The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Jorge spent his first twenty years in that little house on calle Membrillar, his life revolving mainly around Flores and Almagro. Even after he left home, he seldom went far. During his thirty-three years as a Jesuit, he was mostly in San Miguel, in the province of Buenos Aires, a little more than an hour away; and in his fifties he returned to Flores as an auxiliary bishop. As archbishop in his sixties he lived in the Plaza de Mayo, half an hour directly east of Flores by bus or subway. Before he was made Christ’s vicar on earth, he planned to live out his remaining years in Flores—specifically in Room 13 on the ground floor of the clergy retirement home on calle Condarco 581, which was being kept for him.

  Seven blocks south of the Bergoglio house was their parish church, the impressive Basilica of St. Joseph of Flores, which hosted the funeral of Argentina’s first president, Manuel Dorrego. It was here, at seventeen, that Jorge had an experience in confession that unlocked his vocation, and whenever he returned as archbishop he would kiss the ornate wooden confessional where God had surprised him.

  The basilica sits on Rivadavia Avenue, which was in colonial times the “royal road,” the camino real, linking Buenos Aires to Upper Peru. Later it became the main east-west artery, marking the boundary between the wealthy north of Buenos Aires and its poorer southern half. Along the Rivadavia, underground, runs the subway to the Plaza de Mayo.

  A few blocks north of Membrillar Street is the Mercy Sisters’ convent, in whose little chapel the Bergoglios often heard Mass. The convent occupies the whole side of the square named after it, the Plaza de la Misericordia, or Mercy Square. At kindergarten here, Jorge hated to be inside the classroom, wanting always to be outside. The nuns nowadays laugh that this was the first indication of what is now the pope’s plan for the Church.

  A Mercy nun here was one of the three key women in his childhood. Sister Dolores Tortolo prepared him for his First Communion (“from her I received a catechetical formation that was balanced, optimistic, joyful and responsible,” he later recalled) at the age of eight. She would be a source of strength when, as a young seminarian, he lay close to death, and she was present at his first Mass in 1969. Whenever he came back to Flores, as Jesuit and later archbishop, he visited her in the convent. He was there in 2000 when she received an award for a lifetime’s teaching, and spoke on that occasion of how she taught with her words and life the value of the interior life and fraternal love.

  In the twilight of her life, when she was still mentally alert but physically paralyzed, the then cardinal would carry her to her room.

  “So what was I like as a child?” he would tease her as he lifted her. “Tell the sisters!”

  “You were terrible, terrible, as naughty as anything!” Dolores would cry, and the sisters would fall about laughing. (After he had gone she would tell them, giggling, that that was not true, that Jorgito, “little George,” was always a good boy, happy and affectionate.) When Sister Dolores died in 2006, he spent the night in prayer next to her body in the convent chapel.

  The sisters showed Jorge the meaning of God’s mercy, and he would always speak of it, taking as his bishop’s motto the Venerable Bede’s account of Jesus recruiting the tax collector Matthew, miserando atque eligendo, which translates clumsily as “He saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him.” Bergoglio liked the way Latin had “mercy” as a verb, miserando, and so created the Spanish misericordiando—an activity of the divine, something God does to you. “Dejáte misericordiar,” he would tell the guilt-ridden and the scrupulous, “let yourself be ‘mercy’d.’” It was typical of the way he idiosyncratically appropriated a word, creating a bergoglismo.1

  Speaking to journalists on the flight back from Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, Francis would proclaim a new age, a kairos, of mercy, recalling how, in the Gospel, rather than call him to account for the money he had squandered, the Prodigal Son’s father instead threw a party. “He didn’t just wait for him; he went out to meet him. That’s mercy, that’s kairos.”

  All his life, Bergoglio has insisted on this quality of God who takes the initiative, who comes out to find us, and surprises us with his forgiveness. “That is the religious experience: the astonishment of meeting someone who has been waiting for you all along,” the cardinal said in 2010. “Dios te primerea,” he added. “God beats you to it.” Primerear is Buenos Aires slang meaning literally “to first” somebody. Used of God it is a bergoglismo that makes you smile, for you have a picture of someone dashing ahead, cheekily snatching the place you thought was yours.

