Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  That crucible was occupying a leading church position in a fascist dictatorship conducting simply horrifying acts of terror, torture, and murder in mass silence and throughout all levels of society. And it is fair to say that during this period, Bergoglio was no hero. He was no outspoken opponent of the regime, no prophet, and no icon of human rights. He was an operator, a leader of an institution whose interests he needed to protect.

  One incident clearly impacted him above all others, and it’s worth unpacking. The core claim against Bergoglio is that he was complicit in the Argentine Navy’s 1976 kidnapping and torture of two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics. The two were associated with liberation theology, working with the poor and marginalized—what today we might call organizing them—risking the ire of the junta. Bergoglio told them to cool it, because of both his skepticism of liberation theology at the time and his fear of a wider conflict between the Church and the junta.

  While it’s difficult to sort through the details and conflicting reports about what happened next, it is clear that when the priests refused to follow his advice he decided he could not embrace their mission or give it the Jesuit imprimatur. While not collaboration with the regime, this did amount to the withdrawal of the Church’s protection of these priests, effectively leaving them exposed and vulnerable. It was an act of prudential omission, not commission, and it led to the torture of the priests. It was no real consolation that Bergoglio did not surrender the priests and actually played a part in securing their eventual release. (One of them told the press after Bergoglio’s ascension to the papacy that it is “wrong to assert that our capture took place at the initiative of Father Bergoglio… the fact is, Orlando Yorio and I were not denounced by Father Bergoglio.”) The entire episode understandably came to sting his conscience.

  Bergoglio had run the Jesuits with a firm hand, becoming known for crisp decisions and follow-through, if also a certain conservatism and, by his own admission, authoritarianism. He was a very successful and powerful young figure—but his sudden ascent to great authority led to what he clearly came to believe was unwitting complicity in the moral evil of the regime. And this changed him. This passage from the interview with America is particularly revealing. Francis was asked how his previous experience in church governance has shaped his vision of the Church:

  After a brief pause for reflection, Pope Francis becomes very serious, but also very serene, and he responds:

  “In my experience as superior in the Society, to be honest, I have not always behaved in that way—that is, I did not always do the necessary consultation. And this was not a good thing. My style of government as a Jesuit at the beginning had many faults. That was a difficult time for the Society: an entire generation of Jesuits had disappeared. Because of this I found myself provincial when I was still very young. I was only 36 years old. That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself. Yes, but I must add one thing: when I entrust something to someone, I totally trust that person. He or she must make a really big mistake before I rebuke that person. But despite this, eventually people get tired of authoritarianism.

  “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I lived a time of great interior crisis when I was in Cordova. To be sure, I have never been like Blessed Imelda [a goody-goody], but I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

  “I say these things from life experience and because I want to make clear what the dangers are. Over time I learned many things. The Lord has allowed this growth in knowledge of government through my faults and my sins. So as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, I had a meeting with the six auxiliary bishops every two weeks, and several times a year with the council of priests. They asked questions and we opened the floor for discussion. This greatly helped me to make the best decisions. But now I hear some people tell me: ‘Do not consult too much, and decide by yourself.’ Instead, I believe that consultation is very important.”

  It would be a mistake to believe that Jorge Bergoglio came to question the authoritarian structure of papal supremacy because of some ideological position. He came to doubt it because he saw what it could lead to—in his own life. And you can see this in the years following his stint as the Jesuits’ leader in Argentina. He became the rector of the Colegio de San José, a position he held for about six years. He traveled to Germany to pursue his doctoral studies, researching the work of Romano Guardini. He taught in Argentina upon his return. And then he was sent to the Jesuit community at Córdoba as an ordinary priest, serving as a confessor and spiritual director, the place where he speaks of his “great interior crisis.” These years were a time of exile—he was away from his beloved Buenos Aires. From being one of the youngest and most promising Jesuit leaders, he arrived back at square one. With regrets. And questions. And doubts.

  And it was in this period that he became fascinated with a somewhat obscure painting. It’s a Baroque painting of the Virgin Mary in a church in Augsburg, Germany, called Mary, Untier of Knots. It shows Mary patiently focusing on a long, knotted ribbon, gently untying each knot to leave a white, untangled ribbon behind. Since Francis’s introduction of a reproduction of the image in Buenos Aires, it has grown in popularity in South America, with the faithful praying in front of it for Mary to “untie the knots” in their own lives.

  What strikes me about it is how undoing knots conveys a way of being in the world. It begins with a recognition that life isn’t easy, that a smooth and linear path is rarely given to us, that challenges keep presenting themselves. It is not so much the overcoming of these challenges that defines us, but the manner in which we tackle them.

