The Political Pope

by George Neumayr

  Many churchmen on the left’s long march to the papacy died on the journey. But they have enjoyed a posthumous victory under Pope Francis. He has made a point of honoring Marxists inside the Church, such as the late Mexican bishop Samuel Ruiz.

  During his 2016 visit to Mexico, Pope Francis visited Ruiz’s tomb. Ruiz was known for pushing liberation theology, third-world ideologies, and the rights of indigenous peoples and playing fast and loose with the sacraments, which eventually led Pope John Paul II’s Vatican to condemn him. Ruiz’s close associates were thrilled when they heard that Pope Francis was going to visit his tomb, interpreting it as a moment of vindication for the liberation theologians banned by the Church. “Pope Francis is a Latin American, and his duty now is to pick up the work that men like Ruiz have done in the past,” Bishop Raúl Vera said.23

  “I believe that a key moment in the Pope’s journey to Mexico will be his visit to the tomb of Bishop Samuel Ruiz García in Chiapas,” said liberation theologian Leonardo Boff. “This is a reparation and a lesson for the Roman Curia, which is aware of having persecuted and impeded the advancement of a truly indigenous pastoral ministry from the indigenous people themselves and from their culture.”

  During the same visit, Pope Francis rebuked Mexico’s bishops for not doing enough to push liberation theology, a lecture that left them so annoyed that an editorial in a publication for the archdiocese of Mexico City asked after the visit, “Does the pope have some reason for scolding Mexican bishops?”24

  Many of the themes of Pope Francis’s pontificate were foreshadowed by movements within liberal church circles in Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States. The press has praised Pope Francis for transforming the “tone” of the Church, but his “Who am I to judge?”–style rhetoric is a reprisal of the “medicine of mercy” rhetoric pervasive on the Catholic left for over two generations. Figures such as Milwaukee’s former archbishop Rembert Weakland—who spearheaded the bishops’ letter against Reaganomics and endorsed the “genital expression” of homosexuality—can be seen as forerunners of this pontificate.25

  The winds of liberalism sweeping through the Church for decades pushed Bergoglio into the chair of St. Peter and knocked Joseph Ratzinger off it. One of the mysteries of Ratzinger’s pontificate is that it had happened at all. He had always been outnumbered by liberals at the Vatican and didn’t even want the papacy in the first place. As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he had asked Pope John Paul II if he could resign and devote himself to private study. Pope John Paul II rejected his request.26 The circumstances around his resignation remain murky, but it appears that the reluctance with which he entered the papacy (he has told a biographer his unwanted election left him “incredulous”) and the resistance he felt from factions like the St. Gallen group and the gay mafia during it contributed to his resignation.

  Across many quarters of the Church—from chanceries to left-wing Catholic colleges and universities to socialist organizations such as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development—modernist Catholics had been eagerly waiting for a chance to replace Ratzinger with a progressive in the style of Bergoglio. The National Catholic Reporter, a heterodox newspaper that often serves as a barometer of what liberal bishops are thinking, hinted at this when it reported during Ratzinger’s pontificate:

  One need only talk to a sampling of theology departments to know that in many places theologians are lying low. Our seminaries will certainly be playing it safe for the foreseeable future. Moral theology of the sort that might raise substantial questions or handle difficult sexual or other life issues is being left to those who regurgitate the party line. More adventuresome and sophisticated theologians are out there, but they’re not going to raise their heads too far above the barricades.27

  Feeling empowered by the election of Pope Francis, those “sophisticated” theologians now not only lift their heads above the barricades but happily fire upon conservative Catholics. Once critical of “conservative” purges within the Church, they now conduct their own.

