Even though not all have shared their stories, enough former escapees now have to create a clear picture of how Bergoglio saved dozens of people, above all in the years 1976 to 1978, by sheltering them in the Máximo and filtering them abroad via a Jesuit-run international network of escape routes. Most went to neighboring Brazil or Uruguay, and from there to Europe. Bergoglio picked up many of the refugees himself, installed them sometimes for weeks or months in the Máximo, arranged false identity papers, drove them to the airport, and saw them safely onto the planes. In one case, “because he looked quite a bit like me,” he said in 2010, he gave a young man his identity card and clerical clothes, and smuggled him out through the Brazilian border town of Foz do Iguaçu.10
Although Bergoglio got some people out of Argentina via boat to Uruguay, the most common route was through the Argentine-Brazilian border—the old Jesuit mission lands among the Guaraní. The escapees made their way to Misiones in northern Argentina, where missionaries ferried them over the River Paraná from Puerto Iguazú. On the other side they were met by Brazilian Jesuits who sheltered the refugees in Rio de Janeiro, arranged money and tickets for their escape to Europe, and, when it was safe, put them on flights. Each person involved at each stage of the journey knew only about the part for which they were responsible—the bus journey, or the lodging, or the papers—in case they were caught.
This sophisticated and audacious network was all the more remarkable because the military dictatorships at the time in all the Southern Cone nations—Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, and Chile—had mutually agreed in the so-called Condor Treaty to hunt down and hand over so-called subversives fleeing neighboring countries. The way in which the Jesuits of South America mirrored that counterinsurgency cooperation with their own cross-border refugee-smuggling network is one of the great untold stories of the time.
* * *
ON March 24, 1976, the day the army deposed Isabel Perón, Bergoglio was moving the province headquarters from 327 Bogotá Street, just a few blocks from the Casa Rosada, to the Colegio Máximo in San Miguel. Now that vocation numbers were on the rise, “it seemed right for the provincial to be close to the formation house,” he explained in a 1990 letter to the head of the Salesians in Argentina, Don Cayetano Bruno. Formation remained Bergoglio’s main priority.
Even though a coup had been long expected, the Jesuits had no idea it would be that day, and they found themselves shifting furniture and files into a van as helicopters thudded overhead, tanks blocked roads, and soldiers jogged through the streets.
The new military government announced what it called a National Reorganization Process, known to Argentines simply as el proceso. Some of the tunes were familiar: Congress and courts were closed, political activity was suspended, and strikes were banned. But many were new. The government would be led this time by a three-man junta representing each branch of the armed forces, which between them divided up the cabinet posts: although the army commander in chief, General Jorge Videla, was president, he would make no executive decisions without consulting the naval chief, Admiral Emilio Massera, or the head of the air force, Brigadier Orlando Agosti. Also new was the degree of social control: newspaper editors were told what to publish, and the state took charge of all TV channels.
The ambition of the new government was to “restore the essential values which serve as the basis for the integral direction of the state” and—according to its communiqué that day—to “eradicate subversion and promote economic development.” The economic plan was monetarist shock therapy: shrink the state, freeze wages, and open markets to foreign competition. It didn’t work. After an initial spurt of growth and investment, Argentina plunged into yet another economic crisis, this time with sharp rises in unemployment.
By then, however, the country was entombed in an eerie political silence. Not until 1978 did some Argentines begin to emerge from their sepulchers, encouraged by relatives of the desaparecidos who the year before began their sad vigils in front of the Casa Rosada. The sight of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, with their white kerchiefs and ghostly pictures of their vanished children, endlessly circling the square under the surly gaze of soldiers, caught the attention of the world. By then, the junta had changed its leaders, and the new ones sought to distract that attention by the 1982 invasion of British-occupied islands off Argentina’s southern coast. Argentina’s defeat in the ensuing Falklands War (Guerra de las Malvinas) triggered the dictatorship’s collapse and the return to democracy in 1983.
