Palmer, who had at the time little sense of Bergoglio’s rising importance within the universal Church, was in awe of the centrality of Christ in the cardinal’s life. “He has enfleshed the Gospel,” says Palmer. “He is living a sacramental life at the deepest level: he has allowed the Gospel to become him.” Bergoglio’s humility and simplicity are deceptive, says Palmer. “If you don’t listen to him properly you don’t hear the depth of what he’s saying. He doesn’t use emotions to do it; he is quite stoic in that way—he might be emphasizing a point but you’re not aware of it. That’s why you have to listen: to be calm and to listen.”
* * *
IN addition to building up the Church among, and evangelizing from, the shantytowns, and forging deep bonds across boundaries of religion and politics, there was a third dimension to Bergoglio’s mission in his final years as cardinal archbishop. It involved a challenge to the mafias who ruled the seamy Buenos Aires world of gambling, people trafficking, prostitution, and sweatshop labor. The bishops’ bicentenary document had drawn attention to the explosion of gambling and drugs, and the addictions and violence that followed them, while also spotlighting corruption and the exploitation of vulnerable workers, particularly undocumented migrants. All had metastasized after the collapse of the state in 2002–2003, corrupting police, judges, and public officials, and not a few high-ranking members of both city and federal government.
The growth of legal gambling was a symptom of the collusion of state and market. As private companies were given more and more concessions in exchange for party donations and kickbacks, gambling went from floating casinos, lotteries, and bingo halls to game parlors on virtually every street corner, especially in poor areas, producing an epidemic of addiction and family breakups. One company in particular, headed by business allies of Néstor Kirchner and the head of Buenos Aires city government, Mauricio Macri, dominated all the others, generating not just massive profits for the company but millions of dollars in revenue to both federal and city governments.
From 2008, Bergoglio began challenging the nexus. That year there was a strike of workers at the floating casino in Puerto Madero, whose attempt to improve their tawdry working conditions (including sexual exploitation) led the company to fire them. The sacked workers camped out in the Plaza de Mayo in protest, backed by the cardinal both in writing and publicly, which led to the press raising questions about both the gambling concessions and the links to government. Through a combination of this exposure, vigorous statements by the Church, and lobbying by politicians close to Bergoglio, the cardinal scored a major victory in December when Macri vetoed a new series of concessions for bingo and slot machines.
The Church had persuaded the state, at least in this instance, to put the common good above its financial interests. Bergoglio kept up the pressure. In a December 2010 document, he and the bishops pointed out that gambling was closely linked to money laundering by traffickers of drugs, weapons, and people, describing it as “a business that moves great sums of money for the benefit of a few to the detriment of many, especially the poorest.” After listing the many serious consequences for poor families of gambling addiction, they called for the state to control and regulate the industry, and led a national awareness campaign in the run-up to Easter 2011.25
The appearance of the cartoneros—men, often boys, naked from the waist up, who at night scour the garbage of Buenos Aires for recyclable materials to sell—was one of the pitiful images of the post-2001 crisis. The city’s three-thousand-odd cartoneros had formed a Movement of Excluded Workers (MTE) with the help of Juan Gravois, a lawyer, the son of an old Guardia colleague of Bergoglio’s in the 1970s. The cardinal supported the work of the MTE from the beginning, turning up at their base in Plaza Houssay to help them strategize and plan. Whenever Gravois was arrested or attacked, Bergoglio would call to find out how he could help. He became chaplain and friend to the cartoneros, supporting them, marrying them, and baptizing their children. One of their leaders, Sergio Sánchez, says Bergoglio was “the only person who was at our side when our struggle was hardest.”
The MTE worked closely with a textile workers’ cooperative turned anti-trafficking campaign called La Alameda, which offered new lives and protection to workers fleeing the city’s sweatshops and brothels. The clandestine textile factories had come to light in 2006, when a fire in one in Caballito caused the death of six trafficked Bolivians, four of them children locked in a room upstairs in order not to distract their mothers from working. A report that year estimated at least two thousand such factories in which undocumented female migrants worked in slave-like conditions, for a dollar an hour, eighteen hours a day, sleeping and eating on the floor next to the sewing machines, their identity papers taken from them by their overlords. Police were paid to turn a blind eye. Without money or papers, the women had nowhere to turn during the few hours their bosses allowed them out each week.26
As word spread about La Alameda, the women began turning up there, asking for help. Their stories enabled its president, an engaging former teacher named Gustavo Vera, to piece together a picture of a mafia operation that involved many of the same people and interests as in drugs and gambling. The network stretched high into the ranks of the federal police and city government. As he took the women in and reported their evidence, Vera began to receive threats from the gang masters. Unable to look to the police, who were in their pay, he agreed to Gravois’s suggestion to meet the cardinal. Vera was a Che Guevara leftist and atheist but was impressed by what he had read of Bergoglio’s denunciations of the way feral capitalism turned people into commodities. At the end of August 2008 Vera left a letter in the curia to ask for the cardinal’s help, and got a call an hour later from his secretary asking him to come in. When they met, Vera was amazed by how quickly Bergoglio grasped what he was telling him.
