The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Borges returned to Santa Fe in November for the launch of Cuentos Originales, which, buoyed by his praise, became a local success in the city. Bergoglio sent the book to a poet he knew, Sofía Acosta, to ask what she thought of it, then deftly sent her letter praising the stories to the editor of a newspaper in the neighboring city of Paraná (where his great-uncles’ palazzo was now a restaurant). “Our wish is to highlight the achievements and values of this work, which has become a bestseller in Santa Fe,” Jorge wrote, asking him to make the book better known “by means of your distinguished newspaper.” It was an early display of political savvy.

  In the prologue to Cuentos Originales Borges writes: “It is likely that among these eight writers will be one who becomes famous, and bibliophiles will seek out this short volume in search of this or that name which I do not dare to predict.” The book was sought out, but not until 2013; by journalists rather than bibliophiles; and not because of the names that appear in it, but because of one that does not. Borges, the great ironist, would have been delighted.

  One of the contributors to the volume was the journalist Jorge Milia. Forty years later, he published his memoirs of his school days at the urging of Bergoglio, with whom he has stayed in touch. The then cardinal archbishop offered to write the prologue to the memoir, which came out as De la Edad Feliz (Of Happy Times) in 2006. Milia, who these days pens online columns explaining Francis’s bergoglismos, can safely claim to be the only author who has had prologues written by two of Argentina’s most famous sons—Jorge Luis Borges and Pope Francis.

  Borges considered himself agnostic, yet had been taught to read the Bible by his English Protestant grandmother, prayed the Our Father each night because he had made a promise to his mother, and died in the presence of a priest. Yet he was also a lover of Jewish wisdom, who wrote about Buddhism and knew the Qu’ran well enough to declare that there wasn’t a single camel in it (a point he used to criticize a certain kind of nationalist writer who stuffs his books with “local color”). In his last fantasy, Los Conjurados, he imagines the founding miracle of a nation in which “men of diverse tribes, professing diverse religions, and speaking diverse languages, have taken the strange decision to be reasonable. They have resolved to forget their differences and stress their affinities.” It sounded much like what Cardinal Bergoglio would later promote as the culture of encounter.

  THREE

  STORM PILOT

  (1967–1974)

  VOCABOR FRANCISCUS. “I will be called Francis.” It was a breathtaking choice. Because no pope had ever taken the name, it needed no Roman numerals but stood stark and simple as il poverello in a hair shirt, the cast-off silks at his feet.

  No one ever thought a pope could be called Francis; it would be like taking the name Peter, or Jesus. They were one of a kind.

  “I was astonished at the boldness of it, because the name Francis is a whole program of governance in miniature,” the Vatican commentator John Allen told Boston Radio. “He is this iconic figure in the Catholic imagination that awakens images of the antithesis of the institutional church.… That’s an awful lot of weight to put on your shoulders right out of the gate. If you’re not prepared to walk that talk, then you’re going to be in real trouble.”1

  Bergoglio had walked that talk over a lifetime. Right now it mostly meant saying no, like keeping his old black shoes, his silver pectoral cross (a pope’s is normally gold), and his faithful black plastic watch, or refusing the limousine waiting to take him back to the guesthouse for dinner (“May God forgive you for what you have done,” he joked with the cardinals). After Mass with the cardinals the next day, he left the Vatican in a Ford Focus—the security guards had better cars than the pope—to pray at the shrine of Saint Mary Major, returning via the priests’ hostel where he had stayed before the conclave. There he collected his bag, paid his bill to a shocked clerk (“I checked in under another name” was the caption on a widely tweeted photo), and chatted and joked with staff. There wasn’t much to collect. He had been washing his clothes at night, letting them dry on the radiator.

  Meeting with the press corps two days later in the modern audience hall next to St. Peter’s, he put down his prepared text and told them how some of the cardinals had come up with other names: Adrian, for example, after the sixteenth-century Dutch pope (“he was a reformer, we need a reform”), or perhaps Clement XV to take revenge on Clement XIV who suppressed the Jesuits. At the end of the audience, having charmed six thousand journalists from eighty-one countries, he greeted a selection of media people, one by one, up on the proscenium. He didn’t receive them sitting but came forward to greet them. Among them was a blind man working in the Vatican communications office, with his guide dog in a harness. Francis embraced the man, and while they talked he placed his hand on the golden retriever’s head.