* * *
ONCE installed in the Máximo in 1976, Bergoglio set about reforming the formation program of the Jesuit students, a key element of his wider strategy of refounding the province after years of chaos, experimentation, and division.
Speaking that year about the welcome upturn in new entrants, he said it was vital for them to find in the province a spirit of consolation that was the result of the union of souls, mutual trust, apostolic zeal, and obedience. The serpent in the Jesuit garden, he said, was “a certain avant-gardism.” The devil’s subtlest tactic was to make them believe that the Church needed saving (by the Jesuits) from itself. Behind this temptation was a lack of faith in God’s power present in the Church. Noting that “just as there are tempted Jesuits, so there are tempted communities” of Jesuits, he listed the signs to watch out for: where conflict is more important than unity, the part more important than the whole, and personal ideas more important than reality.
To combat these temptations, Bergoglio had a three-point strategy. The first was a revision of the study program. He reintroduced the juniorate (the one- or two-year grounding in arts and humanities) and restored the separation of philosophy and theology to replace what he described in his 1990 letter to Don Bruno as “the mélange of philosophy and theology called ‘curriculum’ in which they began by studying Hegel [sic].” Bergoglio’s new juniorate was a chance to root students in Jesuit and Argentine traditions, rather than foreign models. The studies included not just the European classics but also courses in Argentine literature—from El Gaucho Martín Fierro to Borges. History was revisionist, restoring the Catholic, Hispanic, and early-Jesuit elements in Argentina’s past that were ignored or scorned in liberal history. Bergoglio wanted the Jesuits to value popular religious traditions alongside high culture, to know about gauchos and caudillos as well as railways and telegraphs.
The second element was a pastoral outreach among the local population, an enterprise that would grow spectacularly over the next ten years as the Máximo filled up with students, but which also aroused an opposition to him within the Jesuits that would come to a head in the 1980s. In the same letter to Don Bruno he recalled:
When I was in San Miguel I saw the neighborhoods lacked pastoral care. This bothered me, and we started to attend to the children: Saturday afternoons, we taught catechism, then they played, etc. I realized that we professed Jesuits had taken a vow to teach doctrine to children and the uneducated [niños y rudos], and I began to do that myself together with the students. The thing grew: we had five churches built, we organized in a very systematic way the education of the children of the area on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings. This led pretty soon to the accusation that this was not the proper apostolate of the Jesuits, and that I had “Salesianized” [sic] the formation.
The concrete service of the poor in weekend missions in the local neighborhoods would connect the Jesuit students to the santo pueblo fiel de Dios and keep them rooted in reality. “The faithful people tire us because they ask concrete things of us,” he noted in one of his talks at this time. “In our minds we are kings and lords, and whoever dedicates himself exclusively to the cultivation of his fantasy will never come to feel the urgency of the here-and-now. But the pastoral work in our parishes is the opposite.”11
The third prong of his formation reform was the deepening of their Ignatian spirituality, as ever under the guidance of Father Fiorito, who lived in the Villa Bailari with the novices and was spiritual director to m
any of the students in the college—both Jesuits and non-Jesuits. Bergoglio’s many talks and writings of the time, published in the Boletín de Espiritualidad, are master classes in Ignatian discernment, many of which are concerned with the subtle temptations that lead to rejection of Church authority and divisions in the Jesuit body. He makes particular use of Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandii, lamenting the emergence of certain “base communities” that reject Church authority and become ideological. (“Perhaps it would do us good to suffer a while before the Lord,” says Bergoglio, “asking forgiveness for the times that, in our work as pastors, we have sinned in this area.”)12 But mostly his references are to Saint Ignatius’s own writings—and above all the Exercises—that combat the devil’s many and subtle attempts at dividing the Jesuit body.
