The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Colonna, who describes Jorge when she knew him as “very considerate, very sociable,” says his great love musically was tango. “Jorge was a great tango dancer,” she said. “He liked tangos a lot.”

  Tango, Bergoglio said in 2010, “comes from deep within me.”

  The emblematic sound of Buenos Aires was born as accordion music accompanying ritualized fights between tough men in turn-of-the-century tenements, especially down in the port area of La Boca. But over time it became respectable, morphing in the 1920s into music for couples to dance to—flirtatious, competitive, haughty. Then words were added: in the 1930s and 1940s, when the silky-voiced and astonishingly handsome Carlos Gardel crooned “El Día Que Me Quieras” (“The Day That You Will Love Me”) on the big screen, tango became a craze, both in Argentina and abroad—and Gardel’s tragic early death (which in Argentina has a national resonance as deep as the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the United States) only heightened his fame.

  By the 1950s tango had been domesticated as dance music—Jorge particularly liked Juan D’Arienzo’s orchestra—but it was also a poetic song form, to be listened to rather than danced to. Tangos used lunfardo, the dialect of Buenos Aires that creatively mixed Italian with old Spanish, creating memorable words and images that as cardinal Bergoglio often drew on. He followed the work of composers such as Enrique Santos Discépolo and singers such as Julio Sosa and Ada Falcón—the two contemporaries he admired most—for whom tango was also a form of social commentary, a lament for the erosion of values. Discépolo’s “Cambalache,” for example, sung furiously by a pin-striped Sosa in 1955 with cigarette in hand, propping up a bar, uses the clever image of a pawnshop window, in which a Bible is seen sobbing next to an old radiator. In the 2010 book El Jesuita, Cardinal Bergoglio quoted “Cambalache”’s famous line—“what the heck, everything’s the same, and there in hell we’ll all see each other anyway”—to deplore contemporary relativism.

  Bergoglio always listened to tangos, including in the period of their revival, led by Ástor Piazzolla, in the 1970s. As a Jesuit he got to know Azucena Maizani, the first major woman tango singer, who dressed as a man to be taken seriously. When he gave her the last rites in 1970, he met around her deathbed the great tango artist Hugo del Carril, who was also from Flores.

  When he was elected pope, Bergoglio’s love of tango was cited by Argentina’s media as proof—along with his devotion to San Lorenzo, and his attachment to the ubiquitous smoky green Argentine tea called mate—of his guy-next-door qualities. But in the 1950s tango was still edgy; it still, if dimly, suggested lipstick-smudged hookers fleeing pin-striped hoodlums down dark alleys. For a teenager thinking of priesthood, the attraction to it was unusual, and a sign that even then, in the confusion of adolescence, the margins beckoned.

  * * *

  GOD “got in there first” with Jorge on September 21, 1953, when he was six weeks shy of his seventeenth birthday. It was the start of spring, when across Buenos Aires the jacarandas detonate in purple sprays. He was on his way to meet his girlfriend together with his Catholic Action and school friends to celebrate National Students’ Day. As he was walking down the Avenida Rivadavia past the Basilica of St. Joseph he knew so well, he felt an urge to go inside. “I went in, I felt I had to go in—those things you feel inside and you don’t know what they are,” he explained to Father Isasmendi.

  I looked, it was dark, it was a morning in September, maybe 9:00 a.m., and I saw a priest walking, I didn’t know him, he wasn’t one of the parish clergy. And he sits down in one of the confessionals, the last confessional as you’re looking down the left side at the altar. I don’t quite know what happened next, I felt like someone grabbed me from inside and took me to the confessional. Obviously I told him my things, I confessed … but I don’t know what happened.

  When I had finished my confession I asked the priest where he was from because I didn’t know him and he told me: “I’m from Corrientes and I’m living here close by, in the priests’ home. I come to celebrate Mass here now and then.” He had cancer—leukemia—and died the following year.

  Right there I knew I had to be a priest; I was totally certain. Instead of going out with the others I went back home because I was overwhelmed. Afterward I carried on at school and with everything, but knowing now where I was headed.

