Father Lorenzo “Toto” de Vedia, who runs a team of three priests in Villa 21, says Bergoglio preferred the southern zone because “he is a son of Medellín: that was the Church that nurtured him, a poor Church, for the poor.” Viewed from Father Toto’s Virgin of Caacupé parish, Buenos Aires looks very different. Here, forty-five thousand people are jammed into 175 acres, in brick and corrugated iron houses squeezed up against each other on narrow dusty streets zigzagged by feral kids and stray dogs. While men in overalls drill and hammer, teenagers with tattoos and nose rings drape street corners, and somewhere, above the banging and barking dogs, there is shouting and crying and the thud-thud of a ghetto blaster. The people here are smaller and darker, and, being mostly Paraguayan, many speak Guaraní, while their Spanish lacks the Italianate porteño lilt of Buenos Aires speech. They are eager to share Padre Jorge stories.
In Villa 21, as in other slums and working-class parishes across the southern part of town, the story is precisely the reverse of the refrain in the Barrio Norte. Here people say that Bergoglio and Francis are the same, that how he is now on Wednesdays in St. Peter’s Square is how he was in the villas. They say Padre Jorge came around all the time, at least once a month, to give talks or retreats, to hear their confessions, or sometimes just to callejear, to walk down those streets and chat, maybe go inside somebody’s house to share a mate, ask about the kids. Almost everyone in the little choked streets around Caacupé parish can prove this with photos on their phones. They say Padre Jorge always stayed for the big festivals, including the last one, the Virgin of Caacupé in December 2012, just before he left for Rome and never came back. At the festival, they remember, he had taken his turn serving the choclo, the chewy blanched sweet corn, and the cheesy-doughy balls called chipás.
Bergoglio made the decision, from the start, to focus on these peripheries, choosing to spend some time every weekend in the new barrios. Despite the Kirchners’ angry antiestablishment rhetoric, their policies consistently benefitted the urban middle classes, not the poor. Numbers living in slum housing rose from 10 percent in 2004, when the economy had picked up again, to 17 percent in 2010, when the bishops estimated that 11 percent of children there went hungry. But the peripheries also meant the suffering and the vulnerable: hospital patients and prisoners, the addicted and the afflicted. Bergoglio would spend entire nights hearing confessions at the shrines of saints on their the feast days—the Virgin of Luján, San Cayetano, San Pantaleón, the Miraculous Medal—and when he wasn’t in the confessional, he would spend two or three hours in the crowds, hearing stories and exchanging hugs. Where he went, his priests followed: some of his youngest and most able clergy were sent to work in the villas or in the hospitals and prisons, or to minister to the crowds at the sanctuaries.
Bergoglio evangelized the city from its margins. “The idea is that the Church is first among the poor and from there reaches out to everyone,” says Father Gustavo Carrara, whom Bergoglio put as the head of his slum priests’ vicariate. “It’s the opposite of what in economics is called the trickle-down effect—only it never does trickle down. It’s not about the poor and only the poor. It’s from them, to the rest.” The vicariate, created in August 2009, was a way to incorporate the pastoral slum outreach into the official structure of the diocese. Its first coordinator, Father Pepe Di Paola, says that for Bergoglio “the center of Buenos Aires is not the Plaza de Mayo, where the power resides, but las periferias, the outskirts of the city.”1
In Latin America the majority poor live their faith differently from the minority middle class. Religious expression isn’t a moment in the week but throughout the week; the sacred is part of life. That gives rise, says Carrara, to a culture organized around transcendent values rather than wealth and power. Hence the conviction of the twenty-two slum priests he works with, that in the villas they receive more than they give. Hence, too, the respect the priests give to forms of popular religiosity—the devotions and the processions, the shrine festivals and the offerings, the novenas and the rosaries—which are described so powerfully in the Aparecida document as the place where the poor encounter God, make vital decisions, and are converted. Carrara, a smart and thoughtful priest, a Bergoglio disciple, accepts that everyone’s faith needs purifying, but he is cautious about judging, say, people who might not go every week to Sunday Mass but who go daily during festivals. “In the end, the only one who can measure faith is God.”