  * * *

  THE single greatest childhood influence on Jorge Bergoglio was his grandmother Rosa, a formidable woman of deep faith and political skill, with whom he spent most of his first five years.

  Back in Turin, Rosa had been heavily involved in Catholic Action, a national movement created by the Italian bishops that in the 1920s sought to defend the Church’s independence from the all-absorbing state of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Rosa was a regular speaker who worked closely with the Catholic Action national women’s leaders of her day. The topics of her talks may not have been incendiary—Jorge kept one of her pamphlets, entitled “Saint Joseph in the Life of the Single Woman, the Widow and the Wife”—but because the fascists saw Catholic Action as a rival to the state, its speakers were constantly harassed and repressed, eventually provoking Pius XI’s powerful 1931 antitotalitarian letter, Non Abbiamo Bisogno. When the fascists closed the venue where she was due to speak, Rosa would stand on a soapbox in the street, defying the henchmen; and one time she took to the pulpit of her church to publicly deplore Mussolini. The dictatorship was one of the factors behind her decision to emigrate.

  “My strongest childhood memory is that life shared between my parents’ house and my grandparents’ house,” Bergoglio recalled. “The first part of my childhood, from the age of one, I spent with my grandmother.” Rosa began taking in Jorge after his brother Oscar was born, collecting him each morning and dropping him back in the afternoon. Rosa and Giovanni spoke with each other in Piedmontese, which Jorge learned from them—“I had the privilege of partaking in the language of their memories”—to the extent that today he can recite much of the romantic verse of the great Piedmontese poet, Nino Costa. Because his parents were anxious to integrate and therefore to downplay their origins, Jorge’s grandparents were key to the boy’s sense of identity as an Argentine of Italian heritage. His father, Mario, in contrast, spoke only in Spanish; he was the immigrant moving on, seeking acceptance, never looking back to Piedmont with nostalgia, “which meant he must have felt it,” Bergoglio later recalled, “since he denied it for some reason.”

  Bergoglio has always been convinced of the vital importance of grandparents—and especially the grandmother—as guardians of a precious reserve parents often ignore or reject. “I was lucky to know my four grandparents,” he recalled in 2011. “The wisdom of the elderly has helped me greatly; that is why I venerate them.” In 2012 he told Father Isasmendi on the community radio of the Villa 21 shantytown:

  The grandmother is in the hearth, the grandfather, too, but above all the grandmother; she’s like the reserve. She’s the moral, religious, and cultural reserve. She’s the one who passes on the whole story. Mom and Dad are over there, working, engaged in this and that, they’ve got a thousand things to do. The grandmother is in the house more; the grandfather, too. They tell you things from before. My grandfather used to tell me stories about the 1914 war, stories they lived through. They tell you about life as they lived it, not stories from books, but their own stories, of their own lives. That’s what I’d like to say to the grandparents listening. Tell them things about life, so the kids know what life is.

  Rosa was a wonderful faith transmitter. She introduced Jorge to the saints and taught him the Rosary; and on Good Friday she took her grandchildren to see the crucified Christ and told them how he was dead but would rise on Sunday. Her faith recognized human goodness beyond the boundaries of religion. If at home with his parents the C
atholicism was rather puritanical—“If someone close to the family divorced or separated, they could not enter your house,” he recalled, “and they believed all Protestants were going to hell”—he learned a different message from Rosa. When he was about five or six, two women from the Salvation Army passed on the street. “I asked her if they were nuns, because they had those little hats they used to wear. She answered, ‘No. But they are good people.’” Looking back he realized that this was “the wisdom of true religion. These were good women who did good things.”

  He recalled Rosa taking him to Mass at the Salesian oratory of St. Francis de Sales on Hipólito Yrigoyen Street, explaining that the church had been visited by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli when he presided at the 1934 International Eucharistic Congress in Buenos Aires. She would often tell stories about that mind-blowing event, pulling out old newspaper cuttings and explaining how that October 12 more than a million people had received Communion, almost half of them men (amazingly for the time, when many more women than men attended church); and how hundreds of thousands of people prayed in the streets of the city and queued to confess down the Avenida de Mayo. The Bergoglios were thrilled when Pacelli was elected Pius XII in 1939. Shortly after, Germany invaded Poland, World War II broke out, and émigrés in Buenos Aires spent years deprived of news of their families. Jorge would remember how, when he was nine, Italians celebrated the end of the war, rushing to give each other news of their relatives after Mass at the Basilica of Flores.

