However, this friend of the pope’s insists that in Argentina, and today in Rome, Francis has always enjoyed good relations with the two main liberation theologians, Gustavo Gutiérrez and Leonardo Boff, both sanctioned by Joseph Ratzinger.
To find out more, I travelled to Uruguay, taking a boat across the Rio de la Plata – a three-hour crossing from Buenos Aires, one of the ferries bearing the name Papa Francisco. In Montevideo, I had a meeting with Cardinal Daniel Sturla, a young, warm and friendly priest who embodies the modern line of Pope Francis’s Church. Sturla welcomes Andrés and me in a short-sleeved black shirt, and I notice a Swatch watch on his wrist, unlike the luxury watches worn by so many Italian cardinals. The interview, planned for 20 minutes, lasts for over an hour.
‘The pope adheres to what we call “la teología del pueblo”. It’s a theology of the people, the poor,’ Sturla says to me, taking another sip of his maté.
In the image of Che Guevara, who shared it with his soldiers, Sturla insists on giving me a taste of this bitter, stimulant traditional drink in its gourd, making me suck it up through the bombilla.
In the eyes of Cardinal Sturla, the question of violence represents the fundamental difference between ‘liberation theology’ and ‘the people’s theology’. In his view, it was even legitimate for the Church to reject Guevarist priests who took up arms and joined the Latin American guerrillas.
In Buenos Aires, the Lutheran pastor Lisandro Orlov still identifies the subtle differences: ‘Liberation theology and the people’s theology are similar. I would say that the latter is the Argentinian version of the former. It remains very populist, let’s say Peronist [from the former Argentinian president Juan Péron]. It is very typical of Bergoglio, who was never on the left but who was a Peronist!’
Last of all, Marcelo Figueroa, a Protestant who co-presented a well-known television programme with Bergoglio on the subject of interreligious tolerance, and whom I interviewed at the famous Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires, commented: ‘We might say that Bergoglio is on the left even if in theological terms he is quite conservative. Peronist? I don’t think so. And he isn’t really a liberation theologian either. A Guevarist? He might agree with some of Che Guevara’s ideas, but not with his practices. You can’t put him in any particular box. Most of all he’s a Jesuit.’
Figueroa is the first to have used a comparison with Che Guevara, and other Argentinian priests that I’ve interviewed also present the same image. It’s an interesting one. Not, of course, the picture of the warlike, criminal Che Guevara of Havana, the sectarian revolutionary compañero with blood on his hands, or the indoctrinated guerrilla fighter of Bolivia. Che’s theoretical and practical violence isn’t Francis’s style. But the future pope was not indifferent to this ‘people’s poetry’, that sort of slightly naïve romanticism, and he was fascinated by the myth of Che, like so many Argentinians and so many young rebels around the world (Bergoglio was 23 at the time of the Cuban revolution). And in any case, how could he not have been seduced by his compatriot: the young Buenos Aires doctor who left his country by motorbike in search of the ‘peripheries’ of Latin America; who went on the road to discover poverty, misery, exploited workers, Indians and all the ‘wretched of the earth’? That’s what the pope likes: the ‘first’ Guevara, still compassionate, generous and relatively unideological, sensitive rebellion and social asceticism, the one who rejects privileges and, always holding a book in his hands, reads poems. If Francis’s thought leans to some extent towards Guevarism (and not Castrism or Marxism), it is less because of his Leninist catechism than due to his slightly naïve romanticism, and the legend that is ultimately disconnected from any kind of reality.
We can see it: we’re a long way from the image that the Catholic extreme right tries to attach to Francis – that of a ‘communist’ or ‘marxist’ Pope, as several bishops and nuncios in Rome had no compunction in saying to me. They accuse him at random of bringing Muslim migrants back from the island of Lesbos (and no Christians); of siding with the displaced people; of wanting to sell churches to help the poor; and of course of using gay-friendly slogans. These criticisms point to a political agenda rather than a strictly Catholic position.
Francis a communist? Does that even mean anything? Figueroa is amazed by the bad faith of the anti-Bergoglio opposition, which, with its far-right cardinals, the Raymond Burkes and Robert Sarahs, looks like an American-style Tea Party movement!
