The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Three years after he was elected, John Paul II dramatically intervened in the Society, for a time suspending its constitution. After admitting at GC33 in 1983 that the interpretation of Decree Four had often “reduced the concept of justice to too-human dimensions,” at GC34 in 1995 the Society amended its purpose once again, this time to make clear that there could be no promotion of justice without the promotion of faith. By that time Bergoglio was a bishop.

  During his provincial address in 1978, Bergoglio made many references to GC32, but none to Decree Four. What he did quote was Paul VI’s historic teaching document on evangelization, Evangelii Nuntiandi, issued a few months after the end of GC32 in December 1975. In it Paul VI makes clear—in line with Medellín—that there can be no proclamation of the Gospel without also attending to the liberation of people from “concrete situations of injustice.” But Paul VI also warns about the Church reducing its mission to a “mere temporal project,” leaving it open to “manipulation by ideological systems and political parties.” That was the discerning nuance lacking in many of the applications of Decree Four.24

  Evangelii Nuntiandi would be Bergoglio’s favorite church document, the one he would cite throughout his time as provincial, rector, and later bishop. Not long after his election, Francis described it as “the greatest pastoral document ever written.” Its great purpose was to reconcile eternal Church teaching with the diversity of cultures.

  Considering some of the hidden hands involved in its drafting, it is easy to see why he identified so closely with it both in 1975 and since. The sections on faith taking flesh in a people (Paul VI preferred the term culture) as well as those valuing popular religion, were effectively an Argentine contribution, drafted by Father Gera. The insights reached the document via another Argentine, Eduardo Pironio, the former bishop of Mar del Plata who, as secretary-general of CELAM in 1967 and 1968, had been the moving spirit at Medellín. A collaborator and confessor of Paul VI, he had recently chaired the synod of bishops in Rome from which Evangelii Nuntiandi sprang.

  That synod marked another coming-of-age moment for the Latin-American Church. Bergoglio’s future collaborator, Professor Guzmán Carriquiry, has written that the synod marked the end of the “iconoclastic” phase of the post-council, which had been dominated by a “north-Atlantic crisis of authority, the failure of the Guevarist revolution, and the growing disorientation of the intellectuals.”25 The stage was now set for the second CELAM gathering at Puebla, Mexico, in 1979, whose leading light would be Gera. The way Bergoglio and his people-theology and USAL/Guardia colleagues saw it, the failure of ideology and the intellectuals was leaving history open to the advent of the pueblo fiel.

  Cardinal Pironio can in some ways be seen as Bergoglio’s precursor. His mission was the implementation of Vatican II in Latin America. He had a clear option for the poor but a wariness of ideology, and believed the Gospel offered the basis of a new model of society that transcended the capitalist-communist debate. Just as Bergoglio later would, Pironio alienated conservatives by his commitment to social justice and the left by his failure to endorse Marxist versions of liberation theology. Like Bergoglio, Pironio was no revolutionary, but something deeper: a Gospel radical with a pastoral strategy that prioritized the poor. As rector of the Máximo after 1980 and later as bishop and archbishop, Bergoglio would take that strategy—Pironio’s vision, and that of Evangelii Nuntiandi—onto the street.

  Remembering him in 2008, ten years after his death, Bergoglio described Pironio as “a man of open doors you wanted to be with.” When you went to see him, “wherever and however busy he was, he made you feel as if you were the only thing that mattered.” It could be many people’s description of Bergoglio.26

  They had something else in common. When Paul VI died in 1978, there was talk of Pironio—an Argentine born of an Italian family, with a Franciscan spirituality—as a possible pope. He was virtually Italian, some reasoned, so if the cardinals wanted to look to the developing world, why not this Argentine?