  It was lots of those little things. They weren’t mere gestures, nor were they calculated messages. They flowed from his identification with the Christ of the Gospels.

  In the weeks and months that followed, Francis used the authority inherited from Saint Peter to step free of the monarchic papacy, trying to eliminate, as far as he could, what separated him from ordinary humanity. He wasn’t against the things themselves, only if they were obstacles or distractions. But a media narrative of pauperism began to take hold, according to which everything he did was a refutation of wealth and privilege. He chose to stay in the Vatican guesthouse where the cardinals had billeted during the conclave, not, as was reported, because the Apostolic Palace was lavish (it is not) or because the Casa Santa Marta was simple and humble (it cost $25 million to build and is lined with marble), but so that people could have direct access to him: he didn’t want the bottlenecks of intermediaries that had kept Benedict XVI—in spite of his own humility and accessibility—distant and isolated.

  In the Santa Marta Francis created a whole new means of papal communication: brief, three-point homilies delivered off the cuff at the 7:00 a.m. Mass each day in the modern chapel, the fruit of his dawn contemplation of that day’s readings, mate in hand.

  “We must learn to be normal!” he told his Jesuit interviewer, Father Antonio Spadaro, in August that year, and he put it into practice, collecting his tray of food in the Santa Marta dining room like anyone else, making his own phone calls and many of his appointments, keeping his own diary, and making visits—always in the blue Ford Focus, without any kind of entourage—to parishes and charities around Rome, to spend time with the old and the homeless and the foreign-born.

  Stories of Francis’s personal kindness, impossible to verify, began to make their rounds, like the time he left his room to find a Swiss Guard standing outside his door and brought him a chair. “But Holy Father, I cannot sit down. My boss does not allow it,” the guard told him. “Well, I’m the boss of your boss, and I say it’s fine,” Francis told him, before going back inside to fetch him the Italian equivalent of a Twinkie.

  He wasn’t afraid to hacer lío, to create a little havoc, such as the September 2013 visit he made to a refugee center in Rome, where he said empty convents should not be turned into hotels but should be used to house immigrants, “the flesh of Christ.” Or the time he phoned a woman in Argentina and appeared to suggest she should receive the Eucharist even though her priest had said she couldn’t (“Some people are more papist than the pope,” she said he told her). Or the time he told delegates of the Latin-American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women (CLAR) not to worry if they received a letter from the Vatican pulling them up for some doctrinal infraction or other, that it was better to have a Church that made mistakes and got dirty to one that stayed inside.

  “We’ve got to flip the omelet,” he told the CLAR delegates: why was it world news when the Dow Jones was up or down a few points, but not when an old man died of cold in the street? “We’ve got to turn this around,” he told them. “That’s the Gospel.”

  In his daily homilies and speeches he gently but with total focus led the charg
e against what the theologian Henri de Lubac called “spiritual worldiness.” It was a sickness with many symptoms: high-spending prelates, “airport bishops” often absent from their dioceses, bishops who flitted from one gala dinner to the next, Catholic laymen who used chivalric orders to advance their business interests, dioceses that idolized efficiency and put plans before people, elite groups with theological or liturgical agendas, self-appointed inquisitors who combed priests’ homilies in search of heterodoxy, church organizations that were so professional that they were indistinguishable from those of the world—the list was long. The Church, Francis endlessly pointed out, was not an NGO but a love story, and the men and women were links in this “chain of love.” “If we do not understand this,” said Francis, “we have understood nothing of what the Church is.”

