The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  As the immigrants poured into the cities, however, the Argentine Church began to grow both in capacity and in independence from the state. Two dates stand out. The first was 1865, when Buenos Aires was made the primatial see, the mother diocese, which by 1880 had eighty-four priests; the other was 1899, when Latin-American bishops met in Rome to agree to a sweeping range of reforms. The Church in Argentina became Romanized at about the moment when the state achieved dominance over the nation.

  Over the next decades, state and Church developed vigorously alongside each other. As the state set about institution-building—spreading the railroad and the telegraph, creating a standing army—so the Church built seminaries and parishes, while new religious orders, especially of nuns, sprang up to manage hospitals and schools. Most of this activity was concentrated in the cities, especially in Buenos Aires and Córdoba, in contrast to the interior, where the dioceses remained vast, poor, and remote—and where the rural poor continued, until well into the twentieth century, to have little contact with the Church. Popular religion—which Bergoglio would always respect as an evangelized culture—has its origin here: country people ignorant of doctrine but with deep faith who, in the absence of clergy and churches, looked to devotions more than sacraments.

  By the late nineteenth century the Church had grown in size and influence to the point where the liberals began to see it as a rival. In the 1880s, the Argentine government, in a display of secularist zeal, copied France by bringing marriage and education under the control of the state. The civil marriage law made the state the only legal witness to a wedding, while the education law banned Catholic teaching from public schools in favor of a compulsory secular morality that would create enlightened citizens. During the furious debates in Congress—in which the education minister declared the triumph of science over “thousands of years of mystical hysteria”—the government easily crushed the clutch of Catholic deputies and moved to quell the Church’s objections by expelling the Holy See’s apostolic delegate, temporarily suspending the bishops (who were state employees), and sacking the Catholic university teachers who had challenged the new laws. As the historian John Lynch puts it: “Argentina was living disproof that Latin-American liberalism was a tolerant creed.”2

  Yet the government had little appetite for disorder of the sort that had broken out during the conflict, when Freemasons torched churches and anticlerical mobs attacked the Jesuit-run Salvador University. French-style secularism was abandoned in favor of a conservative, almost English model of Church-state relations, in which agnostic rulers supported a tame Church as a bulwark of social order. Unlike in neighboring Chile, where state and Church amicably separated in the 1920s, Catholicism remained the official religion of the Argentine state, while guaranteeing freedom to other faiths. Argentine bishops received their salaries from the government, and the president was until recently required to be a baptized Catholic, with the power to veto the appointment of bishops. Church and nation have remained strongly entwined. Every day, after the 9:00 a.m. weekday Mass at the cathedral, sword-carrying soldiers in ceremonial uniforms march down past the side altars to stand guard at the flag-draped tomb of the liberator, General San Martín. And once a year, the Church reconsecrates the nation at the traditional May 25 Te Deum service, attended by the president and leading politicians, which, until Cardinal Bergoglio turned it into a prophetic challenge, was a tame, reassuring event.

  The first of many papal letters deploring the iniquities of modern capitalism, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891 found a clear echo in Argentina, as did his objections to the free-market idolatry of the wealthy classes. The poverty of the laboring classes and what to do about it—the so-called social question—came to dominate Argentine politics, and lay behind growing social violence: in 1919 the Buenos Aires police chief was killed by an anarchist bomb and hundreds died in the subsequent crackdown. Yet while governments enacted public-order laws, they refused to intervene in the market; Congress blocked attempts by Catholic and socialist deputies to introduce even moderate social reforms.

  The Church ran the only organized labor movement not led by communists or anarchists, and in its social teaching it had a clear alternative to both left- and right-wing ideologies. But attempts to translate these into a clear political alternative to the dominant liberal government foundered: the Christian Democratic Union’s advocacy of the women’s vote, a minimum wage, and labor laws made the bishops uneasy.

