Liberation theology was still equated in most people’s minds with the Marxist edition prevalent in Central America and the Andean countries, one that implied that a “people’s Church” of base communities at odds with the “institutional” Church. But there were at least two post-Medellín liberation theologies, both committed to liberation and the option for the poor but with different roots: one nourished by post-Enlightenment liberalism and Marxism (which Latin-American theologians brought back from their studies in Europe), the other by national, popular, and Catholic traditions. Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian priest who authored the founding text of liberation theology in 1971, would revise his own thinking under the latter influence. By the 1990s he had come to accept that the “historical force” of the poor was through culture and faith rather than merely political struggle.
The German theologian whom in 1980 John Paul II named to head the Vatican’s doctrine watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), took a strong interest in these developments, and in the distinction between these two strains. From 1982 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger hosted meetings of Latin-American theologians at the Vatican to look at what was good and true in liberation theology and what was incompatible with core Christian understandings. The Instruction issued by the CDF in 1984 condemned the use of Marxist hermeneutics in some strains of liberation theology, as well as their reduction of the rich biblical concept of liberation to political categories; but the CDF was careful to acknowledge that there were different versions of liberation theology, and only some contained these errors. Two years later, the CDF issued a second Instruction that praised the theology of liberation, especially its affirmation of popular piety and the option for the poor—the key Latin-American theological insight that John Paul II so valued.26 The first Instruction was reported in the media as a blanket condemnation of liberation theology, while the second was ignored by the media because it contradicted that story. Thus two myths were forged: that all liberation theology was Marxist, and that the Vatican condemned all liberation theology. Argentine teología del pueblo disproved both.
In between the two instructions, in September 1985, Bergoglio hosted at the Colegio Máximo a major conference of 120 theologians from twenty-three countries on the topic of “the evangelization of culture and the inculturation of the Gospel,” in order to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Jesuits in Argentina. His opening address was pure Puebla, identifying both faith and culture as “privileged places where divine wisdom is manifested.” The first was the Gospel, which revealed God’s saving plan through His visible image, Jesus Christ; the second was “the different cultures, fruit of the wisdom of peoples” that reflected “the creative and perfecting Wisdom of God.” At the end of his address he paid “filial homage” to Father Arrupe “who in the Synod on Evangelization of 1974 pronounced what was then the novel word ‘inculturation.’”27
The conference was opened by the Argentine bishop, Antonio Quarracino, who was reaching the end of his term as CELAM’s president. Quarracino, who knew and admired Bergoglio since they had first met in the mid-1970s, would soon be named archbishop of La Plata and, in 1990, archbishop of Buenos Aires. Once there, he would work to get Bergoglio made his auxiliary bishop.
* * *
BECAUSE he would never again be so visible at such close hand to so many, the Jesuit students’ recollections of Jorge Bergoglio as he neared fifty have a special value. Even those who later critiqued aspects of the Bergoglio era agree that he was a demanding but loving father figure, a brilliant teacher, a spiritual master, and a captivating leader. He prayed for two to three hours a day, ran a college of two hundred resident students and hundreds more nonresidents, plus a vast parish; he taught pastoral theology, gave retreats, organized conferences, raised money for the college, and was mentor and spiritual director to dozens of Jesuits. Yet his students remember him as always there for them. “He went from giving spiritual direction to speaking on the phone with a bishop to washing clothes in the laundry before going to the kitchen and the pigsty and then back to the classroom,” remembers Cervera. “He was involved in every detail with each one of us.”