In the talks he gave to the Jesuits as provincial, his diagnosis of the province’s challenges merged with his view of what had gone wrong in the country and the Church at large. Christianity in Argentina had been taken hostage by violent ideologies. His generation had succumbed to the temptations of the revolutionary messianism of the guerrillas or the anticommunist crusade of the men in khaki, and the result was diabolic: the Body of Christ had been split along temporal lines, and orders such as his own had seen their members dwindle and disperse. In reforming the Society of Jesus in Argentina, Bergoglio wanted the Jesuits to surrender their all-too-human schemes and be shaped by the “periphery”—the pastoral needs of the poor.
In this, Bergoglio was following the wisdom of Yves Congar’s 1950 text True and False Reform in the Church. True reform came about through the periphery being allowed to shape the center; “reforms that have succeeded within the Church are those which have been made with concern for the concrete need of souls, in a pastoral perspective, aiming at holiness,” the French Dominican had written. What upset reform, leading to division and schism, was ideology—a partial interpretation in which some values are extolled and others demonized. The post-conciliar Jesuit changes showed all the signs of a “false” reform, not least because it had led (on both left and right) to a greater alignment with secular ideologies. True reform meant returning to the sources, reaffirming essential Catholic traditions.
Bergoglio’s talks show him developing two major vaccinations against the lure of ideology. The first was the God’s-holy-faithful-people idea: following Congar, God’s power was to be discerned not in elite schemes but in the ordinary believing poor. The second was a series of governing “Christian principles,” a kind of sapiential wisdom captured in a series of criteria for discernment. In 1974, when he addressed the provincial congregation, there were three: unity comes before conflict, the whole comes before the part, time comes before space. By 1980, he had added a fourth, anti-ideological principle: reality comes before the idea. They were principles deduced from various of his heroes—the early companions of Saint Ignatius, the Paraguay missionaries, even the nineteenth-century caudillo Rosas—and one major source: what he called “the special wisdom of the people whom we call faithful, the people which is the people of God.”13
Those four principles, said Bergoglio, “are the axis around which reconciliation can revolve.” They would constantly appear from now on in his writing and speeches—and were shared with the world in Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), Pope Francis’s first authored document, released in November 2013.
Bergoglio’s 1980 talk argued that elite projects “deny their own brothers and sisters the power to make decisions, to move a process forward, and to organize themselves: the right to form their own institution.” They “do not desire to form a body” but instead “aim to hold on to a privilege of power.” That power divides, unlike like the power of God. The unifying power of God is located outside the schemes of the elites—in God’s faithful people.
Restorationists and idealists, conservatives and revolutionaries will always be fighting to get power, get control, run the institution. The argument remains put in such a way that there are just two possible alternatives: our institutions have to be either restoration workshops or antiseptic laboratories. In the meantime, while we argue and waste time on these arguments, we do not see the real movement going on among God’s faithful people. It is with these people that effective power, wisdom, real problems, serious suffering, all move forward—and here, too, is the movement of salvation. Then, as always, the restorationist and idealistic ideologues, incapable of smelling the sweat of the real advance, will get left behind. They are cut off in their elitism and hold on to their tired, gray, cartoon-book narratives. Thus they fail to join in the march of the history where God is saving us, God is making us a body, an institution. God’s power enters history so as to make of human beings one single body.14
* * *
SAINT Ignatius of Loyola’s dictum that love is known more in deeds than words was especially true of Bergoglio during the dirty war. His silence was not just caution, and it wasn’t just his character. It was key to his objectives. The Jesuits were being watched—the telephones were tapped and the post searched—and the province mirrored the divisions in the Church and the country. There were Jesuits who sympathized with the guerrillas, and others who identified with the military, and any number of others in between with Radical, liberal, or Peronist sympathies.
The three Jesuit military chaplains living in or next to the college were under obedience to Bergoglio as provincial and he had their trust. Their tip-offs and influence in military circles gave him space to maneuver; he could warn those at risk of being targeted, and get information on those who had been taken. He was able to tell his fellow Jesuit Julio Mérediz, for example, who slept in a room with a corrugated-iron roof in a youth center, that he was on an air force list of possible subversives. “He ordered me to go and live in the Colegio Máximo,” Father Mérediz recalls. “I went there and hid and that saved my life.”