Before they were Roman, Pope Francis’s chief enemies were Argentinian. It’s interesting to go back to the source of the anti-Bergoglio opposition, since it’s so revealing in terms of our subject. Let’s now focus on three major figures in the very special context of the Argentinian dictatorship: the nuncio Pio Laghi, the Archbishop of La Plata, Héctor Aguer, and the future cardinal, Leonardo Sandri.
The first of these, a nuncio to Buenos Aires from 1974 until 1980, only clashed with Jorge Bergoglio much later, when he became a cardinal and ran the Congregation for Catholic Education. During his years in Argentina, he was still close to the military junta, who were responsible for at least fifteen thousand deaths by firing squad, around thirty thousand ‘desaparecidos’ (disappeared) and a million exiles. For a long time, Pio Laghi’s attitude has been subject to criticism, not least because the nuncio liked playing tennis with one of the dictators. However, a number of people I have interviewed, such as the theologian and friend of the pope, Juan Carlos Scannone, or Argentina’s former ambassador to the Vatican, Eduardo Valdés, put this friendship and his collaboration with the dictatorship into perspective.
As for Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, who was Pio Laghi’s deputy in Argentina in the late 1980s, he said to me during an interview in Rome: ‘It’s true that Laghi engaged in dialogue with Videla [one of the dictators], but it was a more subtle form of politics than is admitted today. He was trying to persuade him to change tack.’
The archives declassified by the American government and several witness statements that I collected in Buenos Aires and Rome show, on the contrary, that Pio Laghi was an accomplice of the military, a CIA informer and an introverted homosexual. On the other hand – and no surprise here – the Vatican archives, which have also been partly declassified, tend to exonerate him.
The main thing that emerges from the reading of 4,600 declassified secret notes and documents from the CIA and the State Department, which we have been able to consult in detail, is the nuncio’s closeness to the United States Embassy. In a series of memos from 1975 and 1976 that I have at my disposal, Laghi tells the American ambassador and his collaborators everything. He constantly pleads the case of the dictators Videla and Viola, who he says are ‘good men’ who want to ‘correct the abuses’ of the dictatorship. The nuncio clears the military of their crimes, the violence coming as much from the government, he says, as from the ‘Marxist’ opposition. He also denies, to the American agents, that priests might be persecuted in Argentina. (At least a dozen were murdered.)
According to my sources, Pio Laghi’s homosexuality might explain his positions, and might have played a part in his closeness to the dictatorship – a template that we will encounter many times. Of course, that did not predispose him to cooperation, but by making him vulnerable in the eyes of the military, who knew his predilections, it could have forced him to remain silent. However, Laghi went further: he chose to socialize actively with the fascistoid gay mafia surrounding the regime.
‘Pio Laghi was an ally of the dictatorship,’ says Lisandro Orlov, a Lutheran pastor who was a genuine opponent of the military junta, and one of the men best acquainted with the Argentinian Catholic Church, whom I interviewed several times at his home in Buenos Aires and then in Paris.
One of the ‘madres de la Plaza de Mayo’, the famous group of mothers of the desaparecidos whose public demonstrations every Thursday, at 3.30 p.m. in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires I was able to witness, also testified against Laghi in court.
Finally, several investigative journalists that I have m
et are currently investigating the links between Laghi and the dictatorship, and the nuncio’s double life. They talked to me particularly about his ‘taxi boys’, an Argentinian euphemism for escorts. New revelations will be made public in the coming years.
Under the dictatorship, Héctor Aguer and Leonardo Sandri were still young Argentinian priests, certainly influential, but without any major responsibility. Much later, the former would become Archbishop of La Plata, while the latter, a future nuncio and cardinal, would be appointed Vatican ‘substitute’ in 2000, or ‘minister’ of the interior of the holy see, and one of the most influential prelates of the Catholic Church under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Both have been long-term enemies of Jorge Bergoglio, who, once he was made pope, would force Aguer to retire just a week after his seventy-fifth birthday, and would always keep his distance from Sandri.
According to several witness statements, the two Argentinians, having become friends, were particularly ‘understanding’ towards the dictatorship. Close to the most reactionary currents of Catholicism (Opus Dei for Aguer, later the Legion of Christ for Sandri), they were both violent opponents of liberation theology. They liked the regime’s slogan ‘Dios y Patria’, a mixture of national revolution and Catholic faith.