Bergoglio’s hands-on management extended to the kitchen, where on Sundays—when the staff was off—he took charge. His mother had taught him well; he was a good cook (his sister María Elena says his pièce de résistance was stuffed calamari). A friend at the time remembers organizing a meeting of thirty theology students at the Máximo but, close to the time of their arrival, had nothing to give them to eat. Bergoglio wasn’t fazed. “Go into the center of San Miguel and buy four spit-roasted chickens, four panes de manteca (lard bread), and four cans of cream,” he told him. When he came back, he found Bergoglio had organized a team of students to peel and boil the potatoes. Bergoglio told him: “This is one of my mother’s recipes. You cut the bread in two. One half you use to cover the cooked chicken; the other half you use to stuff it. The same with all four chickens. You put them in a hot oven for ten minutes, take them out, add the cream, and you turn off the oven. You serve it with the potatoes, and that’s it—everyone happy” (they were).28
Bergoglio expected much and gave much, too; he was always out there in front, primereando. He sought excellence, quoting Saint Ignatius’s Latin adage, age quod agis, which English-speaking Jesuits summarize as “do what you’re missioned to do and don’t let other things, even very good ones, distract you, because that’s how the devil makes sure you blow it.” He was sensitive to different students’ needs. Tomás Bradley, a novice who had studied agronomy and loved the outdoors, was given a summer duty managing the college’s reception desk to encourage him to find God in the boredom and stillness of a desk job.29 In keeping with the austere habits of a lifetime, Bergoglio never took vacations himself, but sent the students away in the heat of January for two weeks to the mountains of Córdoba, where first the novices and then the scholastics stayed in an old school hut.
He was tough and demanding, but never harsh. When Nardín got back from one of the summer camps with the children to begin his annual eight-day retreat, “he saw I was exhausted and said, ‘Have a siesta until five, and instead of four prayer sessions, do three.’ He had that kind of personal care.” Cervera recalls how often, after they had been working hard, “he would appear with a bottle of wine and something to eat, and we ate together in a family atmosphere.”
He wanted them to develop as mature Jesuits, alive to the temptations of the ego. Ortiz remembers trying desperately to impress him over a number of weeks by gathering ever-larger numbers of children for the Sunday Mass Bergoglio celebrated at San José. But each week the rector told him, pocos, muy pocos (“not many, not many at all”). When, on the third week, Ortiz proudly came with fifty noisy children, and Bergoglio again told him muy pocos, the young Jesuit exploded and told him to go to hell, at which point the rector took him to the side of the church and gave him a hug. “It’s not about the numbers you’ve managed to bring,” Bergoglio told Ortiz. “It’s the kids themselves that matter. Your vanity stopped you seeing that. Now, finally, you’ve got it.”
Ortiz learned to be straight with Bergoglio, to express his feelings and frustrations, whereas some who were tested and probed by their rector resented it. “He treated you like a father, and like a father you could unburden to him,” says Ortiz. Rossi recalls:
The people that could expect a dressing down from him were those who wanted people to know how good and perfect they were, or who were legalistic. Conversely, he responded to fragility with a sensitivity I don’t think I’ve ever seen in anyone else. If you could apply some kind of mathematical rule to Bergoglio, I’d say it was, the greater the fragility, the greater the response from him. I’ve always said: if you hit rock bottom, even if you’re his biggest enemy, just go and see him—he’ll be there for you, not just with time, but whatever you need: a house, food, work, whatever. Human fragility brings out the best in him. That’s why those who have most enjoyed his papacy ar
e not the poor in the abstract but the huge numbers of poor people he has helped. They know who he is. On the one hand they’ve seen this mercy and forgiveness, and on the other this exquisite charity, the kind of giving that the Gospel describes as an unrestrained outpouring.
His students found Bergoglio’s vision deeply attractive. He offered a model of what it meant to be a twentieth-century Jesuit based on what he saw in the early Society of Jesus. They admired his deep grasp of Ignatian spirituality, which he had a born teacher’s ability to communicate. He was well read and had a penetrating, systematic intellect, but proceeded as much from the gut as from the mind. Where Rossi describes him as “a mix between a desert ascetic and a brilliant manager,” Nardín says he was a “very astute saint—very able, and streetwise: it’s an unusual combination.” His authority was innate. “He was born to lead,” says Gómez. “His whole thinking is that of a leader.” He offers an example: Bergoglio’s skill in tailoring the qualities needed for a task to the abilities of those available to him, working out how the different qualities and temperaments in them could collectively add up to what was needed. “It’s what people who govern know how to do,” says Gómez, who used to be Argentine provincial.