Carrara thinks Bergoglio went to slum fiestas but not Barrio Norte cocktail parties because in the fiestas the poor celebrate Christ, not themselves. “A fiesta has a different dimension: with Mass, food, dances in honor of the Virgin, Christ. The fiestas are happening because they are feasts of Christ and the Virgin. They’re linked to the religious, yet with a deep human dimension.” Father Toto agrees. “Here in the villas they live values that have been lost elsewhere: the people know each other, and the neighbor is very important. To have the basics, to survive, you have to depend on others. And that produces a strong sense of community, for good and ill. The guy you were in a knife fight with yesterday you stay up all night with, because his mother is ill. It’s an intense existence.”
Bergoglio wanted the city to learn from this solidarity. He told a Caritas retreat in 2010 that the slums could teach the people in the tall apartment buildings how to create fraternal bonds. At the end of 2012, in an interview with Father Juan Isasmendi on the Villa 21 community radio, he said that he had always been struck by two things in the barrios:
First is a great sense of solidarity. You can be pretty pissed at someone, or whatever, but there’s a need and immediately solidarity makes itself felt. It does me good to see solidarity. There’s less egotism than in other parts, there’s more solidarity. The second thing is the faith that is here, faith in the Virgin, faith in the saints, faith in Jesus. I’m really struck by how, not just this one, but all the [shantytowns] are barrios of faith. It’s true, Jesus always made clear that where there was humility it was easier for faith to enter. He said: “If you don’t become like a little child, you won’t enter the Kingdom.” And “if you’re not pure in heart, if you’re not poor in your heart, it’s difficult to enter the Kingdom.” When you have a humble life, and you live from your work, which is what gives us our dignity, then faith takes root even more. These two things have always struck me: solidarity and faith. Put them together, and what do you get? The ability to celebrate. It’s great how in these barrios people celebrate, make fiesta—they’re joyful. So you have those two things, faith and solidarity, and when you put them together you get joy.
* * *
WHAT convinced Bergoglio to create the new slum priests’ vicariate in August 2009 was the drug dealers a few months earlier announcing their intention to kill Padre Pepe.
The dealers didn’t like a declaration by the slum priests in March that year in response to a congress debate on the decriminalization of drugs. The priests said that drugs were already de facto legal in the villas, where they were bought and sold with impunity, and wreaked havoc in the lives of fragile people. The priests also objected to the media assumption that drug-linked violence and crime was a problem that came out of the villas and affected the city; in fact, they pointed out, the drugs and all that went with them came from outside, peddled by dealers working for men in suits and fast cars who lived in the Barrio Norte. The priests went on to document the effect of crack cocaine (paco) and the diabolic way in which adolescent craving for love and acceptance was exploited and perverted into addiction and enslavement to criminal gangs. Finally, they made a number of practical suggestions for attacking the problem at its root.2
The document was headline news, and provoked media discussion over many days. Padre Toto’s predecessor in Villa 21 was Padre Pepe. The bearded young priest who with Bergoglio’s support had brought the Virgin of Caacupé to the slum in 1997 was the architect of a thirteen-year parish operation that had given birth to fifteen chapels, a high school, a trade school, a home for the elderly, vario
us soup kitchens, drug prevention programs, a recovery center, two farms where recovering addicts live and work, a day care center for kids, and a community newspaper and radio. As the leader of the slum priests, and with Jesus-like bearded good looks, Padre Pepe inevitably led the media interviews on the drugs document.
The first warning came when he was bicycling back to the parish one night in April, when a man in a suit came out of the shadows and told him to get out. “Once this comes off the news, you’re toast,” he told Padre Pepe. “They’ve got you marked.”