  It’s possible to get extremely frustrated by knots, after all, as I remember each time I retrieve a set of iPhone earbuds from the black hole of a coat pocket. Your first thought is just anger: How on Earth did this get so fucking tangled up? Your second impulse is to grab it and shake it or even to pull on it to resolve the issue in one stroke. But that only makes things worse. The knots get even tighter. In the end, you realize your only real option—against almost every fiber in your irate being—is to take each knot in turn, patiently and gently undo it, loosen a little, see what happens, and move on to the next. You will never know exactly when all the knots will resolve themselves—it can happen quite quickly, after a while, or seemingly never. But you do know that patience, and concern with the here and now, is the only way to “solve” the “problem.” You don’t look forward with a plan; you look down with a practice.

  This has a relationship with the concept of “discernment” that is integral to Francis’s spiritual life, as it is to any Jesuit’s. A Christian life is about patience, about the present, and about trust that God is there for us. It does not seek certainty or finality to life’s endless ordeals and puzzles. It seeks through prayer and action in the world to listen to God’s plan and follow its always-unfolding intimations. It requires waiting. It requires diligence. Here is how Francis describes it:

  I don’t have all the answers; I don’t even have all the questions. I always think of new questions, and there are always new questions coming forward. But the answers have to be thought out according to the different situations, and you also have to wait for them. I confess that, because of my disposition, the first answer that comes to me is usually wrong. When I’m facing a situation, the first solution I think of is what not to do. Because of this I have learned not to trust my first reaction. When I’m calmer, after passing through the crucible of solitude, I come closer to understanding what has to be done.… You can do a great deal of harm with the decisions you make. One can be very unfair.

  It is hard not to see the shadows of the tortured and the disappeared lingering over that epiphany in Bergoglio’s life: “You can do a great deal of harm with the decisions you make.” And it is hard not to see Mary, the Untier of Knots, as
some kind of breakthrough in his understanding of what it requires to do God’s will. Even the Mother of God was asked to accept the hardest task of all: to lose her own son for reasons she never fully understood—and simply had to accept—at the time.

  III

  We may never know why exactly Benedict resigned as he did. But I suspect mere exhaustion of the body and mind was not the whole of it. He had to see, because his remains such a first-rate mind, that his project had failed, that the levers he continued to pull—more and more insistent doctrinal orthodoxy, more political conflict with almost every aspect of the modern world, more fastidious control of liturgy—simply had no impact anymore. You can see how, in the maintenance of order, Benedict had become lost in the rules and categories that Jesus warned against. His great encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, reads like an intellectual brilliantly expressing the love of God—but not a pastor who has easily breathed that love into the Church and the world. And so, as Bergoglio had gracefully conceded to him in the 2005 conclave, perhaps one way to see his resignation is as a graceful concession back.

  Our relationship with the divine, in Catholic thought, is always a mixture of total unworthiness and yet also essential worthiness. Somehow, we have to understand ourselves as both made by God and yet deeply alienated from God. So how do we live with this tension? For Benedict, the critical posture toward God is vertical—from heaven to Earth, from pontiff to people, and back. This doesn’t mean there is no living in the world, no sense of truth in sacramental life, no community, no faith-in-action. But it does emphasize the Augustinian alienation of it all. For Francis, in contrast, the alienation is not so great, and the world more Thomist. The world is good and we live only now, and in it.

  And so for Francis, the central posture is clearly horizontal—outward toward others, inclusive, and engaged in constant dialogue. Again, this does not deny the utter grace of divine revelation, but this Christian lives far less stricken in his fallen skin. And so while Benedict offered Mass with his back to the congregation, focused on the divine, Francis, as noted by Paul Vallely, immediately shifted back to facing the people, building a community of equals in the eyes of God. Francis deliberately calls himself the Bishop of Rome, not the Supreme Pontiff, breaking down some of the vertical lines. He is emphatic about decentralization, about a mode of leadership that is closer to community organizing than to unquestioned authority in all things:

  The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost. The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.

  The pope must accompany those challenging existing ways of doing things! Others may know better than he does. Or, to feminize away the patriarchy:

  I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people, and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans, and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel.