  They have put pressure on Catholic publications to fire conservative Catholics thought to be out of step with this progressive pontificate. After Adam Shaw of Fox News criticized the liberalism of Francis in 2013, he lost his job at the Catholic News Service.28 When Ross Douthat, a columnist at the New York Times, balked at the liberal drift of the pope’s Synod on the Family, a long list of Catholic academics, many of whom had no problem criticizing Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, ganged up on him, writing his bosses, “This is not what we expect of the New York Times.”29 After a conservative Canadian blogger criticized one of Pope Francis’s media aides, that aide enlisted the help of a law firm in intimidating the blogger. He only called off the law firm after media attention to his heavy-handed petulance caused the Vatican embarrassment.30

  Charles Curran, one of the most notorious modernist dissenters from the 1970s, understood the significance of Pope Francis’s election. He will “leave the door ajar,” he said, assuring his fans that Francis’s rise to power represented more than just a “change of style.”31 Dissenting sister Jeannine Gramick has written that the renegades from the Vatican II era have reappeared and now tell her, “My hope is in Pope Francis and what he is doing for the entire church.”32

  The liberal media cast the election of Pope Francis as a chance for a hidebound institution to move into the “future.” But his election had less to do with the future than the past. It represented the Catholic left’s victory in a theological civil war that had been raging for more than a century. As Cardinal Kasper said after Pope Francis’s election, speaking for the modernists who had bided their time until his pontificate, “[we] now have the wind at our backs.”33

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Liberal Jesuit from Latin America

  Jorge Bergoglio is the first pope to come from the Jesuit order. That is one of the keys to understanding his liberal papacy and the cachet that he enjoys in the eyes of global socialists. As a liberal Jesuit from Latin America, he is seen by the left as the quintessential “progressive” priest.

  Once a bastion of orthodoxy and discipline, the Jesuits fell under the influence of socialism and modernism in the twentieth century. By the time Bergoglio entered it, the order was rapidly moving to the left, both politically and theologically. “I was very, very undisciplined,” Pope Francis has said.1 In another era, that quality might have disqualified him from the Jesuits. In the 1960s, it made him a natural fit.

  Bergoglio was a protégé of Pedro Arrupe, the head of the Jesuits from 1965 to 1983, a period of unprecedented liberal ferment within the order. Arrupe had grown up in Basque Spain, like the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Loyola. This led conservatives to joke in the 1970s about Arrupe’s liberalism: “One Basque founded the Jesuits, another one is going to destroy them.” But to liberals, he was a “refounder of the Society in the light of Vatican II.”2

  “I remember him when he prayed sitting on the ground in the Japanese style. For this he had the right attitude and made the right decisions,” Pope Francis recalled.3 Compared to St. Ignatius of Loyola, a strict disciplinarian, Arrupe was enormously permissive, allowing socialism, loose morals, and liturgical irregularities to spread throughout the order.

  By the end of his tenure, the politics of the order had become so embarrassingly left-wing that Pope John Paul II decided to intervene personally in its internal affairs. He rejected Arrupe’s chosen successor and sent his own personal delegate to lead the order until a more appropriate replacement for Arrupe was found. Explaining the unprecedented move, a Jesuit spokesman at the time acknowledged that Pope John Paul II “wants the Jesuits to be more religious and not get too involved in politics.”4

  The politically minded Bergoglio was an ideal candidate for the Arrupe-era Jesuits. He had grown up in Argentina, where he was exposed to and inspired by communist and left-wing political influences.

  “It’s true that I was, as my whole family, a practicing C
atholic. But my mind was not only occupied with religious enquiries, for I also had political concerns, even though they didn’t go beyond an intellectual level,” he said. “I read Nuestra Palabra y Propósitos [Our Word and Resolutions] and was enchanted with all of the articles of one of its conspicuous members—a well-known figure of the world of culture—Leónidas Barletta, who helped me in my political formation.” The publication to which he refers in this quote was put out by the Communist Party of Argentina, and Barletta was a communist filmmaker. (Bergoglio has also spoken fondly of a communist teacher from high school, who “questioned us about everything.”)5

  Bergoglio was more of a political activist than a Catholic intellectual. He started doctoral studies but didn’t finish them. (As pope, he told a fellow Jesuit, “Studying fundamental theology is one of the most boring things on earth.”)