Even today, Héctor Aguer is seen by the press as an ‘ultra-conservative’, a ‘right-wing fascist’ (la derecha fascista), a ‘crusader’, an ‘accomplice of the dictatorship’, or a ‘fundamentalist’. In spite of his affected voice – when we meet, he quotes Madama Butterfly by heart, in Italian – he is also reputed to be an extreme homophobe, and he acknowledged having been in the front line against gay marriage in Argentina. While he denies any ideological kinship with the dictatorship, he is antagonistic towards liberation theology, ‘which has always carried the Marxist virus’.
‘Aguer is on the far right of the Argentinian Church,’ explains Miriam Lewin, an Argentinian journalist for Channel 13 who was imprisoned during the dictatorship. (I wasn’t able to meet Aguer during my trips to Buenos Aires, but my Argentinian and Chilean researcher, Andrés Herrera, interviewed him at his summer residence in Tandil, a town 360 kilometres from Buenos Aires. Aguer spent his holidays there with about thirty seminarians, and Andrés was invited to lunch with the elderly archbishop surrounded by ‘los muchachos’ (the boys), as he calls them, several of whom seemed to him to ‘embody all the stereotypes of homosexuality’.)
As for Sandri, whom I was able to interview in Rome, and whom we will encounter once again when he becomes unavoidable in the Vatican, he already appears, during his Argentinean years, on the far right of the Catholic political spectrum. A friend of the nuncio Pio Laghi and an enemy of Jorge Bergoglio, his failure to condemn the dictatorship was offensive and rumours abounded concerning his behaviour, his contacts, his bromances and his toughness. According to the testimony of a Jesuit who studied with him at the Metropolitan Seminary in Buenos Aires, his youth was stormy, and his trouble-making well known even at the seminary. Even as a teenager ‘he surprised us with his desire to charm his superiors intellectually, and he reported all the rumours circulating about the seminarians to them,’ my source tells me.
Several other people, like the theologian Juan Carlos Scannone and the biblical scholar Lisandro Orlov, described Sandri’s Argentinian years to me and supplied me with first-hand information. Their testimonies concur. Because of his anti-conformist image, was Sandri forced by rumours to leave Argentina after the end of the dictatorship? Feeling frail, did he need to get away? It’s one hypothesis. The fact remains that having become right-hand man to Juan Carlos Aramburu, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Sandri was sent to Rome to become a diplomat. He would never return to live in his country. Appointed to Madagascar and then to the United States, where he became deputy to Pio Laghi in Washington and kept company with the ultra-conservatives of the American Christian far right, he went on to be appointed apostolic nuncio to Venezuela and then Mexico – where he was pursued by rumours about his worldliness and extremism, according to several witness statements that I gathered in Caracas and Mexico. (In his ‘Testimonianza’, Archbishop Viganò would, without supplying any proof, suspect Sandri of covering up for sexual abuse in the exercise of his functions in Venezuela and Rome, and ‘having been ready to hide them’.) In 2000 he settled in Rome, where he would effectively become ‘Interior Minister’ to John Paul II.
In this overall context, Jorge Bergoglio’s attitude under the dictatorship seems braver than has generally been admitted. With regard to Pio Laghi, Héctor Aguer, Leonardo Sandri and an episcopacy whose prudence bordered on connivance, and many priests who got involved with fascism, the future pope demonstrated an undeniable spirit of resistance. He wasn’t a hero, certainly, but he didn’t collaborate with the regime.
The lawyer Eduardo Valdés, who was Argentinian ambassador to the holy see in the 2010s, and who was close to the president, Cristina Kirchner, receives Andrés and me in his private ‘Peronist’ café in the centre of Buenos Aires. He’s a chatty character, which suits me, and I let him talk, with a voice recorder in plain sight. He sums up what he sees as Francis’s ideology (liberation theology in an Argentinian Peronist sauce), and tells me about the ecclesiastical complicities with the military junta. We also talk about the nuncio Pio Laghi, the Archbishop of La Plata, Héctor Aguer, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, and several other clerics who were notorious opponents of Cardinal Bergoglio. The ambassador, now throwing caution to the wind, tells us amid great explosions of Peronist laughter about the outlandish lifestyles and frolics of members of the Argentinian bishops’ conference or their entourage. If he is to be believed, these clergy included countless ‘rigid’ individuals who are in fact leading a double life. (This information would be confirmed by other bishops and priests that I met in Buenos Aires, and by the militant LGBT campaigner Marcelo Ferreyra, who has very complete files, drawn up with his lawyers, about the most homophobic and most outspoken prelates in Argentina.)
