Those were the parts of the interview that generated—as they were intended to—the main news coverage. But while Francis was capable of communicating in the simplest of terms to the broadest range of people, he could also use a coded language for internal consumption. Parts of the interview were designed specifically for the readers of those Jesuit journals.
Noting that “now more than ever” Jesuits were called to work closely with the whole Church, he told Spadaro that this required “much humility, sacrifice and courage, especially when you are misunderstood or you are the subject of misunderstandings and slanders.” He went on to give examples: “Let us think of the tensions of the past history, in the previous centuries, about the Chinese rites controversy, the Malabar rites and the Reductions in Paraguay.” Jesuits knew what he meant: these were historic examples of “inculturated” missionaries adopting practices at odds with Rome but which history showed to be on the side of right. Francis was demonstrating that he understood, as a Jesuit, the price that obedience to the Church sometimes demanded, while stressing that living in that tension produced what he called “the most fruitful attitude.”
The interview also contained another olive branch to the Argentine Jesuits who continued to be suspicious of him: he confessed to governing the Argentine province in an authoritarian manner, not consulting enough. But he firmly rejected the injustice of the accusation many Jesuits had made of him that he was right-wing. “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he told Spadaro, “but I have never been a right-winger.”
Asked what it was about being a Jesuit that shaped his papacy, the pope did not hesitate: “Discernment.” He described the Jesuit means of distinguishing good and bad spirits as “the instrument of struggle in order to know the Lord and follow him more closely.” Discernment, he said, “guides me in my way of governing.” Decision making included discussion and consultation, but was about “looking at the signs, listening to the things that happen, the feelings of the people, especially the poor.” It meant sometimes waiting and assessing, taking the necessary time to decide on a course of action; or doing something now that you had thought you would do later. His choices as pope—living in the Casa Santa Marta, using a humble car—were the result of a discernment that followed from “looking at things, at people, and from reading the signs of the times.” Ordinarily, the way of making decisions was the one Saint Ignatius in The Spiritual Exercises described as the “Second Time,” “when sufficient light and knowledge is received through experiences of consolations and desolations, and through experience of the discernment of the different spirits.”
Spadaro noted that Francis’s Jesuit model was Peter Faber (1506–1546), Saint Ignatius’s first companion, a Savoyard Frenchman who, unlike Ignatius and Xavier, was of peasant stock. Bergoglio, who was a lower-middle-class boy from Flores while most of his companions were graduates of prestigious Jesuit private schools, may have identified with Faber for that reason. But the two were alike in other ways. Faber was gentle, open-minded, with a great capacity for dialogue—he had a particular mission to the Calvinists—yet was a leader and reformer who was capable of decisive government. On his birthday that year, December 17, 2013, Francis had breakfast at the Casa Santa Marta with four homeless men and their dog, before later that morning declaring Faber a saint by means of an “equivalent canonization”—entering his name in the calendar of saints without a formal ceremony. He called Nicolás to tell him. “I just signed the decree,” he told him.