The next day, after a priests’ meeting during which further threats turned up on his cell phone (there were text messages as well as letters), Padre Pepe took Bergoglio aside and told him, “Look Boss, they’ve threatened to kill me, and I think it could be serious.” The cardinal fell silent for a time. “First of all, we have to be calm, because we are acting in accordance with the Gospel,” he said, before adding: “If someone has to die, it should be me. I will ask God to take me, and not you.”
They agreed that, because the mafia clung to the shadows, the spotlight of public attention would afford the greatest protection. The following day, when the cardinal was celebrating an annual Mass for the start of the academic year, the media were on hand to record him telling two thousand teachers and five thousand students that one of his priests had been threatened by what he called “the merchants of darkness.” His homily gave details: “The priests in Villa 21, down by the Riachuelo, recently opened three homes to help young addicts. The drug dealers did not like this. Some have got nervous and threatened to kill a priest.” He added: “We don’t know how this will end.”
The story led that night’s news. The next day 356 Buenos Aires priests signed a declaration backing the curas villeros and condemning the threat. Padre Pepe went on to a press conference where he gave countless interviews, before returning to the villa to find a rally in his support. As he walked with the crowd, people came out of their houses to join in, which led to more first-class TV footage. The following day Bergoglio went as usual to Villa 21 to spend hours walking the streets with Padre Pepe and greeting people, sharing a gourd of mate here, some biscuits there. The message was clear: the shepherds were one with their flock, and ready to die for them. The story was still running the next day, when the streets around Virgin of Caacupé parish were packed with thousands of people chanting for Padre Pepe to stay. The story by this time had been picked up across the world. Over the next months, Bergoglio created the vicariate for slum priests and named Padre Pepe to head it. The vicariate became an interlocutor with the public authorities, negotiating for improvements. The publicity had exposed how little presence the state had in the slums.3
The Church, deeply embedded in the lives of the villeros, now became their public advocates. When, the following year, Argentina began a series of bicentenary anniversary celebrations of its six-year process of independence from Spain (which began with the town-hall declaration of May 25, 1810, and concluded with the declaration of independence in Tucumán on July 9, 1816), the slum priests’ vicariate called for the city to recognize its shanty dwellers not just as objects but as subjects of history. Just as the so-called lower orders (bajo pueblo) were the agents of change at the nation’s birth yet never got streets named after them, they argued, so history will regard the villas of Buenos Aires.
The document argued against both private-property fanatics who claimed the villeros were illegal occupants of unowned land, as well as the government bureaucrats who saw the villas as a problem to be “solved” from on high. They proposed that the villeros should be seen as a distinctive group within the city, with its own customs and mores, to be listened to and dialogued with. During the six-year celebrations of independence, the priests argued, the villas should be integrated with the city via a new social agreement that allowed the slum dwellers to be heard as citizens. In the villas were youth, energy, a high birthrate, and immigrants ambitious for their children. It was where the Argentine dream began, they said, and in embracing its shantytowns the nation would be owning its future.4
* * *
FIRED up by Aparecida’s call to work for a new order of justice, Bergoglio saw the bicentenary as an opportunity to push for a new proyecto de país (“country project”) that would give the nation a new birth. If there could be agreement on core values around which Argentines could come together, a series of fundamentals that would survive changes in government, it could transform public life. At the heart of this agreement would be a commitment to eradicate poverty and include the marginalized, promoted by a politics and economics based on the common good. The idea was proposed by the Argentine bishops under Bergoglio’s presidency in an extraordinarily ambitious document issued in December 2008 called Toward a Bicentenary in Justice and Solidarity.5
The deep thinking behind the document can be found in a prologue Bergoglio wrote to another book by Guzmán Carriquiry. There, Bergoglio noted the price Latin America continued to pay for its elites’ utopian, disincarnate ideas of liberty, detached from both the lived reality and the core values of the pueblo. This was not a new idea: he had written much the same in the 1970s. But the times had changed: what held the pueblo back was no longer messianic Marxist ideology but what he called a “theist gnosticism,” a new, disembodied thinking that in Church terms could be expressed as “God without Church, a Church without Christ, Christ without a people.” Against this elite “airspray theism,” Bergoglio set what he called lo concreto católico, the “concrete Catholic thing,” which was at the heart of the history and culture of the Latin-American people. The implication was clear: no Latin-American “country project” could be effective without being rooted in the concrete Catholic thing.