  In the early 1920s, however, the accommodation of the bishops to the liberal state received a blow from Rome. When the government tried to name the new archbishop of Buenos Aires, the Christian Democrats and the Jesuits appealed to the pope, who refused the nomination: the post would be vacant for two years before a new candidate was finally agreed on. In the midst of this standoff between the Vatican and the Casa Rosada, the Argentine Church would increasingly find its prophetic voice, one that was sharply critical of liberalism in both economics and politics, and, in Church terms, ultramontane, looking to Rome rather than the state. Catholicism, in short, became antiestablishment. The Church was the major source of protests against the liberal economy and politics of the day, drawing on the social teaching of the popes and new nationalist thinking in Argentina, both of which would influence the Peronist government in the 1940s and 1950s.

  The Church of the 1930s also acquired an impressive capacity for mobilization. The symbolic moment was the 1934 International Eucharistic Congress in Buenos Aires, two years before Jorge Bergoglio was born, but about which he had heard endless stories from his grandmother Rosa. In the history of the Argentine Church, it marks a before and after. The following years witnessed a dramatic expansion, a “Catholic spring”: ten new dioceses were created; Mass attendance rose sharply, along with baptisms and marriages; the seminaries swelled; and vocations finally kept pace with population expansion. Schools multiplied, to the point where three out of four private pupils were educated by the Church.

  It was also an intellectually confident Church, running a network of newspapers, magazines, and radio stations, along with the leading Church publisher of its day, Editorial Difusión, which in the 1930s sold six million books from a catalog of hundreds of titles. In the 1940s to 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Catholics—among them the young Jorge Bergoglio—joined Catholic Action’s study circles. There were marches, leaflets, and speeches that laid the blame for social ills squarely at the feet of liberal capitalism, while urging workers to resist the blandishments of socialism and embrace Catholic social teaching. Yet Catholics and socialists still cooperated in Congress, finally persuading it to pass laws introducing Sunday rest and eight-hour workdays.

  This was the Church—vigorous, confident, a little triumphalist—in which Jorge Bergoglio grew up. It was antiliberal in the particular Argentine sense of that word. Liberal was associated with the free-market, cosmopolitan, rationalist, authoritarian outlook of the Argentine belle époque; in the 1930s, it was a worldview that increasingly came to be seen as antithetical to the national interest.

  The alternative to liberalism was a series of inchoate protests under the umbrella of nationalism. The movement had begun in academia, in studies of history and literature, but it became, in the 1930s, a social and political critique of the prevailing order. In shutting export markets to Argentine goods, the world economic crisis had exposed the country’s dependence on foreigners, and comparative advantage began to look like a slavish subservience—one that the so-called oligarchy defended in its own interest rather than that of the nation as a whole.

  This crisis of the liberal order caused nationalist intellectuals to challenge the liberal myth that Argentina had progressed by spurning its Spanish, colonial heritage; they began to look to an older, more authentic nation that had been suppressed by the liberals’ cult of foreigners. In rejecting political and economic liberalism, the nationalists embraced what liberalism had scorned: the Spanish and Catholic tradition was now vindicated as the more “authentic” heritage, an
d the dictator Rosas came to be seen as a hero, one close to the land and its people.

  Catholics were sympathetic to these new ideas because they rescued Catholic culture as a key actor in Argentine history—one that had been suffocated by what nationalists called foreignizing (extranjerizante) liberalism. Some of the more aristocratic Catholic nationalists looked, ironically, to right-wing movements abroad (this was the age of Franco and Mussolini), but the Argentine Church mainstream steered a course between both liberalism and totalitarianism. What Catholics sought was a government that would give a voice to the new urban masses disenfranchised by the liberal elite. They wanted government to be nationalist in the sense of being faithful to Argentina’s traditions rather than a copy of France or Britain. And they wanted the government to take its economic and social policies from the social teaching of the Church, which meant a state that intervened to curb the excesses of the market and the growing gap between rich and poor.