Bergoglio took considerable risks. In 1977, for example, he took a truck to the house of his old laboratory boss, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, whose daughter Ana María was being watched, and removed their library of Marxist books to hide in the college. And he regularly went to collect another dear friend, the human rights judge Alicia Oliveira, from her place in hiding, so she could meet her young children at the Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires.
Oliveira offers a valuable window onto Bergoglio’s thoughts and actions at the time. She was an anticlerical left-wing Peronist, a single mother of three, and Argentina’s first female criminal judge. She met Bergoglio in 1972 when the provincial went to consult her on a legal matter. Finding themselves on the same wavelength, they became friends. Oliveira was one of the founders—together with the man who would be Bergoglio’s first accuser, Emilio Mignone—of the Center for Social and Legal Studies, CELS, a human-rights monitor that in 1975 was becoming an increasing annoyance for the security forces. With coup rumors circulating, and concerned for her safety, Bergoglio invited her to live in the college—an invitation she laughingly turned down, saying she’d rather go to prison than live with priests.
Following the coup she was considered ideologically unsuitable and lost her court position (Bergoglio anonymously sent her flowers; she recognized the handwriting on the card praising her qualities as judge). Shortly afterward the CELS office was raided and she went into hiding, lodging with a friend but leaving her children with others. Bergoglio brought her to meet her children twice a week in the college. There they discussed the appalling friend/foe military logic, and the inability of the junta to distinguish between political, social, and religious commitment—or between varieties of liberation theology.
Oliveira also saw firsthand Bergoglio’s anxiety for the safety of the Jesuits, especially those in the villas miseria where the guerrillas and their front organizations were based. He confided in her about the efforts he was making to find detainees, both before and after Yorio and Jalics were taken in May 1976; and he invited her to farewell lunches for people he was helping to escape, at the Jesuit retreat house in Sa
n Miguel as well as the Jesuit residence of San Ignacio de Loyola close to the Plaza de Mayo. “When someone had to get out of the country, there was always a lunch,” she recalls. “He never missed them.”
Rescuing people from the clutches of the armed forces once they had been taken was an almost impossible task, but Bergoglio had some successes. One of them was a student of Father Juan Carlos Scannone’s. Bergoglio found out where he was being held and convinced the commander that he was innocent. But the young man, whose surname was Albanesi, had been tortured; worse, he had seen the face of his torturer. That meant, the officer informed Bergoglio, that he could not be freed. “Bergoglio told him that it was a serious sin to kill an innocent man,” remembers Scannone. “He said: ‘If you believe in hell, you should know you’ll get sent to hell for a serious sin.’ He saved the boy’s life.”
Another success was Sergio Globulin, who had been a lay theology student at the Máximo in the late 1960s. Bergoglio had celebrated his wedding in 1975 and went to visit Sergio and Ana more than once in the villa miseria where they taught. After Sergio was abducted in October 1976, Bergoglio found a safe house for Ana and energetically set about getting her husband released. After eighteen days, he succeeded. By then Sergio had been so badly beaten, he needed to be hospitalized for a month.
Bergoglio came to see him there, and told Sergio and Ana that they had to leave the country, which they did with the help of the Italian vice-consul. “He told us about his various attempts to get us freed and to demonstrate my innocence, attempts that had required meetings with various high-ranking members of the Armed Forces,” Sergio Globulin recalls. “That’s why he kept telling us to get out. He knew other groups in the army were looking for me.” They went to live in Friuli, Italy, where Bergoglio visited them in 1977 on a visit to Rome.15
Miguel La Civita, at that time a theology student at the Máximo, witnessed the effect on Bergoglio of one of the meetings the provincial held to get Globulin released.
The Great Reformer Page 19
