gospel, of whose values the Church was guardian and protector.
At the following year’s Te Deum, in the Jubilee year, he was briefer, issuing a rallying cry for Argentina in the new millennium to recover “the adventure of a new nation” and “to be reborn in the promise of the pioneers who began our fatherland.” That meant, he said, restoring social bonds and solidarity, and reaching out to the young, the jobless, the migrants and the elderly. He again pointed to the growth in community organizations as a sign of hope, and called on the politicians to “make the community the protagonist.” But he presented the grim image—prophetic, as it turned out—of a people profoundly disillusioned with their self-referential politicians, incapable of generating the solidarity needed for a functioning democracy.
We need to recognize, with humility, that the system has fallen into a broad umbral cone, into the shadow lands of distrust, in which many of the promises and statements sound like a funeral cortège. Everyone consoles the bereaved, but nobody resurrects the corpse. Get up! This is the call of Jesus in the Jubilee. Arise, Argentina! as the Holy Fa
ther said to us on his last visit, and as our pioneers and founders dreamed. But until we face up to the duplicity of our motives there will be neither trust nor peace. Until we are converted, we will not know happiness and joy. Because unchecked ambition, whether for power, money, or popularity, expresses only a great interior emptiness. And those who are empty do not generate peace, joy, and hope, only suspicion. They do not create bonds.31
The task of helping to create those bonds was given to Father Accaputo’s social-pastoral office which helped build the public relationships that the archbishop would draw on in the coming years. The broader purpose was to rebuild public life, inspired by a 1999 document of the French bishops that he much admired.32 The aim was to build bonds of friendship and trust, forged by people focused on the horizon of the common good rather than as rivals for access to public resources. At least a year before the collapse of the Argentine state, Bergoglio’s culture of encounter showed politicians how to rebuild a nation.
The first such gathering was held in December 2000: a meeting of 150 public officials in the city government of Buenos Aires—including legislators and leading civil servants—to reflect on the political vocation and the challenges ahead. It became news because the head of the Buenos Aires city government, Aníbal Ibarra, was a self-declared agnostic, yet enjoyed a close relationship with the archbishop via Accaputo. Bergoglio’s presence and speech that day made an impact on those present. “Bergoglio is different,” one of the legislators told a journalist. “He understands politics. He understands the logic of power. You can really talk to him.”33
It was a very Bergoglio paradox. The austere, incorruptible mystic at war with spiritual worldliness—the pastoral bishop who smelled of sheep—was the most astutely political Argentine since Perón.
SEVEN
GAUCHO CARDINAL
(2001–2007)
THE BUENOS AIRES evangelical pastors with whom he used to pray each month got to see their old friend Jorge Bergoglio in the Vatican about ten weeks after he was elected pope. It happened that Pastor Carlos Mraida of the Central Baptist Church, Pastor Norberto Saracco of the Pentecostal Evangelical Church, Pastor Angel Negro from the Christian Community, and Pastor Omar Cabrera of the Future Vision Church were all due to be in Europe at about the same time, and God clearly wanted Jorge Himitian of the Christian Community to join them, because the pastor managed to find the funds for the flight just in time.
The pastors greeted Pope Francis outside the Santa Marta with Argentine-style embraces and kisses. Francis laughed at Pastor Himitian’s greeting: “So you’ve managed to bring us to the Vatican after all!” Inside, they told him how amazing it had been in Argentina since his election: they had to pay to put Jesus Christ on the airwaves, but here was Francis putting Him out for free on all the big shows. They told him how there was a new openness now in the Argentine media, how journalists who had long said they were atheists and agnostics were all talking about what it meant to be Catholics and Christians; how suddenly it was OK to talk about Christian values.
Francis was the same old Jorge, says Himitian, yet he wasn’t. “What everybody had been talking about, the way he had become so effusive, so joyful—we had seen that side of Jorge for ourselves in our retreats, when he preached, but outside of those times he was a very serious man. But now, as pope, he was exultante (‘elated’) all the time, just as he had been with us.”
Inside the Santa Marta at the end of May, they prayed together, just as they used to in Buenos Aires. According to Himitian, Pastor Saracco said to Francis: “Jorge, let me share something with you. Last night I was praying about this meeting and I said, ‘Lord, if you have a word for Jorge, give it to me.’” In the evangelical and charismatic tradition, to ask in prayer for a word means to ask the Holy Spirit to inspire a person to turn to a particular chapter or verse in Scripture that has particular meaning for them at this time.