  The religious vocation is “a call from God to a heart which is expecting that call either consciously or unconsciously,” Bergoglio once explained. He accepted it not so much as God’s will for him, but as his own deepest desire, even if God—in getting there before him, primereando—knew it before he did. In Saint Ignatius’s three ways of choosing, this was clearly an example of the first: when you just know. In a 1990 letter, he described the experience as like being thrown from a horse.

  For over a year he told no one at home, while undertaking what he describes as “serious spiritual direction” with the confessor he had stumbled on in the basilica, Father Duarte Ibarra, until the priest’s death the following year in the Military Hospital.

  At this time he was working, along with Oscar Crespo, in the Hickethier-Bachmann chemical laboratory at the corner of Santa Fe and Azcuénaga, and also earning money on occasional evenings as a doorman at tango bars. Crespo remembers how one day Jorge told him: “I’m going to finish secondary school with you guys, but I’m not going to be a chemist, I’m going to be a priest. But I’m not going to be a priest in a basilica. I’m going to be a Jesuit, because I’m going to want to go out to the neighborhoods, to the villas, to be with people.”

  This account suggests more certainty than in Bergoglio’s own remembrance. Although he was clear about wanting to be a priest, “in truth, I wasn’t very clear which direction to go in,” he recalled in 2010. Crespo’s memory suggests Bergoglio’s direction was mapped out in his mind but was some way short of being a concrete plan. He knew no Jesuits until he reached the seminary, only Salesians and Dominicans. For a lower-middle-class kid from Flores, it wasn’t easy to knock on the door of what was at that time a large, formidable order with a reputation for taking only the best educated—mostly the products of their own private schools.

  “Some years passed before that invitation and decision were definitive,” Pope Francis told young people in Sardinia in September 2013. “They were years of successes and joys, but also of failures, of fragility and sin.… But even in the darkest moments of sin and failure I looked at Jesus and he never left me alone.”

  They were also years of political experimentation. His friends remember his concern for social questions and his visits to deprived neighborhoods. He regularly digested a communist periodical and devoured every article he could find by Leónidas Barletta, a left-wing essayist and playwright. Jorge was never persuaded by Marxism, but contact with its rigorous theories helped sharpen his ideas. After he made a searing critique of trickle-down economics in his first major document as pope, he would be accused of being a Marxist by some conservatives in the United States. “Marxist ideology is wrong,” he told a journalist, but “I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don’t feel offended.”

  The good Marxist Jorge met at this time was Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, the third woman—after his grandmother Rosa and Sister Dolores—he has spoken about as a major influence on his early life. Ballestrino was a Paraguayan communist who in 1949, at the age of twenty-nine, had fled her country’s dictatorship and moved to Buenos Aires with her daughters. For three years Esther was his “remarkable boss” at the Hickethier-Bachmann laboratory. She showed Jorge not only the importance of proper scientific work, repeating tests to eliminate possibilities—he was performing chemical evaluations of nutrients—but also taught him the rudiments of her native language, Guaraní, and many valuable lessons in politics. “I owe a lot to that woman,” he said in 2010. “I loved her a lot.”

  They met again more than a decade later, when he was Jesuit provincial and her family was under surveillance during the military dictatorship. He ag
reed to hide her collection of Marxist books and to help her locate her daughter Ana María, a communist worker delegate, after she was captured and disappeared (she was eventually released). As result of looking for her daughter, Esther became one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the human-rights movement that protested the mass disappearances under the Argentine military dictatorship in the 1970s. She was abducted along with French nuns by the military in June 1977 from the Passionist church of Santa Cruz where they were meeting.

  When her remains were discovered and identified many years later, in 2005, Esther’s other daughter, Mabel, successfully petitioned Bergoglio, then the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires, for her to be buried in the garden of the Santa Cruz church, because, Mabel said, “that was the last place they had been as free people.” Naturally, he agreed. And that is how a communist atheist Paraguayan woman the cardinal had loved as a teenager came to be buried in the garden of the Buenos Aires church from which she had been taken to be murdered.