In the New Year, Francis celebrated Faber’s canonization with 350 Jesuits at the Gesù. In his homily he described the new saint as a “modest man, sensitive, with a deep inner life and endowed with the gift of making friends with people of all kinds,” as well as being “a restless spirit, indecisive, never satisfied.” On July 31, 2014, the Feast of Saint Ignatius, Francis joined the Jesuits for lunch. Photos were later posted on the website of the Jesuit Curia that showed Francis laughing uproariously, at home with his brothers again.6
Not only had the relationship healed, but Francis’s desire to be seen as a Jesuit pope meant the Society was basking in his reflected popularity. Ever since Paul VI in 1974, Jesuits had felt chill winds from Rome. In less than a year, Francis had brought the Society back into the fold, modeling a whole new papal relationship with the Jesuits that was almost the exact reverse of John Paul II’s. Meanwhile, Francis had set about building bridges with his Jesuit critics in Argentina, sending them affectionate handwritten letters that some read with tears in their eyes.7
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NOT long after Bergoglio stood down as provincial in December 1979, he had a second brush with death. Dr. Juan Carlos Parodi, then a thirty-seven-year-old surgeon, was called out to the San Camilo Clinic in Buenos Aires to treat a Jesuit priest who years later he realized was Bergoglio. His patient was suffering from gangrenous cholecystitis, a severe inflammation that cuts the blood supply to the gallbladder, a fatal condition if not treated. Dr. Parodi, who remembered only that his patient had been “very ill,” removed the gallbladder and drained the affected area. Bergoglio recovered in a few days and, when the doctor refused to be paid, gave him a book on Saint Ignatius.8
Bergoglio was now rector of the Colegio Máximo, one of three positions (the others are provincial and novice master) appointed by the general in Rome. His successor as provincial was Father Andrés Swinnen, who in turn was replaced by Father Ernesto López Rosas as novice master. All three were part of the group around the province’s spiritual guru, Father Miguel Angel Fiorito, in the late 1960s, and shared a similar outlook. That made for a smooth transition. Swinnen kept Bergoglio’s innovations—the team of roving missionaries, the vocations group, the expansion of discernment retreats—while raising funds to cover the costs of the dozens of new vocations.
As rector, Bergoglio was director of the philosophy and theology faculties, and in charge of the formation of close to one hundred Jesuit students, which would double by the time he stepped down in 1986. He had exercised a de facto role as formator after moving into the college as provincial in 1976, but could now, as he turned forty-three, focus wholly on the calling he had first recognized in Chile twenty years earlier. The college was filling up with dozens of new Jesuits—young men needing to be formed—and Bergoglio had a compelling model of missionary priesthood and Ignatian spirituality to impart. Swinnen’s policies continued Bergoglio’s priorities: in order to improve formation, the college retained the best students as professors in the Máximo rather than let them be sent to universities abroad, as happened in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Bergoglio’s reorganized studies of philosophy and theology were at the heart of the study cycle at the Máximo. The curriculum was national and popular, with the juniors receiving solid doses of Argentine history and literature. The philosophers and theologians imbibed the teología del pueblo, with its emphasis on popular religiosity, as dominant at that time in the Máximo as it was in Argentine diocesan seminaries. But the Máximo was not parochial. In 1985 the college hosted a four-day international conference on the evangelization of culture and inculturation, and Bergoglio invited Jean-Yves Calvez, the French Jesuit expert on Karl Marx who had been one of Arrupe’s four chief advisers, to give a course each year at the Máximo. Spirituality remained key: the rediscovered Exercises, and Ignatian discernment, were a major part of student life, and the articles (many of them by Bergoglio) in the spirituality journal edited by Fiorito, the Boletín de Espiritualidad, continued to shape the province’s renewal.
Bergoglio’s formation program, however, had an extra, radical element seldom found in Jesuit training at the time, which he took from the early missions that so inspired him. It was an option for the poor expressed in manual labor, hands-on pastoral care, and a deep respect for popular culture and values, especially a religiosity of pilgrimages, shrines, and devotions. It was a radical inculturation into the lives of God’s holy faithf
ul people.
Over the years this format met with increasing opposition from older Jesuits in Argentina, elsewhere in Latin America, and eventually from the Jesuit curia in Rome. Within Argentina, the hostility came from senior Jesuit intellectuals in the Center for Social Research and Action, or CIAS, who took advantage of the change of general in Rome in 1983 to lobby against the rector and his followers, arguing that Bergoglio’s model of formation was backward and out of step with the Society of Jesus in Latin America. When the new superior general, Father Kolvenbach, imposed the CIAS’s candidate as provincial in 1986, the move met with opposition from the younger Jesuits angry at what they saw as the dismantling of Bergoglio’s apostolate. The Argentine Jesuits entered a tense period that eventually split the province and led to Bergoglio’s internal exile.