  Bergoglio became a Jesuit in 1969 and quickly rose to a coveted leadership position in the order under Arrupe. At the mere age of thirty-six, he was made the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina. “That was crazy,” Pope Francis has said.6

  Arrupe had identified Bergoglio as a rising liberal star in the order. Like Arrupe, Bergoglio was imbued with the liberal zeitgeist after Vatican II and followed his lead in opposing armed Marxism but making allowances for its theoretical variants within the Latin American Church. In 1980, Arrupe produced a feeble letter titled “On Marxist Analysis,” which blessed a measure of Marxism within the Jesuit order, provided that it made an attempt to shoehorn Christianity into its message.

  “It seems to me that in our analysis of society, we can accept a certain number of methodological viewpoints which, to a greater or lesser extent, arise from Marxist analysis, so long as we do not attribute an exclusive character to them,” Arrupe wrote. “For instance, an attention to economic factors, to property structures, to economic interests that motivate this or that group; or again, a sensitivity to the exploitation that victimizes entire classes, attention to the role of class struggle in history (at least, of many societies), attention to ideologies that can camouflage for vested interests and even for injustice.”

  Vatican officials were perplexed by the mixed message of Arrupe’s letter and didn’t care for his alarmism about anti-communism, which was evident in this passage from it: “Finally, we should also firmly oppose the efforts of anyone who wishes to take advantage of our reservations about Marxist analysis in order to condemn as Marxist or Communist, or at least to minimize esteem for, a commitment to justice and the cause of the poor, the defense of their rights against those who exploit them, the urging of legitimate claims.”7

  Arrupe’s Liberal Enforcer

  “The Society has been moving Left ever since Arrupe,” says a Jesuit interviewed for this book. “Arrupe liked to promote young liberals to be provincials. The more traditional Jesuits were pushed aside and the progressives were promoted.”

  In 1975, Arrupe summoned Jesuits worldwide to a meeting in Rome. The purpose of the event was to consolidate the Jesuit order’s liberal direction after Vatican II. “At the 1975 General Congregation, a worldwide gathering of Jesuits, Fr. Arrupe managed to refashion the Society’s identity so that it was dominated by social justice concerns,” according to the Catholic Herald.8

  Conservative Jesuits in Spain, upset by the direction of the order under Arrupe, had petitioned Pope Paul VI for relief from Arrupe’s modernist rule. Arrupe needed someone to “quell” this rebellion, according to Pope Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh.9 Arrupe turned to Bergoglio, who was the superior of one of the group’s leaders, to play his liberal enforcer.

  “On the eve of the general congregation, [the conservative Jesuits] had created a new network, Jesuitas in Fidelidad (‘Jesuits in Fidelity’), which was lobbying against both the [general congregation] and Arrupe,” writes Ivereigh. “In the run-up to GC32 the Jesuits in Fidelity were distributing the book in preparation for a planned protest. In the presence of two witnesses, Bergoglio ordered Puyadas [one of the group’s leaders] under pain of obedience to leave Rome, which the Spaniard was forced to do in order to remain a Jesuit. Together with his old Maximo colleague and now Chilean provincial, Father Fernando Montes, Bergoglio then headed to Termini rail station, where they successfully persuaded other ultras arriving from Spain to return home.”10

  That Arrupe would enlist Bergoglio’s help in marginalizing conservatives within the order explodes the claim of some Catholic commentators at the beginning of his pontificate that he was an “old-school Jesuit.” Bergoglio was very much of Arrupe’s new school. As pope, Bergoglio has made a point of emphasizing that he was “never” a conservative and that he didn’t care for traditional Jesuits who viewed St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in a way “that emphasizes asceticism, silence, and penance.”11