He went on to draw a distinction between country, nation, and patria (“fatherland”). The first was a geographical area, the second the institutional scaffolding, the third the inheritance of the past that each generation hands on to the next. A country’s borders can change, and a nation can be transformed, but the patria “either preserves its foundational being or it dies.… We can expand it, but not adulterate it.”6 This is the key notion behind the Argentine bishops’ bicentenary document: that the Christian values set deep in the national DNA—the foundational being (ser fundante) that predated the Argentine nation-state—are the basis on which to construct a new national project.
The bicentenary document was a bold attempt to translate the vision of Aparecida into a new kind of politics. It called for Argentina to “ratify and empower the option of the preferential love for the poor, which flows from our faith in Jesus Christ” and quoted Aparecida’s call that “new structures must likewise be created to promote a genuine human coexistence, prevent arrogant domination by some, and facilitate constructive dialogue for the necessary social consensus.” By forging new bonds of fraternity and solidarity and an agreement to enshrine the option for the poor in state policy, Bergoglio believed that Argentina could resist the negative impacts of globalization; the dissolution of community and social bonds could be reversed by a strengthening of family and civil society.
The document identified core Argentine structural failings: stubbornly high unemployment despite economic growth, deep-seated public corruption, political clientelism, an explosion of drugs and gambling, a lack of respect for life and family, and, of course, a growing population of los descartables, “throwaway people.” The new country project was an invitation to learn from the dialogue and solidarity that emerged in the crisis of 2002, and to tackle together Argentina’s failures, mobilizing the energies of civil society and renewing public life. Helpfully, the document went on to list suggestions for strengthening the country’s institutions and its democracy.
The Casa Rosada, as usual, was not interested. Cristina Kirchner—elected president in December 2007 after Néstor stood aside—was, like her husband, ideologically impervious to the possibility that the Church could have anything to teach politicians. She consented to regular meetings with the bish
ops to hear their concerns, and generally relations were less tense than with Néstor, yet the policies and politics remained the same, together with the with-us-or-against-us polarized rhetoric, and the official snarling every time the Church offered an X-ray of social ills: whenever the bishops raised their voice over poverty, they were lectured on their “complicity” in the dirty war. But there were glimpses of other possibilities, as when, in 2008, Bergoglio successfully mediated in a dispute between the agricultural sector and the government, which threatened to escalate disastrously; or when, later that year, Cristina accepted an invitation from the cardinal to attend a Mass at the shrine of Luján. Yet the Kirchners were too busy trying to preserve the state from the Church—which they saw through ideological filters as a retrograde corporation—to contemplate working with the bishops to repair the nation’s fabric.
Bergoglio kept up the pressure, angry that the Church needed to expand its charitable provision to care for the growing numbers of poor at a time of economic growth. But he was careful not just to blame the government. At the annual San Cayetano Mass in August 2009, for example, Bergoglio deplored the “scandalous” way Argentina failed to take responsibility for its poor, thundering that “in our city every day we see people who have no place, who don’t fit, who are surplus, and who are discarded, as if thrown away in existential dump trucks.” But he made clear he was criticizing everyone—“we all carry the blame”—and held up frivolous consumerism as an example of how money was diverted from where it was needed. Rewriting the words in Matthew, chapter 25, Bergoglio said Jesus would tell people at the Last Judgment: “Go away from me because I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat, for you were busy blaming the government.”7
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