  The choice of name began to make deeper sense, for Francis of Assisi was the great enemy of spiritual worldliness. Back in 1205 he had made himself a beggar for Christ’s sake, spurning a life of comfort and privilege to be among lepers and the trees and wild animals of his beloved Umbria. His infectious joy flowed from making room, all the time, for what came first: God, Christ, His creation. “He loved nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds flying in the sky,” said the pope of his namesake in an interview on the eve of his Assisi visit on October 4, 2013. “But above all he loved people: children, old people, women.”

  In naming himself after the poverello, Francis was identifying not just with a saint but with an underground stream that had often in history bubbled up in moments of crisis but had just as soon vanished. Times had changed since the saint of Assisi, said Francis, “but the ideal of a missionary, poor Church is still more than valid. This is still the Church that Jesus and his disciples preached about.” This was his vision: a Church shaped by the periphery, which put the poor first, that was ambulant, materially simple, boundary-leaping, and lived from the sweet joy of evangelizing. It was a Church that, in the words of Bergoglio to his fellow cardinals prior to the conclave, rejected spiritual worldliness in order to live by not its own light but by the mysterium lunae, the light of the divine.

  Francis’s twelve-hour Assisi visit on October 4, 2013, allowed him to teach this vision of the Church in a tour of all the places linked to the poverello’s life. He had speeches to give, and scheduled stops to make, yet to those watching him that day it seemed as if he was being led from one place to another by God’s holy faithful people, eager to show him their pretty hilltop earthquake-shattered town. “They dragged him to every cave, every altar, and every crypt,” Cardinal Seán O’Malley of Boston, a Capuchin Franciscan who was with him, later recalled. “Everywhere he would go, someone would stand up and say, ‘This is the first time a pope has ever come here.’ I kept thinking, ‘He shouldn’t be here this time! He’s not a young man.’”

  When he was “in his sins,” Francesco di Bernardone had been afraid, even disgusted, by the sores of lepers, and ergo by them; but later, as he cleaned their bodies and dressed their wounds in the leprosarium, the omelet got flipped: those whom he had recoiled from now gave him delight and joy. It was a rebirth, a healing, a way of seeing the world now with God’s eyes. Pope Francis began his visit to Assisi among today’s lepers, the profoundly disabled, at the Seraphicum Institute. For an hour he was theirs: they clasped his hand, took him aside to confide their thoughts and feelings, played with his pectoral cross, shouted and grunted and screamed. “We are among the wounds of Jesus,” Francis said in a quiet voice, visibly moved. “These wounds need to be recognized, and listened to.”

  The following month Francis stunned the world by caressing the sores of Vinicio Riva, a fifty-three-year-old man whose facial disfigurement was so grotesque it caused people to get off buses to avoid looking at him. When Francis kissed his painful growths, a symptom of a genetic disease called neurofibromatosis, Riva’s heart beat so fast that he thought he would die. “He didn’t even think about whether or not to hug me,” he later said. “I’m not contagious, but he didn’t know that. But he just did it: he caressed me all over my face, and as he did I felt only love.”

  Francis was the nineteenth pope to visit Assisi but the first to go to the so-called stripping room in the archbishop’s palace, where Francesco di Bernardone, in front of his family, took off his nobleman’s silks and renounced wealth and power. “Worldliness brings us to vanity, arrogance, pride, and these are idols,” Pope Francis said. “All of us have to strip ourselves of this worldliness.” Otherwise, he said, “we become pastry shop Christians, like beautiful cakes and sweet things but not real Christians.”

  That afternoon, in outdoor meetings with clergy and young people, speaking in his fluent Argentine-accented Italian, he was at his colloquial best. At San Rufino Cathedral he told priests to resist giving “interminable and boring homilies where no one understands anything” and reminisced about bygone days when parish priests knew the names of all their parishioners, “and even the name of the dog in each family.” He told clergy that couples that separated didn’t know how to forgive each other in time. “I always said to newlyweds: argue as much as you want. If the plates fly, let them. But never let the day end without making peace, never!” Urging them to reach out to the marginalized and the disregarded, he told them: “Do not allow yourselves to be obstructed by prejudices, habits, mental or pastoral rigidity—the famous ‘it’s always been done this way.’ You can reach the peripheries only if you carry the Word of God in your heart and walk with the Church, like Saint Francis.”