  FOUR

  CRUCIBLE

  (1975–1979)

  MANY COMMENTATORS SAW the day when the Vatican was hauled before the United Nations over clerical sex abuse as Francis’s first major test. It was in mid-January 2014, shortly before the first anniversary of his election, and he had enjoyed spectacular media ratings. But in the weeks leading up to the Holy See’s appearance before the Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva, Switzerland, it looked increasingly as if the Vatican was going to be given a rough ride.

  On the day of the hearing, at his daily 7:00 a.m. Mass in the chapel of the Casa Santa Marta, Francis spoke of “corrupt priests” who “instead of giving the Bread of Life, give a poisoned meal to God’s holy people.” He stopped and shook his head in disbelief. “Are we ashamed? So many scandals!” Some “have led to us paying out huge sums of money,” he said, adding: “Well that’s good, that’s how it should be. But the shame of the Church!” He went on to attribute “those failings of priests, bishops, lay people” to their lack of relationship to God and their worldliness. “They had a position in the Church, a position of power, even of comfort. But the Word of God, no!”

  Over in Geneva, the Holy See delegates—Archbishop Silvano Tomasi and the Vatican’s former top prosecutor on abuse, Bishop Charles Scicluna—were unflappable in the face of a grilling from the eighteen-strong UN committee. If there was a time when the Vatican was slow to face up to the reality of the abuse crisis, said Scicluna, today it very much “gets it.” In hours of question and answer, the delegates spelled out in great detail the complex juridical relationship of the Holy See to the global Catholic Church and described the sea change in accountability and transparency over the previous decade at both the diocesan level and in the Vatican.

  No other institution had been, in this area, more criticized or litigated for its historic failures, and no organization had traveled so far and so fast in ensuring they could not be repeated. The failures were well known and documented, and had been the basis of many claims, leading to payouts of millions of dollars in the United States alone. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, in common with other institutions, the Catholic Church had no proper mechanisms to understand or deal with abuse: victims were silent or were silenced, and in line with the scientific view of the time, offenders were sent off for treatment, declared “cured,” and sent to new parishes and ministries, where they often abused again. In the 1990s, victims—adults now, with therapists and lawyers—began bringing lawsuits, but not even then did the issue properly surface, because compensation settlements contained confidentiality clauses. Not until the 2001 US crisis in Boston, Massachusetts, when diocesan files were turned over to the courts, did screaming headlines document the whole sad history of collusion, cover-up, and moral blindness.

  What followed was wholesale change: external monitoring of strict guidelines to prevent cover-up ever again taking place; massive payouts to victims; review of files stretching back decades; the removal and defrocking of dozens of priests. The changes were not perfect or universal—there were still dioceses in Africa and Asia that lagged behind the Church elsewhere, procedures that could be sped up, bishops who had not been made to resign over their mishandling—and the issue was by no means closed. Victims continued to step forward claiming abuse decades earlier, and the healing of deep wounds inflicted by men who used their spiritual authority to violate adolescents would take generations. But in its handling of the issue the Catholic Church was—in Western countries, at least—a transformed institution whose procedures had become models for other organizations.

  The Vatican, too, had moved on from its position of defensiveness and denial in the late 1990s. Rome had direct control only over the 1,000 clergy who worked in the Vatican city-state; almost all of the world’s 410,000 priests were under the control of their bishops or religious orders. But the Vatican could tell bishops to take action. From 2001 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, had asked local bishops to send h
im details of each case so he could see they were not being brushed under the carpet but had been referred to police and social services. After his election in 2005, Benedict XVI asked all bishops’ conferences across the world to introduce rigid guidelines that ensured past and present allegations were acted upon. At the heart of those rules was deference to local law, ensuring that police and social services were brought in as soon as an allegation was made, and that the safety and welfare of minors were paramount. The Vatican also amended its own regulations to make the process of laicization—stripping a man of his priesthood, a power reserved to the Vatican—faster and easier. Of the 3,400 cases reported by local dioceses to the Vatican between 2004 and 2011, 848 priests were laicized, while 2,572 were punished with other, lesser penalties—usually old men who had spent time in prison for their crimes, whom the Vatican told to spend the remainder of their lives in prayer and penance.1