At heart those tensions echoed unsettled questions over Jesuit identity and mission that so vexed all three popes of the 1970s. Soon after his election in August 1978, Pope John Paul I scheduled an address to the Society of Jesus that his sudden death five weeks later prevented him from giving. His successor, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, elected John Paul II in October of that year, gave Arrupe the scolding his predecessor had prepared, and said he agreed with it. Arrupe did, too—in part. He told Jesuit leaders in Rome that after fifteen years of searching and experimentation it was time to restore some traditional values that had been jettisoned in the process. But he was old and ill, and believed another should now take the helm, and in 1980 he asked permission of John Paul II to resign and call a new general congregation.
John Paul II ordered him to wait; he wanted to reform the Society before it chose his successor. But then came the shooting of the pope in St. Peter’s Square, and in August 1981 Arrupe was felled by a cerebral thrombosis that left him hemiplegic and increasingly without speech. In accordance with the Jesuit constitutions, the general’s responsibility should have passed to an interim administrator who would call a general congregation to elect a successor. But the convalescent John Paul II overrode the constitutions and imposed his own personal delegate, the octogenarian Italian Jesuit Paolo Dezza, who had been Paul VI’s confessor.
The eighteen-month papal intervention sent shock waves through the Society and turned many Jesuits into lifelong opponents of John Paul II. Others saw it as a chance to take stock after the heady Arrupe years of experimentation and innovation. In February 1982 Swinnen joined eighty-five other provincials in Rome to hear John Paul II tell them things Bergoglio would have agreed with: that Vatican II needed to be authentically interpreted, that the Jesuits needed a distinctive “priestly” engagement in the quest for justice as well as a rigorous formation that was “spiritual, doctrinal, disciplinary, and pastoral.” He asked them to take up four tasks: ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, dialogue with atheists, and the promotion of justice. At the end of the address, the pope gave permission for the Society to elect Arrupe’s successor.
In September the following year, Bergoglio and López Rosas were elected to accompany Swinnen as delegates to GC33 in Rome. The election of a Jesuit general has similarities with a papal conclave. Before the voting, there was a report about the state of the Society and discussions of the necessary requisites of the future general. There was also a prayerful time for murmurationes, during which the two hundred delegates could discreetly discuss and get to know candidates. Just like the cardinal electors in a conclave, they weighed candidates’ prayerfulness, leadership, and organizational skills, as well as their capacity to tackle the challenges of the moment; anyone showing any sign of ambition was automatically disqualified. Then, after a prayer to the Holy Spirit and oath of secrecy, the voting was carried out by secret written ballots.
On September 13, 1983, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach was elected on the first ballot, a shy, soft-spoken Dutchman with a goatee beard and the diplomatic skills to restore relations with the Holy See. Although GC33’s main purpose was his election, it issued a statement that echoed reservations (which Bergoglio shared) about Decree Four, lamenting “deficiencies … essentially linked to the tendency to reduce the concept of justice to too-human dimensions.” The decree was reaffirmed, but the statement stressed the need to integrate justice into the service of faith.
Back home there was regime change, too, triggered by the military junta’s disastrous invasion in April 1982 of barren islands in the South Atlantic claimed by Argentina but occupied by Great Britain since the nineteenth century. The six-week Falklands War was devastating in its cost in lives—649 Argentines and 255 British died fighting over islands with a population of just eighteen hundred—but for Argentines it was doubly traumatic because of the tortuous mix of emotions involved. On the one hand, Argentines believed passionately that the recovery of the islands was a matter of justice; on the other, they came to see that the military junta had used the invasion in the hope of avoiding accountability for the crimes of the dirty war.
There were many Jesuits from army families, and prayers and Masses were said at the Máximo for the beleaguered troops. During the war, in May, Pope John Paul II made a long-planned pastoral visit to the United Kingdom. To maintain balance, he paid a two-day visit to Argentina on June 11, just as its ten thousand soldiers were fighting a desperate losing battle in Port Stanley (they surrendered days later). Bergoglio went with the staff and students of the Máximo to a huge outdoor Mass celebrated close to the Monument to the Spaniards in Buenos Aires where John Paul II prayed for a rapid end to the war, and to hear the pope speak to religious and priests in Buenos Aires cathedral.