  And, of course, this means an openness to new things, new truths, new understandings. If the central element of fundamentalism is an orientation to a pristine past—an inerrant, literal Scripture which must never be amended; or an apostolic succession descending from the first pope, Peter, to the present day in one, unbreakable chain of unquestionable authority—the key to Francis’s expression of faith is an openness to the future, a firm place in the present, and a willingness to entertain doubt, to discern new truths and directions, and to grow. Think of Benedict’s insistence on submission of intellect and will to the only authentic truth (the pope’s), and then read this:

  Within the Church countless issues are being studied and reflected upon with great freedom. Differing currents of thought in philosophy, theology, and pastoral practice, if open to being reconciled by the Spirit in respect and love, can enable the Church to grow, since all of them help to express more clearly the immense riches of God’s word. For those who long for a monolithic body of doctrine guarded by all and leaving no room for nuance, this might appear as undesirable and leading to confusion. But in fact such variety serves to bring out and develop different facets of the inexhaustible riches of the Gospel.

  Underlying all this is a profound shift away from an idea of religion as doctrine and toward an idea of religion as a way of life. Faith is a constantly growing garden, not a permanently finished masterpiece. By this I do not mean to say that doctrine is somehow irrelevant. It isn’t. It is still there insofar as we can ever fully understand it. But sometimes, it is appropriate to accept the limitations of what we can understand—and get on with the always deeply simple Christian injunction to love God and to love one another as Jesus loved his friends. We live as temporal, human beings in a finite, fallen world; and faith is, for Francis, a way of life, not a set of propositions. It is a way of life in community with others, lived in the present yet always, deeply, insistently aware of eternity.

  Here you feel the profound impact of Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s concept of discernment and “contemplation in action.” Father Howard Gray, S.J., has put it simply enough:

  Ultimately, Ignatian spirituality trusts the world as a place where God dwells and labors and gathers all to himself in an act of forgiveness where that is needed, and in an act of blessing where that is prayed for.

  Life itself provides us with truth beyond that revealed in any text or by any authority. The journey itself changes who we are and that new self, if open to God, is actually our real self. We do not begin in the shadow of a great truth and measure our life by how far we fall shy of it. We live in a world that already contains that truth and we measure our life by our ability to find it. As Michael Oakeshott put it,

  [R]eligion… is not, as some would persuade us, an interest attached to life, a subsidiary activity; nor is it a power which governs life from the outside with a, no doubt divine, but certainly incomprehensible, sanction for its authority. It is simply life itself.… The man of the world is careless of nothing save himself and his life; but to the religious man, life is too short and uncertain to be hoarded, too valuable to be spent at the pleasure of others, or the past or of the future, too precious to be thrown away on something he is not convinced is his highest good. In this sense, then, we are all, at moments, religious.…

  This is what Francis captures: the messiness of a Christian faith actually lived. And such a faith has to prioritize—so as not to get caught up in extraneous dogmas or exhausted tropes. Here’s a key passage from Francis:

  The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.

  And so Francis, like Jesus, has had such an impact in such a short period of time simply because of the way he seems to be. His being does not rely on any claims to inherited, ecclesiastical authority; his very way of life is the only moral authority he wants to claim.

  IV

  Countless tales and aphorisms have been attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, most of which are apocryphal. But one stands out, along with the lyrics to songs that still ring with strange wonder today. It is his famous injunction: “Preach the Gospel always.
If necessary, with words.” His preaching was as untraditional as it was effective. He was famous (and not always favorably) for suddenly engaging in wild, interpretive dances on the streets. Legend has him disappearing into flocks of birds to talk and pray with them, and fearlessly approaching a wolf as if there were no real gulf of understanding between species.

  In other words, he changed the world not primarily by what he said but by how he lived. Giving up an inheritance, he embraced a poverty of almost pathological dimensions. For periods of time, he would have no shelter except the ruins of churches he voluntarily rebuilt or patched up. He refused any money for labor. He hated the exercise of any power even over his own order, preferring to sit on the floor during meetings and if absolutely forced to make a decision, whispering it in another monk’s ear. He even refused to ride a horse, because it elevated him above others. In excruciating pain on his deathbed, he reportedly refused a pillow to rest his head on, then succumbed to that small comfort, and then berated a fellow monk who had brought the pillow to him. He lived by standards no one else truly understood, but they didn’t need to understand. They merely had to witness.

  Much has been made of Francis’s gestures since becoming pope. Cynics may regard some of it as public relations—but those cynics, especially by today’s standards, are remarkably rare. What some may not have seen is how these actions—of humility, of kindness, of compassion, and of service—are integral to Francis’s resuscitation of Christian moral authority. He is telling us that Christianity, before it is anything else, is a way of life, an orientation toward the whole, a living commitment to God through others. And he is telling us that nothing—nothing—is more powerful than this.