Away from the political gallery, the cardinal had plenty of behind-the-scenes meetings with human-rights activists and relatives of the desaparecidos. He would receive any who asked to see him, and they found him unfailingly sympathetic and always helpful in their pursuit of information. They could meet on shared ground, for Bergoglio, too, had lost people dear to him in the dirty war.
The wave of sympathy for the president, Cristina Kirchner, in the wake of Néstor’s death, ensured her a second term at the end of 2011. Her government remained hermetically sealed within its own narrative and became increasingly authoritarian. Outside the narrow world of government, however, Father Accaputo’s Social Pastoral office had over many years built a formidable web of relationships among politicians and business and union leaders across the divides. Like the Dialogue of 2002, its purpose was the rebuilding of Argentine public life, fostering a new generation of leaders committed to Bergoglio’s big themes: politics as service, the preferential option for the poor, the culture of encounter, solidarity, and the common good.
The Jornada de Pastoral Social (“Social Pastoral Day”), which Bergoglio and Accaputo built up over a decade, is an extraordinary phenomenon: an annual Church-hosted gathering of the nation’s leaders from all parties and major interest groups who come together on panels to discuss national challenges and priorities. The object is to develop an understanding of how the interests that each represented could be seen as part of a whole, and to see those who represented other interests as sharing a common humanity. “At the moment you discover that behind a politician or business leader there is a person like you, a person who suffers, has problems, existential doubts, then you discover the person and not the personality,” Father Accaputo explains. “When you can get to that, you can generate a relationship in which people can encounter each other.”
The jornadas were (and remain) a practical attempt by Bergoglio to overcome the besetting sin of Argentine political life, personalized factionalism, and to build a political culture whose fruits may not be reaped until the post-Kirchner era.19
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CARDINAL Bergoglio was a master builder of cross-frontier relationships, many of which developed into deep friendships. Jean-Louis Tauran, the French cardinal who heads the Vatican’s council for relations with other faiths, refers to the “Argentine model of interreligious dialogue, unique in the world.” What made it special, says Father Guillermo Marcó, who with Bergoglio’s backing set up an interfaith dialogue institute in 2005, is that it relies on friendship rather than on reaching theological agreement. The dialogue takes place not among institutions or representatives of religions, but through the friendship among leaders of different faiths or denominations, who take on also each other’s concerns without ever compromising their identity. The “Argentine model” partly reflects the way it came into being, as a result of the 2001–2002 crisis, when the lack of trust in state institutions caused people to look to religious leaders, who needed to get together to respond practically to the needs of the moment.
Among many remarkable relationships, three in particular stand out: with a Muslim, a Jew, and an Anglican evangelical.
The million-odd Argentine Arabs of Syrian and Lebanese extraction who arrived in the 1920s are mostly (like former president Menem) Christians. But Omar Abboud, whose Argentine grandfather, a sheikh, was the first Muslim to translate the Qu’ran into Spanish, puts the Muslim population (Sunni, Shiite, and Alawite) somewhere around three hundred thousand: it is hard to know, exactly, because Argentine censuses do not give a breakdown of non-Christian affiliations.20 But practicing Muslims are relatively few; Buenos Aires has just three mosques. It was a quiet, integrated population until the September 11 attacks in New York shone a spotlight on them, and Abboud—by then working in the Islamic Center of the Argentine Republic—found himself in the media explaining the difference between terrorists radicalized by Islamist ideology and ordinary faithful Muslims.
Following contacts with Father Marcó, the cardinal in May 2004 paid the first visit to the Islamic Center, which since its foundation in 1931 had never been visited by a bishop, let alone the Argentine primate. “I give thanks to God, the Merciful,” Bergoglio wrote in the visitors’ book, “for the fraternal hospitality, for the spirit of Argentine patriotism I found here, and for the witness of commitment to the historic values of our fatherland.” Until his death a year later, the president of the Islamic Center at the time, Adel Made, began to meet regularly with the cardinal, who returned to the Center in August 2005 to pray at the sheikh’s wake. By that time, the interreligious institute had been set up, with an agreement not to allow tensions from abroad to affect the relationships in Argentina: this meant, for example, that Benedict XVI’s Regensburg speech in September the following year, which caused anger across the Muslim world after a sentence was quoted out of context, caused little Muslim-Catholic friction in Argentina. (It did, on the other hand, lead to Marcó standing down as the cardinal’s spokesman, after comments lamenting the pope’s speech he made in a personal capacity were reported as the cardinal’s.)