  By the time of the 1930 military coup, liberal republican democracy in Argentina had few friends. The introduction of universal male suffrage in 1916 had led to the electoral monopoly of a middle-class party, the Radical Civic Union (UCR), known as the Radicals. Despite their name, Radicals did not question the basic tenets of the economic model, but expanded state spending in order to secure electoral support through patronage, earning the enmity of the conservatives, now gathered in the modern successor to the PAN, the National Democratic Party (PDN). In 1930 the army moved to topple the Radicals in the name of rescuing the constitution, eventually handing power to the PDN, who reverted throughout the 1930s to their old practices of stuffing the ballot box, while excluding the Radicals from taking part in elections.

  For this, among other reasons—there were monopoly concessions to the British, and widespread evidence of corruption linking the ruling classes to foreign business interests—the 1930s would be remembered as the infamous decade, the liberal era’s last gasp, sandwiched between two military coups. The second coup came in 1943, in the midst of World War II, when Argentina—maintaining its traditional neutrality, in defiance of the United States’ call for Latin America to back the Allies—was plunged into crisis by a US embargo on arms and industrial goods. The army took power in the midst of rising social protest and anger at electoral fraud, waiting on the outcome of the war. As the Allied victory began to look certain, a group of young army officers, headed by Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, took control.

  Perón grasped that Argentina was on the cusp of revolution, that the old order had passed away and the task was to manage the transition to a new mass politics without falling into communism. While his fellow officers thought only of restoring the status quo after the war’s end, Perón used his formidable political skills to construct a powerful new alliance of interests and values. Deploying the resources of the state at his disposal, he began dispensing favors to the labor unions and reaching out in various ways to the disenfranchised working-class majority. In less than two years he constructed a formidable movement, one that voiced the nationalist and Catholic values of the immigrant classes and offered concrete benefits to the poor.

  When the war ended and elections were called, Perón was arrested; but on October 17, 1945—a date hallowed by Peronists ever since—tens of thousands of workers filled the Plaza de Mayo to demand his release. The army set the colonel free, and he coasted to a decisive electoral victory in February 1946, when Jorge was ten. Perón defeated a rainbow alliance of all the existing “liberal” political parties, ranging from left to right, assembled by the US ambassador in Buenos Aires, Spruille Braden, who misread Perón as a fascist. Perón won a second term in 1952, which ended three years later. Peronism transformed the Argentine political landscape and dominated the adolescence of the future pope.

  * * *

  THE first real crisis in the Bergoglio home happened in February 1948, when Jorge was twelve, and Perón had been in power for two years. As a result of complications with the birth of María Elena, Regina was bedridden for some time, suffering from a form of paralysis. While Rosa helped with the two youngest children, Alberto and María Elena, the family priest, Don Enrico Pozzoli, hastily found places for the three eldest at Salesian boarding schools. While Marta was sent to the María Auxiliadora school in Almagro, Jorge and Oscar were sent in 1949 to the splendidly named Wilfrid Barón de los Santos Ángeles school in the western district of Ramos Mejía.

  Jorge, who boarded as a sixth grader, loved the school, which was named after a French immigrant millionaire whose widow funded its construction in 1925. “The day shot by like an arrow; there was never time to get bored,” Bergoglio recalled in 1990 in a letter to the Salesian provincial, Father Cayetano Bruno. The school was permeated by a natural Catholic culture, in which going to Mass was as normal as studying or playing. The hours of studying in silence developed his concentration and focus, and he learned a wide variety of hobbies and skills: Father Lambruschini taught him to sing, Father Avilés how to make copies using gelatine, and a Ukrainian priest taught him how to serve Mass in the eastern rite—an unusual choice of pastime for an adolescent, but not at the Wilfrid Barón de los Santos Ángeles school.

  In both study and sport, they were taught to compete “as Christians”—to strive for success, but never despising those who came second. They learned about sin, but also forgiveness: the Salesians “weren’t afraid to confront us with the language of the Cross of Jesus,” he recalled in the letter. Jorge learned to pray before going to sleep, to ask favors of the Virgin, and to respect the figure of the pope, then Pius XII. The Salesians also taught him a love of chastity, which Jorge—who arrived in the school just as he was coming into adolescence—came to see as healthy. “There was no sexual obsession in the college,” Bergoglio wrote to Don Bruno. “I found much more sexual obsession later on among educators and psychologists who claimed to let it all hang out, but who looked at everything through a Freudian lens which saw sex everywhere.”