  * * *

  HAVING been accepted by the Buenos Aires diocesan seminary, Jorge was due to begin his studies at the start of the academic year in March 1956. He broke the news to his parents in November 1955, just after graduating as a technical chemist, two years after his experience in the confessional. The shock was particularly great for Regina, who had banked on his studying to become a doctor. That is what he had told her, and when she accused him of lying, he defended himself with proto-Jesuit deftness: “I didn’t lie to you, Mom,” María Elena recalls him telling her. “I’m going to study medicine of the soul.”

  Regina would not be the first mother to try to block her firstborn’s bid to leave the nest. “I think she would have had the same reaction if he had announced he was getting married or moving abroad,” María Elena believes. Although their father, Mario, was supportive, he backed Regina’s bid to persuade Jorge to wait and get a degree. When Jorge refused, the atmosphere in the house turned thick with tension.

  Guessing that sooner or later Don Enrico would be called in to adjudicate, Jorge arranged to see him. Father Pozzoli asked him about his vocation, gave him his blessing, and told him to pray and leave it in God’s hands. Sure enough, someone at home soon suggested: why don’t we talk to Father Pozzoli? With a straight face, Jorge agreed. The opportunity arose on December 12, 1955, two months after the army coup that deposed Perón, on the occasion of Mario and Regina’s twentieth wedding anniversary, when Don Enrico celebrated a Mass for the family at the Basilica of St. Joseph. At breakfast afterward in a Flores café, the question of Jorge’s vocation arose. “Father Pozzoli said the idea of going to university was a good one, but that one had to take things as God wants them,” Bergoglio recalled.

  And he began telling different vocation stories, without taking sides, and finally he tells his own story: how a priest put the idea to him of being a priest, how pretty soon afterward they made him a subdeacon, then a deacon, then a priest, how unexpected it all was.… By this point my parents’ hearts had been softened. Naturally, Father Pozzoli didn’t end by saying they should let me go to seminary, nor did he ask them to decide; he realized he had to just soften them up. That was typical of him.… You didn’t know where he was going, but he did, and he generally didn’t want to reach a point where it looked like he was “winning.” When he sensed that he was getting what he wanted, he pulled back before anyone else realized. That way the decision was made freely, by the people involved; they didn’t feel pressured. But he had prepared their hearts. He sowed the seeds, then let others have the satisfaction of reaping.

  His parents acquiesced, but it took some years for Regina to accept. She didn’t visit him until he was a Jesuit novice in Córdoba. In 1969, at his ordination, by then long widowed, and proud of his decision at last, she would kneel for his blessing.

  Rosa, his grandmother, had long guessed this was where Jorge was headed, but she feigned surprise. “Well, if God is calling you, blessed be,” she told him, adding that the doors were open if he decided to come back, and no one would hold it against him if he did. Her response was a lesson to him in how to walk with people making a major life decision.

  When he broke the news to his friends, they were happy for him but sad to lose a dear companion. There were hugs, and promises of prayers. He was ribbed about the loss to San Lorenzo’s future. A couple of girls—perhaps disappointed for themselves, as well as sad to lose him—sobbed.

  When he knocked on the door of the seminary, in March 1956, Jorge was twenty, almost the age his father, Mario, had been when he boarded the Giulio Cesare.

  TWO

  THE MISSION

  (1958–1966)

  ON COPACABANA BEACH in the last week of July 2013 you could still find a fresh coconut to suck or a caipirinha sugarcane cocktail to sip, but the bronzed, bikinied beauties of Rio de Janeiro were nowhere to be seen—and not just because of the unseasonal rain and wind. Francis was in town, and Copacabana was now a beach of piety, every inch of its three-mile seafront occupied by young Catholics drawn from every nation. As pilgrim-in-chief of World Youth Day, Francis was there to lead the great crowds of the young. But he had a bigger mission in mind: the launch of his pontificate. “My papacy begins after Rio,” he had earlier confided to a friend in Buenos Aires.