  The New Yorker’s James Carroll quotes a senior Jesuit official, Fr. Joseph Daoust, as saying that the 1975 General Congregation was a watershed moment in Bergoglio’s ideological formation:

  If Jorge Mario Bergoglio had a conversion moment, Daoust told me, it was probably at the 1974–75 Jesuit Congregation, the worldwide meeting in Rome of the society’s leadership that was summoned by Superior General Pedro Arrupe, of Spain, a controversial liberalizing figure. Arrupe’s priesthood had been defined by the experience of being in Hiroshima when the atom bomb fell, and as Superior he set a new course. Given what Bergoglio was facing in Buenos Aires, the gathering must have been tumultuous for him: his own positions were being challenged. The order embraced an unprecedented understanding of itself. “We can no longer pretend that the inequalities and injustices of our world must be borne as part of the inevitable order of things,” the Congregation declared. To be a Jesuit today “is to engage, under the standard of the Cross, in the crucial struggle of our time: the struggle for faith and that struggle for justice which it includes.” The Jesuits affirmed “belief in a God who is justice because he is love.”

  Critics regarded the turn as a betrayal of transcendent values in favor of an overemphasis on the secular world.12

  Bergoglio’s tenure as a young provincial general was rocky and ended after only one term. Much has been made by pundits of his “exile” after it. Some have claimed that he fell out of favor, owing to resentment toward his supposed “conservative” objections to the left-wing drift of the order.

  That is false, and Pope Francis has himself debunked the claim:

  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… 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… But I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.13

  In other words, the bad-mouthing of Bergoglio within the Jesuit order arose from essentially personal, not philosophical, resentments. Certain Jesuits disliked his high-handed manner. “Bergoglio was kind of a jerk,” one Jesuit who served under him told the press.14 Others saw him as an obnoxious busybody. Reuters recounted a telling story of his meddling at a Jesuit residence in Buenos Aires after he had been named auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires:

  He returned to the city, but instead of moving into a house at the archdiocese, went back into a Jesuit residence. There, colleagues from that period say, he began to meddle again. Once, when a friend of the order left them a gift of pastries, Bergoglio grabbed it and carried it to the kitchen, where maids and cooks could share the goodies.

  “We didn’t need a bishop to teach us how to share,” reca
lls one Jesuit present, who requested anonymity because he does not want to offend the pope.

  After a few months, some Jesuits began to ask when Bergoglio would leave. Eventually, says a senior Jesuit at that time, the order formally asked him to move.15

  In the end, these resentments helped rather than hurt Bergoglio’s ambitions, since Jesuits closely tied to their order are rarely promoted to bishop. As David Gibson of the Religion News Service wrote, “Paradoxically, his virtual estrangement from the Jesuits encouraged Cardinal Antonio Quarracino of Buenos Aires to appoint Bergoglio as an assistant bishop in 1992. ‘Maybe a bad Jesuit can become a good bishop,’ an Argentine Jesuit said at the time… The fact that he had been somewhat rejected, internally, by the Jesuits, if not for that he probably would not have become a bishop,’ said Fr. Humberto Miguel Yanez, an Argentine Jesuit like Francis, who heads the moral theology department at the Gregorian University in Rome.”16

  According to Argentine criminal prosecutor Jack Tollers, a long-time observer of Bergoglio, conservative Latin American Jesuits viewed Bergoglio as an opportunist willing to work both sides of the political street when ecclesiastical advancement required it.

  “In those days a group of us youngsters were very good friends with a local Jesuit priest very much known for his anti-progressive stance. In those days, most Catholics in this country leaned one way or the other,” Tollers has said. “But I remember quite distinctly how this Jesuit told us that this Bergoglio fellow played quite another game, playing the progressive music most of the time, but now and again switching sides to the more conservative band if need be. This was when John Paul II had been recently elected and of course there was quite a lot of ‘band switching’ going on in those days. But Bergoglio did it in a somehow blatant manner that was the talk of those days, all of it underscored by a surprisingly successful career.”17