“Bergoglio was the one who showed us and taught us about dialogue,” recalls Abboud, who took over from Made as the Center’s director. “He brought minorities to the table, to create an unprecedented civic space.” Bergoglio gave Abboud and other religious leaders the place of honor at the annual Te Deum, for example, and arranged common declarations and pledges so that there was a joint religious voice on social issues.
Abboud, an articulate forty-seven-year-old descendant of Syrians, became close to Bergoglio, whom he used to visit regularly at the curia, where they drank coffee and ate alfajores, and spoke of soccer and politics, as well as literature, music, and opera (“I learned through him to appreciate Wagner’s Parsifal”). Abboud explained to him about Islam, but found the cardinal already well informed. Bergoglio lent him books that would allow him to see parallels between Christianity and Islam, and taught him the importance of his four civic principles—the whole is greater than the part, unity is superior to conflict, reality is superior to the idea, time prevails over space—which Abboud translated into Islamic concepts and uses all the time.
“How can a Muslim learn from a Catholic priest?” Abboud shakes his head in amazement. “I learned the dynamic of Islamic mercy through his words.” Their discussions roved over the divine attributes—the Muslim insistence on divine oneness, versus the Catholics’ understanding of God as a plurality of three persons in one—as well as what Abboud calls “the vision of an Islamic Jesus that is also miraculous.” But the richest discussions took place on the common ground of mercy, the quality of the divine. “From Bergoglio it was a whole lesson in the exercise of mercy, in improving your view of the other by putting yourself in their shoes,” recalls Abboud, who admired Bergoglio’s extraordinary spiritual depth—the product, he said, of a lifetime’s rigor and prayer—and his “zero attachment” to material things. “The fact is,” says Abboud, “I love him a lot.”
Another who loves Bergoglio is Rabbi Abraham Skorka.
Bergoglio’s father, Mario, used to tell his son how the Jews had been persecuted over the centuries, including by the Church, and that he should know that Jesus was a Jew. Growing up, Bergoglio knew a number of rusos in Flores. It’s a term of affection: most Argentine Jews are Eastern European Ashkenazi, who came off boats after the 1880s (Buenos Aires was mostly their second choice, when New York’s quotas had filled): Skorka’s Polish grandparents came in the 1920s, and he spoke Yiddish at home.
The Argentine Jewish population of around two hundred thousand is smaller than it was—emigration to Israel increased after the 2001–2002 Argentine economic crash—yet it remains the largest and most important Jewish diaspora in Latin America, with over a dozen synagogues in Buenos Aires and a number of significant institutions. Despite the anti-Semitism of nationalist Catholic intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s, which reappeared in the higher echelons of the military junta during the dictatorship of t
he 1970s, Jews are on the whole safe and integrated in Argentina. But in the early 1990s the Middle East conflict came to Buenos Aires, when foreign Islamic radicals car-bombed the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA), killing eighty-five, just two years after an attack on the Israeli embassy in which twenty-nine died. The attacks left their mark: there are bars in the windows and round-the-clock security guards at Skorka’s synagogue, Benei Tikva, tucked away in a silent street in Belgrano. But the rabbi always believed that real security meant not letting locked doors hem you in, and in the mid-1990s he began building relationships with priests and local Muslim leaders. He was also a regular writer on Jewish matters for the newspaper Bergoglio read, La Nación.