A week later, the cardinal celebrated a Mass in the sanctuary of Our Lady of Emigrants in the port area of La Boca attended by a congregation of cartoneros, trafficked seamstresses, and former prostitutes mobilized by La Alameda and the MTE. He told them he had realized that what he had been taught at school, that the Constitution of 1813 had abolished slavery in Argentina, was a lie, and that there were more slaves in Buenos Aires now than then. He said he had seen, a few nights earlier, a cart full of flattened cardboard boxes being pulled along the street, and had looked for a horse, only to find it was being pulled by two children less than twelve years old. City laws had long banned animal-drawn transport, he added, but what was this? Was a child worth less than a horse?27
The Mass became an annual July event in the Plaza de la Constitución, gathering tens of thousands of cartoneros, exploited and trafficked workers, prostitutes, and migrant workers. Over five years Bergoglio used the event to bring to the surface a hidden population. The Mass served a twin function: to bolster the courage and hope of the victims of trafficking by showing that the Church was their ally, working for their liberation, and to challenge those who benefitted from, or closed their eyes to, this pernicious industry.
Bergoglio often took the subway on Saturdays to La Alameda’s base in Parque Avellaneda, to drink mate and chat with the eclectic mix of staff, volunteers, and survivors, atheists and agnostics, leftists and Catholics. They called him Jorge and he was always available to them, one time baptizing the three daughters of a seamstress who had been rescued from one of the textile sweatshops, with an atheist and a Jew standing in as godparents. He helped Vera and the other directors make strategic decisions about how and when to go public with accusations, and encouraged the women struggling to make new lives. In his five years supporting them, La Alameda brought eighty-five successful court cases against the clandestine factories for breaking labor laws and safety regulations, and freed over three thousand workers.28
Many of the trafficked women were sold into prostitution. As they struggled to get free, they and anyone helping them would find themselves in the crosshairs of pimps and rotten cops. Just as he did for Padre Pepe, Be
rgoglio would publicly back the women involved, providing a shield of publicity, while placing them in convents or retreat houses until it was safe. In this way the cardinal met dozens of prostitutes and helped them find shelter and new lives, just as Saint Ignatius of Loyola and his first companions had done in Rome.29 Bergoglio became their public advocate, telling their stories. In his Plaza Constitución homily of July 2010, for example, he said:
The night before last a poor girl was taken out of a brothel where she had been forced to work, and rushed to the hospital. To break her will they had got her drunk and injected her with drugs and she had gone into a coma. This is what the mafias do, the elegant gentlemen whose money is drenched in blood. They are the slave traders of our time, who run organizations whose purpose is to corrupt young people, break their wills, destroy them with drugs, and exploit them. They are important, influential gentlemen who do this, who never show their faces and never face the music because of that great Buenos Aires solution known as la coima, the bribe.… Let us not cross over in order to avoid the poor person beaten by the side of the road. Let us instead stand up and point out the focal points of slavery and corruption, the clandestine factories, brothels, and cabarets, the places where they sell drugs, these grinders of blood, these modern altars where our brothers and sisters are offered in sacrifice.
Vera reckons that the cardinal had more than eighty meetings with trafficked women. Each time Bergoglio would ask Vera what help the women had, whether they had work and somewhere to live. He never took notes, but would just say bueno, “fine.” Vera didn’t know what that meant at first, but two or three days later he would be called by union leaders, businessmen, or nuns, friends of the cardinal, with offers of jobs and shelter for them. Jorge always remembered each case, each name, each story, and he wanted Vera to let him know how they were doing.
The women came out from their meetings with the cardinal, said Vera, “in a state of total peace,” saying no one had ever listened to them so deeply nor looked at them with so much love. When the cardinal came out, his eyes were always red with tears. He told Vera one time: “I see in them the wounds of Christ.”
* * *
JOSÉ María Poirier, editor of the Catholic weekly Criterio, recalls that the cardinal’s office was “excessively modest, because it was uncomfortable. You had to open the door, move a chair in order to close it, and then move the chair back into its place.”30 Compared with 1998, when Bergoglio was starting as archbishop, much was the same: the priorities for the diocese, his option for the poor, his austerity and humility. One thing above all remained constant: he still rose not long after 4:00 a.m. to pray, and this was the time—with mind alert and heart open—when he made the most important decisions.
He genuinely governed, say those who worked with him, by seeing everything in the light of God’s will. His dawn discernments made him decisive, yet experiences in prayer also led him to reconsider. He was instinctively hostile to the idea of deacons, for example, seeing them as clericalized laity, but told three of them who had trained for the role: “I really don’t like deacons. But the Virgin came to me last night and asked for three deacons for Buenos Aires.”31
His fellow bishops were amazed by his capacity for work. “Outside the time he was praying and seeing people, he was always working,” says Bishop Jorge Casaretto. He gave up watching television in the 1990s after making a promise to the Virgin, and never went to the movies or the theater. When Archbishop Jose María Arancedo of Santa Fe asked him what he did during the January vacation, he was told he stayed in the curia and relaxed by praying and rereading the classics. Yet Federico Wals, his head of press, says the cardinal’s downtime was mainly in the slums and the sanctuaries on weekends, just being a pastor. “It’s where I saw him relax. It nourished him, being with ordinary people.”