  His grandmother also taught him to love Italian literature, reading to him above all the great novel by Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), whose famous opening (“That branch of Lake Como that turns off to the south between two unbroken chains of mountains…”) Jorge learned by heart. The Betrothed, which was first published in 1827, would always have a special place in his affections. It is the Italian equivalent of War and Peace or Les Misérables, an epic of love and forgiveness amid war and famine, with an unforgettable cast of pious lovers, cruel nobles, virtuous peasants, and a great range of ecclesiastical figures: a worldly country priest, a saintly friar, and an austere cardinal.

  At the heart of the story are two lovers, Renzo and Lucia, whose desire to marry is thwarted by their parish priest, Don Abbondio, who is cowed by the local nobleman, Don Rodrigo, who lusts for Lucia. The lovers appeal to a saintly Capuchin Franciscan, Father Cristoforo, who confronts Don Rodrigo, who is enraged and vows to kill Renzo and abduct Lucia. The plot escalates as Father Cristoforo hides the lovers, who are separated, while Rodrigo secures the help of the murderous baron L’Innominato (“The Unnamed”) in kidnapping Lucia. Enter, at this point, the austere and holy cardinal, Federigo Borromeo, in whose presence L’Innominato breaks down and confesses his sins. The novel’s dénouement takes place in a lazaretto, a field hospital for victims of the plague outside Milan, where there are heartrending scenes of forgiveness and reconciliation, as victims and perpetrators come face-to-face at the instigation of the friar.

  The Betrothed is a complex, multilayered novel with many themes that would be dear to Bergoglio as a Jesuit, bishop, and later pope: the mercy of God, offered even to the worst sinners; the contrast between the cowardly worldliness of some priests and the fearless austerity of others; the corruption of wealth and power in contrast to the virtuousness of ordinary people; the power of prayer and of forgiveness; the Church as a battlefield hospital. Cardinal Borromeo’s pages-long rebuke of the cowardly Don Abbondio—“You should have loved, my son; loved and prayed. Then you would have seen that the forces of iniquity have power to threaten and to wound, but no power to command”—could almost be a manifesto for Francis’s reforms.

  His grandmother remained Bergoglio’s great love. In the 1970s, by then widowed and frail, when she was looked after by Italian nuns in San Miguel, he visited often. “He adored her, she was his weakness,” recalls one of them, Sister Catalina. “She only ever paid attention to what he said.” As Rosa lay dying, Jorge kept vigil by her bed, holding her body until life left it. “He told us: ‘At this moment my grandmother is at the most important point of her existence. She is being judged by God. This is the mystery of death.’ A few minutes later,” said Sister Catalina, “he got up and left, as serene as ever.”

  With Rosa and the maternal grandparents in the background, his parents in love with each other, and siblings at home, Jorge was a happy, well-adjusted child in a contented, stable Italian home. Mario was an essentially joyful man who seldom got angry, and in this, says María Elena, father and eldest son were alike. The Salesian family priest, Don Enrico, was a supportive presence, a regular visitor especially at the Sívori house where the whole clan would gather to eat ravioli with him.

  Jorge’s barrio had many playmates, who used to come together in the local square. Primary school (No. 8 Coronel Pedro Cerviño, at no. 358 Varela Street) was close by: there he was a diligent student who passed all his subjects. With his first-grade teacher, Estela Quiroga, he maintained a lifelong correspondence, relating to her each stage in his journey of faith, and she was present at his ordination to the priesthood in 1969.