Bergoglio inherited the Jewish community’s strong relations with Cardinal Quarracino, who had taken the unprecedented step of installing in the cathedral a glass mural that contained documents rescued from the Holocaust. Shortly after he became archbishop, Bergoglio had the mural expanded to include a commemoration of the 1992 and 1994 attacks, and held a service at the cathedral to commemorate victims of the Shoa. Over the next years, he took Jewish-Catholic relations in Buenos Aires to a whole new level. He regularly took part in the yearly commemoration of the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Kristallnacht, and hosted it more than once in the cathedral, asking forgiveness on behalf of those who in the 1930s stood by and let the Holocaust happen. He made sure the Shoa was taught in diocesan schools and seminaries, and in 2012 he sent three trainee priests to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. He asked his auxiliary bishops to represent the Church at the Jewish community’s yearly commemoration of the AMIA victims, and in July 2010 he himself attended, praying in front of the mural and telling journalists that the attack was “another link in the chain of sorrow and persecution that the chosen people of God has suffered in its history.”21
Bergoglio also built strong relationships with Jewish leaders. Among them were Rabbi Daniel Goldman, who was part of the Interreligious Institute with Father Marcó and Omar Abboud, and Sergio Bergman, rabbi of Argentina’s primary synagogue, who is also a center-right politician. Bergman and Bergoglio for many years worked on developing common civic virtues to rehabilitate politics: the cardinal wrote the prologue to Bergman’s 2008 essay on citizenship, while Bergman describes Bergoglio as his “rabbi” and the spiritual leader of all Argentines, not just Catholics, the creator of a civic space in which all can take part and contribute without sacrificing their identity.22 Claudio Epelman, executive director of the Latin-American Jewish Congress, and Alberto Zimerman, of the Delegation of Argentine-Israeli Associations (DAIA), were also friends, whom Bergoglio invited to dine with him on Christmas Eve, bringing in kosher food.
Skorka, the sixty-three-year-old rector of the Latin-American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires, had been a chemistry student, like his friend Jorge. They became close after the rabbi invited him in September 2004 to join his community for the penitential service of Selichot, where they prayed and broke bread together. Thereafter, Skorka was a regular visitor to the cardinal’s office, where they ribbed each other about which of their soccer teams (Skorka supports River) was on the wane, and began working together on many projects. Bergoglio prologued a book of Skorka’s, and later asked the rabbi if he would do the same for the cardinal’s book-long interview with Sergio Rubín and Francesca Ambrogetti, El Jesuita, which came out in 2010—a gesture that deeply touched Skorka (“‘What is this?’ I thought. ‘You’re asking me, a rabbi, a Jew?’”).
In 2010 Skorka and Bergoglio met every month for a year in the company of a journalist who transcribed and edited their discussions on mostly moral and ethical topics, such as euthanasia, divorce, abortion, globalization, poverty, marriage, as well as the Holocaust. The discussions were turned into a book published in 2011 as On Heaven and Earth. “Dialogue, in its most profound sense, is to draw the soul of one close to the soul of another, with the result revealing and illuminating one’s interior,” Skorka writes in his introduction. All three—the rabbi, the cardinal, and the journalist—dealt that year with the loss of a loved one: the cardinal’s brother Alberto died in June and the rabbi lost his mother-in-law. When Skorka accompanied the cardinal to his brother’s wake—“We were speaking about deep things; what else do you talk about at a wake?”—he asked Bergoglio why he had asked him to write the prologue to his book. “He said, without thinking, ‘It came out of my heart.’ I was overwhelmed.”
In October 2010, Bergoglio and Skorka began taking part in an unusual three-way dialogue broadcast on the archdiocese’s TV channel, Canal 21. The chair was Marcelo Figueroa, a Protestant theologian who coordinated what turned out to be thirty-one hour-long monthly programs. Each took a social theme—such as solidarity, sexuality, authority, happiness—and centered the discussion on the Bible, the book that all three traditions shared and all three men knew deeply.23 Two years later, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, which transformed Catholic-Jewish relations, Bergoglio awarded Skorka an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University in Buenos Aires—an event without precedent in Argentina.
There is a deep affection between them. Bergoglio, says Skorka, is un amigo campechano—a real pal, a straight-down-the-line friend. Yet there is a seriousness to their relationship, signaled by the use of the formal Spanish usted form, rather than the familiar tú. “It marks a framework of absolute respect, with an enormous affection,” says Skorka. These linguistic nuances are hard for outsiders to understand, but it’s like this, says the rabbi: we don’t take each other for granted; we defer to each other’s tradition. Beneath the joshing and the affection lies a serious purpose. “Whenever we got together, we always asked ourselves, ‘What are we doing so that there is a little bit more spirituality in the world?’ We would always ask each other, ‘What is our next project? What is our next mission?’” They wanted to develop a deeper understanding of what Jewishness means to Christianity and vice versa; if Jews were the Christians’ “elder brothers” in the faith—the modern Catholic formula—what could or should that brotherhood look like? Bergoglio’s focus on Jesus’s identification with the poor and the marginalized recalls the prophets of Israel and the Torah, says Skorka, and allowed the two Argentines to meet constantly on shared ground. “He feels us to be at the root of his belief.”