  Yet when the UN released its report on February 5, it was as if the Vatican had never been in Geneva and none of this had ever happened. The committee spoke as if the Church were a retrograde institution, characterizing the Holy See as a kind of corporate head office of a global corporation that subverted local laws. The report demanded that the Vatican “immediately remove” all priest abusers, accused the Holy See of imposing a “code of silence” on clergy to prevent them from going to the police and of shuffling priests within parishes, and deplored the Vatican’s “policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by and the impunity of the perpetrators.” Amazingly, the report went on to lecture the Vatican on policies in other areas, telling it to erase what it called gender stereotyping from the curricula of Catholic schools, alleging that its teaching on sexuality was homophobic, and declaring that the idea of male and female sexes as complementary was incompatible with modern gender theory. It even called for the Church to change its teaching on abortion, which, as some Catholics pointed out, would hardly advance the rights of the child.

  Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi did not hide his amazement, saying it appeared as if the report had been “practically already written, or at least already in large part blocked out before the hearing.” Indeed, it looked a lot like a report sent to journalists weeks before the hearing by a little-known London-based NGO, the Child Rights International Network, or CRIN, which worked closely with the UN committee. Its director had told the media that “child abuse happens in other closed institutions, but what’s unique about the Catholic Church is that the Holy See is a state that’s voluntarily signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.” (She did not seem to mind that a “closed institution” would hardly be likely to make itself accountable to a UN committee.)

  On its website, it was clear where CRIN was coming from, describing religious institutions as “arcane” with “entrenched power structures.” Its report rehashed a fantastic series of Da Vinci Code–like myths: that the hundreds of thousands of priests worldwide were employees of the Vatican, and local bishops its agents; and that priests accused of abuse were being secreted in the Vatican beyond the reach of law-enforcement agencies. These myths in turn rested on a single grand idea: that the Church remained an unreformed institution, which in 2014 handled abuse no differently from the 1990s—or even from the 1960s and 1970s, when most of the abuse happened—and that the Church put its reputation above justice, sacrificing innocent lives in the process, following policies set by the Vatican.2

  An ideological narrative had captured a UN committee and made it impervious to reason and evidence.

  Francis stayed quiet, but a month later, when nobody had expected a reaction, he quietly challenged the UN’s assault without mentioning it by name. He said statistics showed clearly that most abuse happens in the family and left deep wounds. The Catholic Church was “perhaps the single public institution to have moved with transparency and responsibility” on the issue, he said, adding, “No one has done more, yet the Church is the only one to have been attacked.” He also praised Pope Benedict XVI, who he said had been “very courageous” in confronting the Church’s abuse scandals and “opening the way” to reform.

  Francis had gently exposed the scapegoating of the Church, and he wasn’t afraid to lose popularity in pointing it out. Among many furious reactions was that of the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), which had been delighted by the UN report. It now said that Francis’s comments showed he had “an archaic, defensive mindset that will not make kids safer.”

  Francis had by then appointed a commission to advise him on safeguarding policies and specifically the pastoral care of abuse victims. Its members included Cardinal Seán O’Malley of Boston, the US bishop who had led a radical reform of the Church’s handling of the issue, as well as an abuse victim and campaigner for the rights of Irish survivors, Marie Collins. Of the five lay people in the commission, four were women, including a former Polish prime minister and leading British and French psychologists.

  In April 2014 Francis made impromptu remarks, speaking softly and in Spanish, to a French child protection group, saying he took personal responsibility for “all the evil that some priests—many, many in number, though not in proportion to the totality” had done, and promised to be “strong” in imposing sanctions. The words many, many were important: Vatican comments had often focused on how proportionally small the number of abusers were rather than on what struck most ordinary people, which was that the overall number was staggeringly high. The reference to “sanctions” also sent a message that the days of bishops’ impunity for mishandling were over. In an airborne press conference on the papal plane back from Tel Aviv at the end of May, Francis said a priest who abused was like one who performed a satanic Mass. “We must proceed with zero tolerance,” he said.