  María Elena—known in the family as Malena—was twelve years younger than Jorge. “I was the little doll and he was el viejo, the old man,” she laughs. She remembers Sundays best, when they all went to the parish for Mass and came back to lunches that stretched far into the afternoon. Materially, it was a simple existence: “We were poor, with dignity.” There was no car, and they didn’t go on vacation, as better-off middle-class families did. But there was food on the table—Regina’s capelletti with ragú and Piedmontese risotto were high on the family wish list—and clothes to wear, even if they were recycled. “Mama succeeded in salvaging some article of clothing for us, even from our father’s things: a ripped shirt or fraying pants got repaired and sewn up, and became ours. Maybe my brother’s and my extreme frugality comes from this.”

  Faith was strong, and conventional. Mario led the family in praying the Rosary when he got back from work, and they were all at Mass on Sunday. But Jorge’s father, whose qualification as an accountant was not recognized in Argentina, had to take on many jobs to make ends meet, and he often sat at home on weekends with huge ledgers, while playing operas and Italian crooners on his Victrola phonograph. To relax, the family played brisca, an Italian whist. Listening to opera with his mother and siblings on Saturday afternoons is among Jorge’s fondest memories. To keep the children’s attention, he recalled, Regina would offer a running commentary, whispering, for example, during Otello, “Listen carefully: he’s about to kill her.” Between the ages of ten and twelve his parents took Jorge to every Italian movie being screened in Buenos Aires that starred Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi. La Strada and Rome, Open City were his favorites.

  Then there was soccer. Jorge, a lanky kid, liked to kick around with friends but wasn’t much good: he had flat feet. But Ernesto Lach, who used to play with him behind the parish church of the Miraculous Medal, says he was good on tactics, an opportunistic striker. Most of his playmates agree, however, that he was more at home with books. Everyone remembers him as studious, always with his nose in a text. But that didn’t stop Jorge obsessively following soccer. From his dad he inherited a passion for San Lorenzo, the smallest and pluckiest of Buenos Aires’s three major teams, founded by the Salesian missionary Father Lorenzo Massa back in 1907. Massa had been parish priest of St. Anthony of Padua where Mario and Regina met, and the club is under the protection of the Virgin Mary. After the team entered the major league in 1915, Father Massa secured a stadium where they could play known as the Old Gas Meter in neighboring Boedo, where Mario and his sons never missed a match. The team’s big year was Jorge’s tenth, when legendary striker René “the Egg” Pontoni lifted San Lorenzo to hitherto undreamed-of heights. “I didn’t miss a single match of the champion team of ’46, with the great Pontoni,” Bergoglio later told the team.

  Not long after Jorge began his Jesuit formation, in December 1961, Mario died of a
heart attack while watching a match in the stadium. He was just fifty-one. Jorge’s youngest brother, Alberto, who was with Mario at the time, never went back there. When he left for Rome in February 2013, Cardinal Bergoglio took a treasured relic that is with him now in the Vatican. That piece of wood from the Old Gas Meter contains a whirlwind of memories: of Don Enrico, of “the Egg” Pontoni, of his dad and brother, as well as that feeling when a roaring crowd leaps as one from the benches, punching the air. He has remained a lifelong devoted fan of San Lorenzo and, as Pope Francis, he continues to pay his annual membership fee. If you happen to be in St. Peter’s Square during a Wednesday audience, and there’s just been a match, and you have a San Lorenzo shirt on, you’re sure to see Francis with a great grin on his face, finger-signing the score to you as he swings past on the popemobile.

  * * *

  THE Church that Jorge Bergoglio knew as a child in 1940s Argentina was vigorous, nationalistic, and closely identified with that part of Argentine society that transported General Juan Domingo Perón to power in 1946.

  It had been very different in the mid-nineteenth century, before the immigrant flood started. The River Plate region had been on the peripheries of the Spanish colony, and the Church emerged from the internal battles following independence a feeble institution, heavily controlled by the state. The Church had just five bishops in 1869. They had been appointed by the state, had almost no contact with Rome, and showed little initiative. The great Catholics of that time were not bishops but missionaries like the man known as the “gaucho priest,” Father José Gabriel Brochero (1840–1914), whom Francis, shortly after his election, placed on the road to sainthood. Father Brochero rode a mule, wore a poncho, smoked cheroots, drank mate tea from a gourd, and went about building churches, chapels, and schools, opening up paths and passages in the sierras of Córdoba, tending to the poorest in a model life of heroic self-abnegation.