Bergoglio shared the mixed emotions of his compatriots. Like them he believed the islands were part of Argentine territory, and British occupation a colonial injustice. What he said at the time of the war has not been recorded, but as cardinal archbishop he spoke often at Masses for the veterans, deploying the quasi-mystical language of Argentine nationalism that jars so strongly with the British focus on the right to self-determination of the island’s occupants. Blessing relatives of fallen soldiers on their journey in October 2009 to the islands to erect a cenotaph in Darwin cemetery, for example, he told them to “go and kiss that land which is ours and which seems so far away,” and that their sons, husbands, and fathers “fell there in an almost religious gesture of kissing with their blood the soil of the fatherland.” And in 2012, on the thirtieth anniversary of the conflict, he spoke of those who died as “sons of the fatherland who went out to defend their mother, the fatherland, to claim what belonged to the fatherland and had been usurped.”
Yet he was appalled by the war, and the recklessness of the invasion, describing it in 2008 as “a sad story, a dark chapter in Argentina’s history.” But he was determined that the veterans and their families not be burdened with the nation’s shame, constantly demanding that they be honored and remembered, and their sacrifice acknowledged. “Society owes them a great debt,” he said in his homily that year, pointing out their psychological as well as physical scars, and the challenges the traumatized veterans faced in finding work and forming relationships. Among those at the Mass that day was a group of veterans whom the government did not recognize as such and whose cause Bergoglio had backed, arguing that everyone involved in the war, on or off the theater of combat, bore its scars and deserved to be recognized.9
The Falklands defeat, and the revelations of incompetence and corruption that followed, permanently destroyed Argentines’ historic faith in the armed forces as national saviors. Even before the troops came home, the dictatorship had begun to unravel. As journalists uncovered the first mass graves of desaparecidos, the junta began negotiating with the political parties a pathway to elections. The victory of the Radical Party candidate, Raúl Alfonsín, in the October 1983 presidential elections marked a decisive break with the past. Among his first moves was the creation of a commission led by the writer Ernesto Sábato to probe human-rights abuses during the dictatorship. Its report, Nunca Más (Never Again), led to a landmark trial and the imprisonment of a number of former
junta leaders—an extraordinary achievement. But as the scope of the trials widened, restlessness in the ranks of the armed forces led Alfonsín to a put a stop to them in the interests of consolidating democracy. Argentina would continue for the next twenty years to be caught between the need and desire for both justice and reconciliation.
The economy proved harder to restore than democracy. Alfonsín failed to deal with the soaring budget deficit, vast foreign debt, and shrinking economy he had inherited from the dictatorship, and despite a new currency, by the end of the decade the country was in a major hyperinflationary crisis. For working-class Argentines living in the barrios around the Colegio Máximo in San Miguel, the 1980s were a time of great hardship, as rising prices and unemployment pushed thousands of families into destitution.
* * *
“WITHIN four or five years we were two hundred in the college, all Jesuits, all Argentines,” remembers one of its former students, Angel Rossi. The Máximo was “a real powerhouse of energy” at this time, recalls another, Leonardo Nardín. Its growth could be glimpsed in buildings: a large new novice house had sprung up to replace the Villa Bailari, and a new library opened in October 1981, boasting one of Latin America’s largest theology collections.
Work also began in 1980 on a new church. From the early 1970s the Jesuits in the college had served the parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help together with its five chapels, three schools, and an adult education center. After he became rector, Bergoglio secured permission from the Bishop of San Miguel to build a new parish church, St. Joseph the Patriarch, on land donated by the college. The parish covered three barrios of simple dwellings on unpaved roads that turned to mud in the rains. Bergoglio’s first baptism at the church—a baby called Griselda on February 24, 1980—took place a month before the inauguration of the parish on the Feast of Saint Joseph, March 19, the same day Francis would begin his papacy thirty-three years later. In 1980 the church was little more than a shed but, through the efforts of students and parishioners, soon acquired bricks and a roof. Within a couple of years, it was a huge church at the center of a busy pastoral operation including a children’s kitchen, and two schools next to the Máximo offering job skills workshops and adult education. The Patriarca San José parish eventually spawned four new large chapels spread over the three barrios.10
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