Despite his tenderness, there was an inscrutable, disconcerting side to Bergoglio. His was an intuitive, sapiential kind of knowing, an ability to read a person’s hearts that monks call cardiognosis. “He just knew you,” recalls Rossi. “He heard what you hadn’t said.” Rossi adds that Bergoglio “is an intuitive discerner, which can be disconcerting. He can help you decide in two minutes what you hadn’t even begun thinking about. He’s not infallible, but he usually gets it right.” He liked to step outside categories: Gómez says Bergoglio sought either a midpoint between extremes or a position outside dichotomies, and stressed certainties that guaranteed a shared belonging: he recalls him after a conference at the Máximo being happy because he had equally challenged both the “left” and the “right.” Others describe him as having an irreverent and mischievous streak, which was always checked by the boundaries of Church tradition, which he never overstepped.
Bergoglio’s care for the Jesuits in formation, and their devotion to him in return, gave him enormous influence over them. It was a charismatic, personalist style of leadership, the kind Latins (and especially Argentines) respond naturally to, yet which Anglo-Saxons can regard as suffocating or demagogic. Nardín gives an example of Bergoglio’s charismatically authoritarian leadership: one time he called on students who smoked (Bergoglio, with his weak lungs, never did) to give it up out of solidarity with the workers in San Miguel who were unable to afford cigarettes. “He said, ‘And if anyone thinks they can’t, come and see me.’ It wasn’t an invitation, or a suggestion,” says Nardín. “It was like, ‘We are going to do this.’ And we did.”
Bergoglio was decisive. “He discerned a lot, consulted, and sought consensus in some things,” recalls Cervera. “But when he had to decide, he decided on his own account.” He usually saw what needed to be done but, back in the 1970s and 1980s, often failed to invest time in allowing others to see it that way, too. As provincial and rector, “I did not always do the necessary consultation,” Francis, looking back, told Father Spadaro, adding: “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems.”
Bergoglio’s spectacular success as provincial and rector turned out to be also his weakness. As he pushed ahead rapidly, transforming both the Jesuits and the lives of the people of San Miguel, he was creating a problem: the sheer pace and extent of the changes would provoke resentment. He had created, in just a few years, a thriving institution, deeply embedded in Argentine culture and in the lives of the poor, based on a radical and compelling vision of primitive Jesuit missions, and a charismatic, inspiring leadership. The continued high numbers of vocations, the transformation of the neighborhoods, and the seriousness and dedication of the young Jesuits told their own story. The difficulty was that provincials and rectors are supposed to serve single terms, then stand down and fade into the background. Bergoglio as rector, however, had become a “provincial without portfolio” whose personal authority exceeded his official one, and whose term didn’t end, in practice, with the naming of his successor. Even after Bergoglio stepped down as provincial, Swinnen and López Rosas saw themselves as the executors of his vision; and in many different ways he had more influence by the end of his time as rector than he had had as a provincial.
The Argentine Jesuits today wryly joke that Bergoglio becoming pope was the obvious solution they never thought of at the time.
* * *
WHEN Father Ignacio Pérez del Viso returned from studies in Europe in 1978, he found almost everyone in the Argentine province happy with Bergoglio’s rule as provincial and subsequent role as rector. The grand exception was Pérez del Viso’s own community in the wealthy north of Buenos Aires, in the barrio of Belgrano, where Jesuits worked in the province’s social sciences institute, the Center for Social Research and Action, which in the 1980s became the locus of a campaign against Bergoglio.
The Argentine CIAS was founded in 1960, after the Jesuit curia in Rome had asked each of the Jesuit provinces to establish a study center to use the emerging social sciences to highlight and analyze structural injustice. In their 1968 letter, the Jesuit provincials of Latin America defined CIAS’s mission as “helping to raise awareness, stimulating and guiding mentalities and actions, through research, publication, teaching, and advice.”30
During the ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of the Jesuits in the Argentine CIAS were among the original signatories of the Third World Priests’ Movement (MSTM) around Father Mugica. At least one CIAS employee was involved in the guerrillas and was later killed by the armed forces. Many of the Jesuits in the institute were close to Ricardo O’Farrell, the provincial before Bergoglio, and backed Yorio and Jalics against Bergoglio in the conflict over the community in Bajo Flores. There were some—particularly Father Fernando Storni, one of the CIAS founders who was President Alfonsín’s religious adviser—who had not forgotten the handover of the Salvador university, which they saw as a betrayal. Others, such as Father Eduardo Fabbri, took an avant-garde view of sexuality and marriage, which troubled Bergoglio.