Saracco brought out his iPad and read from the prophet Jeremiah, chapter 1: Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.… See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.
When Saracco—who had come to Rome from Buenos Aires via the United States—started reading the Jeremiah passage, Mraida and Himitian elbowed each other. Amazingly, Himitian had told Mraida he received the same word before setting off from Buenos Aires and even had exactly those verses printed out on a sheet of paper. When Saracco finished, Himitian handed the pope the sheet. “Jorge, I didn’t know about him and he didn’t know about us, but I brought you the same word!”
The pope laughed. “Let me tell you now what happened to me.”
Two days before Bergoglio left Buenos Aires to join the cardinals in Rome for the conclave, a man who worked in the archdiocesan curia came to see him. Mario Medina was an evangelical, who regularly prayed with the archbishop. “Father, excuse me,” he said, “but yesterday I was praying for you, and God gave me a word: Jeremiah, Chapter One.”
“We were amazed by how God had confirmed this,” says Himitian. “For if there was a prophetic voice during those years in Buenos Aires, it was his.”
* * *
THE story of how Jorge Mario Bergoglio came to be a contender in the conclave of 2005 and to be elected pope in 2013 begins a long way from Argentina, in a pretty, snow-clad town in northeastern Switzerland. With its location in the precise center of Europe and its multilingual population of seventy-five thousand, St. Gallen is well placed to headquarter the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe. The CCEE, which includes as members thirty-three bishops’ conferences in forty-five nations, was formed in the years after the Second Vatican Council, at a time when Pope Paul VI—inspired by Latin America’s CELAM—was encouraging similar continent-wide collaboration in order to restore strength and identity to the local Church. Hence the CCEE’s intimidating mission statement: “the exercise of collegiality in hierarchical communion cum et sub romano pontefice.”
With and under the pope. It is a phrase that harks back to the early days of the Church, when local synods and councils were the norm, when the Church in different places had a strong identity, regulated by its own laws and customs, yet always with the Church of Rome as the focus of unity, “presiding in charity” over the other Churches, as the second-century formula has it. The understanding of the Catholic Church in its first centuries was that it was many yet one; plural yet united; local and universal. The Church as a whole was more than the sum of its parts—it was a universal body, anchored in Rome—yet the local diocese was not merely a department or province of a world Church, but wholly the Church in that place, under a bishop.
This was not just good theology—or, to be more exact, ecclesiology—but had implications for the way the Church was governed. Often throughout the Middle Ages popes sought to assert control over local dioceses, to gain freedom from meddling princes, or to push through reform; yet they faced pushback if they tried to use that control in ordinary times. There was always a healthy tension between primacy, which emphasized papal authority, and episcopacy, which called for that authority to be exercised in collaboration with the bishops. But the balance shifted decisively in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in response to absolutist regimes—whether kings or parliaments—that sought to nationalize the Church; now the papacy asserted in fact what it had sometimes claimed on paper. The First Vatican Council (1869–1870) took a view very different from that of the early centuries of the Church in asserting boldly that all sovereignty in the Church derived from the primacy of the pope. This idea was enshrined in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which said the pope has full, supreme, and universal power in the Church.
This didn’t go unchallenged. In the first half of the twentieth century, while totalitarian dictatorships in Europe fought each other, theologians rediscovered the eucharistic notion of the Church as a hierarchical communion. The papacy had com
e to look like an absolutist monarchy, complete with all the trappings, but the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s reimagined it in early-church terms. The Church, said one of its most important documents, Lumen Gentium (“Light of the Nations”), is governed by its bishops cum et sub Petro—with and under the pope—who together form an apostolic college, collegium, which governs the universal Church. From “college” comes the name of the doctrine that expresses this idea: “collegiality.” The idea was rescued and developed by Yves Congar in the 1950s, who argued that Christ instituted two “successions”: while the pope succeeds the apostle Peter, the bishops succeed the College of the Apostles.
After the council fathers had finished their work on Lumen Gentium in November 1964, they submitted it to the pope for his consent. In the document, the bishops had restated the doctrine that the pope has full, supreme, and universal power over the Church but had added the collegial doctrine that the College of Bishops also exercises such power. The prudent Paul VI sensed danger: these two statements could lead to future misunderstandings, even rival claims. So with the help of theologians he drafted a “Previous Interpretative Note,” which stated that the pope, as the vicar of Christ, was entitled to rule as a monarch, but he is also head of the episcopal college and therefore may turn to collegial government. Whether to implement collegiality, in short, was in the gift of the pope.1
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