  In early July he met six abuse survivors for one-on-one meetings at the Vatican. Leaders of abuse-victims groups described the event as a meaningless public relations stunt, but that was not how the survivors who met Francis experienced it. “He seemed genuinely frustrated at what he was hearing. He listened and seemed genuine,” said an Irish survivor, Marie Kane, who added: “There was a lot of empathy. There was no looking at watches. I was the one who ended it as I had said all I wanted to say.”

  The survivors stayed over at the Santa Marta and met Francis informally at dinner the night before. In the morning, they attended Mass in the chapel, where in a searing homily Francis begged their forgiveness. “Before God and his people I express my sorrow for the sins and grave crimes of clerical sexual abuse committed against you. And I humbly ask forgiveness,” he told them, before asking for their help in improving the Church’s response to the issue.

  One of those he met was a British survivor of abuse by Jesuit priests, and founder of a helpline for victims, the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC). Peter Saunders, an enthusiastic cyclist, gave Francis a cycling cap, telling him jokingly it had been hard to choose between watching the Tour de France leave from London or come and meet the pope. While Cardinal O’Malley translated, Saunders told Francis that the Church in all parts of the world had to introduce procedures at the level that now existed in the United Kingdom and the United States and should put more resources into helping and healing survivors. Saunders was with Francis for at least half an hour, and could carry on talking as long as he needed. Francis nodded continually. “I know I was listened to,” said Saunders. “He gave me his total attention. We had eye contact. I told him I wasn’t interested in being part of a public-relations exercise, but it was clear that’s not what it was.” Saunders was struck by the pope’s genuineness. “There’s no guile in him.”

  After the meeting, he was bombarded with e-mails from angry survivors criticizing him for meeting the pope. Many claimed Francis had been mixed up with the Argentine dictatorship and was complicit in the cover-up. “It’s hard to read stuff like that,” says Saunders.3

  * * *

  IN the mid-1980s Bergoglio was accused by a small
number of Argentine human-rights activists of complicity with the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. The indictment was first contained in a 1986 book by a widely admired Argentine Catholic lawyer and former Peronist government official, Emilio Mignone, founder of a human-rights organization, the Center for Social and Legal Studies (CELS). In his book Church and Dictatorship, Mignone claimed that two Jesuits had been abducted from a shanty town in Buenos Aires after Bergoglio had given a “green light” to the security forces to arrest them. It was a shocking claim.

  After Mignone died in 1998 his CELS colleague, Horacio Verbitsky, a Marxist journalist who had acted as intelligence chief for the montoneros, spoke to one of the two Jesuits prior to his death in 2000. The interview with Father Orlando Yorio, who had left the Society of Jesus in 1976, led to Verbitsky elaborating on Mignone’s charges in a series of articles that generated headlines after Bergoglio became archbishop in 1998. Like a drummer toy with long-life batteries, the allegations kept being repeated: in a book by Verbitsky in 2005, in a dossier sent to cardinals in conclave that year, and in a judicial inquiry to which Bergoglio gave evidence as cardinal in 2010. Finally, when Francis was elected, the claims went viral.

  Francis had not yet finished his address from the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square on the night of his election on March 13, 2013 when the British daily the Guardian tweeted: “Was Francis accessory to murder and false imprisonment?” It reprinted a 2011 article with several errors, two of which the newspaper retracted. But the allegations were by then taking wing. As journalists clicked through his copious online archive, Verbitsky, now aged 71 and glorying in the global attention, offered his own verdict of the new pope. Francis, he pronounced, was “an ersatz version of himself, like the water mixed with flour that indigent mothers use to cheat their children’s hunger.” And he tried to attach a moniker to him, as the “Pope of the Dictatorship.”4