  Jorge’s conscience developed fast that year: “I learned, almost unconsciously, to seek the meaning of things.” He became aware of the existence of truth as something outside himself, of the need of values and virtues, and of his own responsibility for the world. The Salesians spoke often of the needs of the poor and encouraged students to go without in order to give to those in need.

  He also learned about death. One night in October 1949 Monsignor Miguel Raspanti, one of the Salesian school inspectors, told the boys about the passing of his mother a few weeks earlier. “That night, without being afraid, I felt that one day I would die, too, and that it was the most natural thing,” he told Don Bruno. He began to hear stories of how the old Salesians left this earth, and what made for what they called a good death.

  At the end of the school year the Bergoglio boys returned home to find their mother, still unable to stand, peeling potatoes from a chair, with all the ingredients for their meal laid out. “Then she’d tell us how to mix and cook them, because we didn’t have a clue,” Bergoglio remembered. “‘Now put this in the pot and that in the pan,’ she’d explain. That’s how we all learned to cook.”

  Jorge first felt the stirrings of a vocation around age twelve or thirteen, although at that stage he was thinking about being a priest “in the way that you think about being an engineer, a doctor, or a musician,” he recalled to Father Isasmendi. He clearly had it in mind when he fell in love with a girl next door of the same age, Amalia Damonte, to whom, in a burst of pubescent passion, he made a less than romantic offer. “If I don’t become a priest, I’ll marry you,” he told her in a letter in which he also drew a pretty house with a red-tile roof where he said they would live. (The girl’s father was furious: he beat her and forbade her to see him.) At school, he prayed intensely to discover his vocation following a talk by a Father Cantarutti, and discussed the possibility of priesthood with another of the priests, Father Martínez, who was famous as a “fisher of vocations.” But the following year, 1950, he began secondary school, and the ide
a was pushed to the back of his mind until, four years later, the candle was lit again, and this time the flame did not go out.

  * * *

  AT the time Jorge began secondary school, Perón had been president for nearly four years and Argentina had been turned on its head. It was the high noon of the first Peronist term, remembered with awe even today as a time of massive state spending, a distribution of wealth in favor of the working class, and rapid industrialization—a nationalist project that in almost every respect reversed the previous liberal model. These were new times: Britain, impoverished by war, was no longer a key trading partner, and while the United States supplied manufactured goods, it already produced at home what Argentina offered to export. A more self-sufficient economy was needed. Perón’s idea was to increase wages to create more consumption and encourage industries to meet that demand, while nationalizing everything that he could, such as oil, railways, and trams. Like the thinking behind Roosevelt’s New Deal, the assumption of Peronism was that the economy could solve social problems and that the state could steer the economy.

  The arguments about what Peronism was and is—authoritarian populism? left-wing nationalism?—miss the deeper point that it was a vehicle for Perón, not for any particular ideology. And Perón, far from being an ideologue, was an intuitive political genius with an uncanny ability to articulate the interests and hopes of the new classes—the immigrants and their children, the folk arriving in the cities in search of a better life. He understood their hopes and dreams, for he was one of them. The story of the handsome colonel and his pretty radio actress wife, Evita—both were born out of wedlock in small-town provincial Buenos Aires, conquering social stigma and disadvantage to make it to the top—and how they built a political movement that resonated with poorer Argentines, has been told often, in books and musicals and films. But outside the theater and myth, the reason that Peronism has endured beyond the deaths of its creators is that, in articulating the values and interests of this new Argentina, Perón created something far bigger than himself: a movement rather than a party, a culture rather than an interest group, a political hybrid so popular and absorbent that for decades it has dominated modern Argentina, overshadowing even those elections from which it was banned.