He spent a lot of time writing. For letters he used an Olivetti electronic typewriter with a one-line memory he had bought in a sale in Germany in 1986, but otherwise wrote everything in longhand. “Bergoglio writes well, he likes writing, and he has a good style,” says Father Carlos Galli, who worked with him on the Aparecida document. “He likes to correct, and polish, until it’s right.” Claretian Publications in 2005 and 2006 had published a number of collections of his carefully crafted homilies and addresses, and brought out more in 2011 and 2012. There were also many articles in journals as well as book prologues.
Archbishop Arancedo believes Bergoglio’s familiarity with the classics helps explain “his superb Spanish style and the beauty of his prose.” As all good writers try to do, Bergoglio avoided stale phrases. If it had been said before, he preferred not to say it or would find new language. This meant that, unusually for a Catholic bishop, he made the Church’s constant teaching sound like news. Part of that ability came from his directness; he intuited what mattered to people, and spoke to it. It was also the result of his simplicity, a use of language that was both lyrical and accessible. This did not come naturally; he had a complex, multilayered mind and needed to work on his texts to make them accessible, streamlining the messages and invigorating them with startling metaphors.32
Bergoglio remained reticent with the press, giving few interviews, and was happy for other bishops to be the interface with the media. But he spoke off the record to journalists he knew and trusted—as well as Clarín’s Sergio Rubín, there was Francesca Ambrogetti and Silvina Premat, plus Carlos Pagni and Mariano de Vedia of La Nación, and in Rome Gianni Valente and Elisabetta Piqué—to brief them on this or that story, sometimes suggesting that they attribute his view to “sources close to the cardinal.” Although he no longer watched television, he was behind the creation of a diocesan TV channel, Canal 21; and while he had no idea himself how to use social media—he used neither computer nor cell phone—he sent Wals to take a course to get acquainted with the new technologies, seeing them as a way of reaching people far from the Church: in 2012 in Rome he told the journalist Andrea Tornielli that “we try to reach people who are far away by means of digital media, the Web, and short messages.”33 Afterward, whenever Wals was putting one of the cardinal’s homilies on the Web, Bergoglio would tell him: “Remember to put it up on that 140-character thing.”
He had become a firmly collegial, collaborative leader, meeting his six auxiliary bishops—all his nominees—every fortnight collectively to manage their vast diocese. Bishop Jorge Lozano recalls that
he listened to us, he respected each of us in our area of responsibility, but he was always the archbishop. When we had to consider changes in the priests, for example, we functioned as a diocese: we all sat down together and spoke about which parish needed a priest, which needed to change; but if there was a sensitive issue, he would speak directly to the bishop concerned first. Everyone around the table expressed their view, and then he would say fine, I’m now going to think about it and I’ll let you know. A couple of days later the bishop closest to the situation would get a call before he made the final decision, to check with him if he agreed, and if he did, he would call all of us with the decision he had made. Between the auxiliary bishops and him there was a very positive relationship of collegiality and communion.
There are many stories of the astute way he went about forging consensus. Another of his auxiliary bishops recalls a daylong planning meeting at a retreat house that got gridlocked in the morning discussions. At lunchtime, the cardinal told the bishop: “I’m going to do some lobbying and we’ll get this fixed.” He disappeared with an apple to his room to take his usual forty-five-minute siesta and to meditate. The others meanwhile had lunch, with wine, and were chatting sleepily away when the cardinal reappeared, fresh as morning grass. One by one he took them aside to chat about the problem. By the time the group had blearily reassembled, the solution was obvious, and everyone was behind it.34
Many describe him, as the Jesuits had, as inscrutable. Bishop Casaretto says Bergoglio’s personality was “rather hermetic.” Despite his warmth and love of people, he was an introvert whos
e instinct was to slink away unobserved. His real forte was his one-on-one relationships. “He created a network of face-to-face relationships that was simply unbeatable,” says Sergio Rubín. “When he creates a personal relationship, he’s fantastic.”
Bishop Casaretto, who was not a friend of Bergoglio’s but got on well with him, describes him as “extraordinarily wise, one of those people who sees below the surface” and who was extremely well-informed, with considered opinions on just about everything. He disconcerted people with his knowledge. “You couldn’t just feed him a line of crap because he’d see right through it,” recalls Father Juan Isasmendi in Villa 21. “You couldn’t just say, ‘Everything’s fine, the parish is going great,’ because before long he’d ask a pointed question that made it crystal clear he knew perfectly well what was going on. You couldn’t get anything past him, and if you tried, he didn’t buy it.” Poirier, the editor of Criterio, in late 2005 wrote a profile of Bergoglio for an English newspaper that began: “What does Cardinal Bergoglio think? Nobody knows.” At a book launch some time later, Bergoglio approached Poirier, and said, laughing: “So no one knows what I think?”35
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