Soon, in Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Cuba and the 11 countries of Latin America where I carried out investigations for this book, I would discover similar behaviour. And always there is this well-established rule of The Closet, which the future pope fully grasped during his Argentinian years: the most homophobic clergy are often the most enthusiastic practitioners.
There is one last point that allows us to explain the positions of Cardinal Bergoglio once he was made pope: the debate around civil unions (2002–7) and gay marriage (2009–10). Against all expectations, in July 2010 Argentina actually became the first Latin American country to recognize marriage for same-sex couples.
Much has been written on the equivocal attitude of the future pope, who never demonstrated any great clarity on the subject when he was in Buenos Aires. To sum up his position, we may consider that Francis has been relatively moderate with regard to civil unions, refusing to incite bishops to take to the streets, but he has opposed homosexual marriage with all his strength. It should be said that the first civil partnerships occurred only slowly in Argentina, on the basis of local decisions, making large-scale mobilization difficult, and it was only same-sex marriage, which was debated in parliament and which President Kirchner was keen to instigate, that prompted a national debate.
Bergoglio’s detractors point out that he was ambiguous even on civil unions, saying everything and its opposite when these were introduced in the district of Buenos Aires – but in fact he said little on the subject. We are reduced to interpreting his silences!
‘I think that Jorge [Bergoglio] was in favour of civil unions; for him it was a law that echoed the civil rights movement. He would have accepted them if [the Vatican] hadn’t been hostile to them,’ Marcelo Figueroa comments.
The close friends of the future pope that I have met stress the difficulties Bergoglio faced from Rome when acting in favour of gay rights in Argentina. In private, Bergoglio had supported the proposed law as a good compromise for avoiding marriage. ‘He was very isolated,’ his friends remark, however
. In their view, an extremely violent battle took place between the Vatican and the future pope on the subject, locally relayed by ambiguous priests who finally made him renounce his most overt ideas.
The man in view in Argentina was, in fact, the Archbishop of La Plata, Héctor Aguer. This visceral homophobe was close to Benedict XVI, an important fact when it came to countering Bergoglio’s too ‘violently moderate’ ideas. Wishing to get rid of the Cardinal of Buenos Aires as quickly as possible, Benedict XVI was said to have promised Aguer that he would appoint him in Bergoglio’s place as soon as the latter reached the maximum age of 75. Knowing that he had support in high places. Aguer, who was usually more effeminate, went into macho overkill. Surrounded by seminarians, the prelate launched a violent campaign against civil unions and gay marriage.
‘Cardinals Sodano and Sandri, then Bertone, had been managing Argentina from Rome, with Archbishop Héctor Aguer and the nuncio Adriano Bernardino on the ground, against Bergoglio,’ Lisandro Orlov explains to me. (On the day of Francis’s election, Aguer’s nose was so out of joint that he refused to ring the bells of the archbishopric of La Plata, as tradition demands; as for Nuncio Bernardini, who was equally shocked, he would fall ill …)
So the future pope had no room to manoeuvre with regard to Rome. Witnesses confirm, for example, that all the names of priests put forward by Cardinal Bergoglio to be consecrated as bishops – generally progressives – were rejected by the Vatican, which appointed conservative candidates in their place.
‘Héctor Aguer wanted to trap Bergoglio. He radicalized the positions of the Catholic Church on gay marriage to force him out of his silence on the subject. In order to understand Bergoglio you must listen to his silences about civil unions and his words against gay marriage!’ Lisandro Orlov adds.
This point is confirmed by Father Guillermo Marcó, who was at the time Bergoglio’s personal assistant and spokesman. Marcó received us, Andres and me, in his office, a former nunciature and now university chaplaincy in the centre of Buenos Aires. ‘Since the Vatican was hostile to civil unions, Bergoglio had to follow that line as an archbishop. As his spokesman, I recommended avoiding the subject and not saying anything about it, to avoid having to criticize them. After all, it was a union without a sacrament, and not a marriage: why talk about it at all? Jorge validated that strategy. I told the homosexual organizations in Buenos Aires that we wouldn’t express an opinion on the subject, and asked them not to involve us in that battle; that was our objective,’ Marcó tells me.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 11