Such disagreements are normal, especially among articulate and educated Jesuits, and do not by themselves account for the animosity of the CIAS community toward Bergoglio. Nor is it enough to look through a political prism. In his 1986 book Church and Dictatorship, Emilio Mignone, for example, wrote of CIAS that “the dominating role played by Father Jorge Bergoglio and his faction within the Jesuits lessened the center’s vitality.” This reflected a view taken by the left at the time: that Bergoglio had in some way muzzled the CIAS, which might otherwise have played a prophetic human-rights role in the dirty war. This was the view of Father Michael Campbell-Johnston, for example, an English Jesuit liberationist who liaised with the CIAS institutes across Latin America on behalf of the general. He was appalled that “our institute in Buenos Aires was able to function freely because it never criticized or opposed the government,” and he berated Bergoglio in 1977 for being “out of step with our other social institutes in the continent.” Campbell-Johnston found unconvincing Bergoglio’s explanation that Argentina was not Peru or El Salvador.31
That was not, however, the view of the CIAS Jesuits in Argentina, says Pérez del Viso. They accepted, first, that provincials have a duty to censor Jesuit publications, and second, that all media were muzzled under the dictatorship. They knew that the CIAS journal could never have carved out a role for itself criticizing human-rights abuses. After it published a December 1976 article critical of torture, for example, the junta came close to shutting the journal down, and only relented after its author, Father Vicente Pellegrini, left the country. When the Buenos Aires newspaper La Opinión republished the CIAS article, the government closed it. Only the English-language Buenos Aires Herald had any freedom of expression under the dictatorship
, audaciously printing a daily record of the disappeared—although its editor and chief news editor were exiled.32
There was a specific liberationist charge against the Bergoglio-Swinnen regime: that it was too concerned with feeding the poor and not enough with asking why they were poor. In this view, Bergoglio’s vision was “sacramentalist, a-critical, and assistentialist,” as the Jesuit Juan Luis Moyano would later put it to Horacio Verbitsky—attacking symptoms of poverty, not causes; helping the poor but not confronting politically what made them poor. But most of the CIAS Jesuits were not liberationists, and the CIAS critique did not come solely from the left.
The tension between Bergoglio and the CIAS Jesuits went deeper and was more visceral: the latter resented what they saw as an attempt by Bergoglio to claim and impose a particular notion of Saint Ignatius and Jesuit identity. They perceived—and in this they were not wrong—that Bergoglio had replaced their own “progressive” model of Jesuit renewal with another, which they saw—and in this they were constrained by their prejudices—as a throwback. As José María Poirier, the editor of Criterio, puts it, “he was criticized for presenting a very personal version of Ignatius’s legacy, and there were not a few who criticized him for distorting that legacy.”33 Bergoglio had come, it seemed, from nowhere—a youthful provincial, from a lower-middle-class background, and not even a doctorate in theology—and turned everything on its head. The mostly older, academic, upper-class Jesuits of the CIAS resented this, not least because of his success in fostering huge numbers of vocations, thereby threatening to reshape the whole future of the province.
Jesuits recall a tribal rivalry at the time between the Colegio Máximo and the CIAS, behind which were two opposing narratives of what it meant to be a son of Saint Ignatius. To the younger Jesuits at the Máximo, the CIAS were whiskey-drinking leftists, armchair socialists who preached about poverty but avoided contact with the poor, “all for the people but nothing with the people,” as Bergoglio’s parody slogan put it. Before stepping down as provincial, Bergoglio wrote to the CIAS citing Father Arrupe’s 1977 message in which he spoke of the importance of contact with the reality and life experiences of the poor: “If this does not happen we then run the risk of being abstract ideologists or fundamentalists, which is not healthy,” Arrupe had written.34
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