In the best Jesuit tradition, Bergoglio remained, as cardinal, a man of the frontier, called to live in the tension of conflicting identities and to support others who trod similar tightropes. One of them was Tony Palmer, a British-born South African Anglican evangelical bishop. Tony met and married his Italian wife, Emiliana, in Cape Town, where they were both living and working. At that stage, they were both evangelicals, Tony a preacher. They left South Africa in 2004 to live in Italy, where Tony began to work with Matteo Calisi, the Italian Catholic charismatic leader whose friendship with the Argentine pastor Jorge Himitian led to the Luna Park gatherings in Buenos Aires. Palmer and Calisi formed a fraternity promoting unity with Christians of other denominations (two Anglicans and an Orthodox) united by a shared conviction: that the Holy Spirit was drawing together the Christian traditions toward a future oneness.
Through the charismatic movement, Emiliana was reconciled with the Catholic Church, while Tony was accepted by the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches (CEEC), a body set up in the 1990s by Protestant and Anglican leaders who also see themselves as part of the convergence movement. (To add to the complexity, the CEEC is Anglican but is not part of the Anglican Communion, whose figurehead is the archbishop of Canterbury.) Through the CEEC, he was ordained a priest in 2005 and, in 2010, a bishop.
A year after his ordination as a priest, Palmer was in Buenos Aires with Calisi and the fraternity on a mission to bring together Catholics and evangelicals. Five of them met Cardinal Bergoglio, who asked to hear their stories. He was especially interested in Palmer’s because of his ecumenical marriage. Palmer said that while it worked very well—they were complementary in their d
iversity—there was a problem. “I told him that since I led my family back to the Catholic Church, I am not allowed to take Communion. I have to stay in the benches on Sunday morning. So my kids come back after taking Communion and say, ‘Dad, why would you join us to a church that separates a family?’” At this, recalls Palmer, Bergoglio’s “heart broke—his eyes filled with tears.” As they were walking out, Bergoglio took Palmer aside and asked if he was willing to start a relationship with him, perhaps to study together the sacrament of marriage. Palmer agreed, and each time he was in Buenos Aires over the next few years to work with young people, they met, staying in touch in between visits by e-mail and telephone. (They always spoke in Italian; Palmer called him “Padre Mario.”)
They had deep conversations about the issue Palmer had first raised—the Church’s rules preventing non-Catholic Christians from receiving the Eucharist at Mass. Palmer passionately argued that the Eucharist was not a sign of institutional unity but unity in Christ, and that the Catholic Church’s rules meant it was claiming that the altar was Rome’s, not Christ’s—a form of blasphemy. “I wasn’t giving him Protestant theology but straight-down-the-line Catholic sacramental understanding,” Palmer insists. The cardinal, he says, did not try to defend the Church’s rules, but affirmed Palmer’s sacramental theology, empathizing deeply, and seeking only to persuade Palmer to be patient. “He wanted to calm me down, to make me a reformer, not a rebel.”
In 2009, when Pope Benedict XVI created a new legal church structure for Anglicans to join the Catholic Church known as the ordinariate, Bergoglio called the Buenos Aires–based Anglican primate of the Southern Cone (in communion with Canterbury), Bishop Gregory Venables. Over breakfast, “he told me very clearly that the ordinariate was quite unnecessary and that the Church needs us as Anglicans.”24 This was also Bergoglio’s message to Palmer, who was looking at the ordinariate and wondering if it was for him. “He told me that we need to have bridge builders. He counseled me not to take the step because it looked like I was choosing a side and I would cease to be a bridge builder.” Palmer says Bergoglio believed he should remain an Anglican “for the sake of the mission, this mission of unity,” and that he was “divesting” himself of being a Catholic “for this mission, this mission of unity.” Palmer says whenever he went to see the cardinal, it was “not as an Anglican but as his spiritual son.”
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