  Even after countless visits, a Mass, and five speeches, he drew energy from the crowd of twenty thousand young people waiting for him outside the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels at the end of the afternoon. Speaking of how hard it was to marry in a culture dominated by the provisional, he told them how a woman in Buenos Aires had complained to him that her son was in his thirties, had a girlfriend, but wouldn’t get married. “I said, Signora, stop ironing his shirts!”

  Francis’s visit was intensely followed in the Italian media. They knew he was fun and bold, but it was easy to get this wrong, to see him as some kind of rebel or iconoclast. He was restoring what had been lost: not spurning the Church and its doctrines but seeking to recover their meaning and purpose, which were to reveal Christ. That meant being against some things, and offending some people, but only in order for the Church to be more like it is, not to turn it into something else.

  What people loved about Francis—just as they had about the man from Assisi—was precisely his Christ-likeness: his authenticity amid the phoniness, his simplicity in a world of materialism, his spontaneity amid the stuffed cassocks, his preference for the poor in a world vying to be rich. He was humble in a world of celebrity, a sinner in a world of self-justification, a leper-kisser in a world obsessed with beauty.

  That made him—although this didn’t suit the media narrative of rupture—a direct successor of Benedict XVI. The more astute observers could see that Francis’s freshness and honesty and directness rested on something solid and unchanging, that he was, in a sense, changing everything at the same time as he was changing nothing. What he had succeeded in doing was making the delivery of the message match its content. The syllabus—humility, prayer, dependence on Christ—was the same, but Benedict XVI’s finely honed, crystalline texts, delivered in a quiet voice by a remote figure, were now being spoken and acted by a man who jumped out of a chair to make off-the-cuff remarks in physically affectionate encounters. Benedict clarified who was Christ, what it meant to live in and through Him; Francis recalled Christ. The widespread attraction to him showed that even inside the staunchest Western agnostics there lurks a long-buried remembrance of the God-made-man.

  It was like Francis’s friars in the 1300s reaping what the monks had sown over the previous seven hundred years. As G. K. Chesterton’s much-loved biography of Saint Francis describes it, referring to the sixth-century founder of Western monasticism, “What St. Benedict had stored, St. Francis scattered …
what had been stored into the barns like grain was scattered over the world like seed.”2

  Now another Francis was taking another Benedict on the road.

  * * *

  THE Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965, the year he taught in the Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires, was Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s reference point. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Church was being pulled apart, Bergoglio was a newly formed Jesuit, and then a young provincial. It was a time when religious orders like his were undergoing their own reforms, debating what it meant to return ad fontes, to their origins, as the Council asked them to do. Within the Society of Jesus, which took the lead in implementing the Council worldwide, the turbulence had been particularly intense, above all in Latin America, because the post-conciliar changes came at a time not just of a cultural explosion, as in Europe and America, but of political revolution.

  It would be because Jorge Bergoglio clung to the idea of reform rather than rupture, of reform not revolution, that his fellow Jesuits urged Rome to name him provincial, and why he became unpopular with the avant-garde intellectuals within his province. It was they, subsequently, who spread the false idea of Bergoglio as a conservative, and the myth that he wanted to take the Jesuits back to before the Council. His decisions and his writings tell the opposite story.

  The Council broke a dam, unleashing pent-up streams of a long-overdue renewal. The faithful could pray in their own language. Scripture could be directly engaged. Up went the bridges, especially to Jews, now seen as elder siblings rather than obdurate foes. Out went the monarchical society—pope and bishops ruling over a great mass of people via the clergy and religious—in favor of the People of God, marked off from one another by role, not rank. A new tone was struck, of dialogue and participation, engagement and hope. Catholics would no longer recoil from modernity but would be its midwives, helping to bring to birth a more human world. Through the documents agreed in the bishops’ titanic three-year meeting there ran again a new, almost Franciscan stream. The Council committed its bishops and clergy to a greater simplicity of life, “to be poor, simple, humble and lovable, in her speech and attitude,” as Pope Paul VI put it.