  Francis had inherited the event, which had been in Benedict XVI’s diary before he resigned. World Youth Day (WYD) is the Church’s largest assembly, when hundreds of thousands of exuberant young pilgrims from across the world gather for days of teaching and prayer before a weekend of massive liturgies led by the pope, the final Sunday being the Day itself. Since it was begun by John Paul II in 1984, World Youth Days have injected vigor into the Catholic Church worldwide. A generation of Catholics can trace to their WYD experience their first emotional engagement with the faith: it’s not just the music, and the silence, and the uplifting teachings, but the comfort and pride in the numbers involved. The record was set in Manila, Philippines, in 1995, when five million turned out for the final Mass, said to be the largest gathering in human history. The sociological theory of secularization, according to which humanity, and the young in particular, becomes less religious over time, has always been dubious as a generalization, and looks especially so during WYDs.

  WYD can only hit Manila levels of attendance when the host country is both populous and churchgoing: Brazil is the world’s largest Catholic country in the world’s most Catholic continent. Rio is one of the world’s great modern cities, famous equally for its glamour and its social divisions; what better platform for a pope setting out to heal those divides? Rio was not so far from Aparecida, Brazil’s national shrine, where in 2007 the Latin-American bishops had gathered in a continent-wide meeting that produced a remarkable document steered by the then cardinal Bergoglio, and heavily influenced by his vision. The document had been ignored by Catholics outside Latin America, but now the River Plate and the Amazon were pouring into the Tiber. As Francis soon made clear, Aparecida was now the program for the whole Church.

  Inevitably, Aparecida’s gargantuan shrine basilica, second in size only to St. Peter’s in Rome, was the first stop in what turned out to be a whirlwind five-day visit. After that the pope remained in Rio, where his schedule included a slum, a soccer field, a hospital, a cathedral, as well as many meetings: with drug addicts, civic leaders, bishops, presidents, young offenders, slum dwellers, and, of course, the people of Brazil, thousands of whom he met in hour upon hour of hugging and handshaking from his open-top popemobile. All of this was the lead-up to the main event, a weekend of massive liturgies on the Copacabana seafront, which as the week went on gradually disappeared under wave after wave of exuberant pilgrims, reckoned at close to four million on the last day. Rio, no stranger to exuberant crowds, had never seen anything like it. Despite the bizarrely inclement weather—the city seldom endures such cold and rain—Copacabana became a praia da fé, “the beach of faith,” its fabulous natural setting permanently hugged by the open-armed Christ
statue on the Corcovado mountain behind.

  As Pope Francis touched down in Rio, it seemed as if a new wind of Pentecost now blew from the south. “This week,” said Francis on Copacabana Beach, “Rio de Janeiro has become the center of the Church.” The figures told their own story. In 1910, 70 percent of the world’s Catholics lived in the north (mainly in Europe) and only 30 percent in the south, whereas in 2010 only 30 percent lived in the north and nearly 70 percent in the south. Some 40 percent of the world’s Catholics were in Latin America, and if the Latin Americans living in North America were included, it was 50 percent. Spanish—or castellano (“Castilian”), as they prefer to say in Hispanic America—was now the most widely spoken language in the Catholic world. But what was most striking about the Latin-American Church was its demographic. Over 70 percent of Catholics are under twenty-five—precisely the reverse of Europe and North America. For energy, passion, and missionary resourcefulness, the Church of this continent leads the world.

  The only question, in fact, was whether God was Argentine or Brazilian. Francis, in an interview with TV Globo, settled the matter. Because the pope was an Argentine, he conceded, God must be Brazilian.

  The Cariocas—Rio dwellers—were soon smitten. A hurricane of affection blew toward Francis. The taxi drivers and the juice bar waiters, the TV pundits and the businessmen, the poor of the shantytowns, the favelas, took to him much as had the Romans in March. They loved his simplicity, his directness, his humility, his passion for social justice, his tireless capacity for vigorous hugging of the elderly and the disabled. They praised his well-aimed three-point speeches, his cozy references, and his vivid metaphors; his cheeky, almost conspiratorial manner with the young; his humor and his candor. But above all they loved him for being Latin-American, for putting people first, for unveiling the humanity inside the humblest hovel—and they loved him even more when, in continental fashion, things didn’t always go as planned.