The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  The final section was entitled “God’s War.” There were often times, he observed, when God went into battle with the enemy of humankind, and it was a mistake to get involved. At such times, “in the silence of situations of the Cross, he asks us only to protect the wheat, and not to try to weed out the darnel.” He referred to an image on the ceiling of the Jesuits’ residence in Córdoba that showed novices protected by Mary’s cloak under the inscription: Monstra te esse matrem (“Show yourself to be a mother”). When God went into battle, he wrote, it was important not to interfere, not to engage in factionalism or divide the world into good and bad, but to go “under the cloak of the Holy Mother of God” and there “to live in the holy tension between the memory of the Cross and the hope of the Resurrection.”48

  The cognizance of the role cast for him as a suffering servant may not have lessened his pain, but it charted for Bergoglio a path through his anguish, and perhaps stiffened him for the next blow. In August 1991, Zorzín’s assistant, the former CIAS director García-Mata, a fierce critic of Bergoglio, was made provincial. He appointed as his socius the CIAS director at the time, Juan Luis Moyano, who had recently returned from Peru. Moyano would be one of the key sources for Horacio Verbitsky’s campaign to indict Bergoglio over Yorio and Jalics, supplying the journalist with vehement quotes. For the American Jesuit Jeffrey Klaiber, “appointing Moyano to that position, a man who worked for the poor and who had been expelled by the military, was a clear sign that the General wanted changes in the province.”49 It was equally a clear sign that Bergoglio no longer had a future with the Jesuits.

  In December 1991, Bergoglio gave a meditation on the Third Week, following Jesus from the Last Supper to the Crucifixion and his burial. In contemplating the corpse of Jesus, Bergoglio noted how it was easy to take spiritual refuge in what was or might have been, or to demand a resurrection straightaway, or to refuse in different ways to accept that the corpse really was a corpse.

  And yet it is a corpse, and divinity is hidden in it, and will be resurrected. That is how, throughout history, the Church’s true reforms, those that bring life to parts of it that are dead, are born from within the entrails of the Church itself, and not from outside. God’s reforms happen right there, where there is no other solution but to hope against all hope.50

  SIX

  A BISHOP WHO SMELLED OF SHEEP

  (1993–2000)

  TRUTH, BERGOGLIO TOLD a Caritas retreat in 2012, is like a precious stone: offer it in your hand, and it draws others to you; hurl it at someone, and it causes injury. Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), which came out in November 2013, was a gem-in-the-hand document that never cajoled or hectored, preferring to dazzle and bewitch. But it was tough, holding nothing back, lashing out at worldliness and corruption in all its forms, while urging the Church to learn to live from the energy of missionary love. Evangelization was not a crusade, or a marketing campaign; it was not about proselytizing. The Church grew, said Francis, by embodying the loving mercy of God.

  It was the first papal declaration to apologize for its own length. Francis said he knew that people didn’t read long documents anymore, that some might find the detail excessive: at two hundred pages, it was far longer than either of Paul VI’s great 1975 exhortations, Gaudete in Domino (On Christian Joy) and Evangelii Nuntiandi (Evangelization in the Modern World) to which Evangelii Gaudium, even in its title, paid homage. But then, Francis packed in an astonishing range of topics, as if his first teaching document—or at least, the first he had mainly authored—might also be his last.

  Francis paid only lip service to Benedict XVI’s synod on the new evangelization the year before to which this was scheduled to be the pope’s response, while demonstrating in every paragraph what it meant to evangelize. If that synod had been dominated by the tired, timid, inward-looking spirit of the European Church, Evangelii Gaudium was an eruption of the energy and insights from Latin America, stuffed with references to the Aparecida document of 2007: a Church of and for the poor, rooted in the Second Vatican Council, geared to mission, focused on the margins, centered on God’s holy faithful people, in confident dialogue with culture yet bold in denouncing what harmed the poor. It presented a Church that was tender and maternal, a big, borderless lazaretto of healing and love.

  Francis had made the world sit up with his by now iconic question about gay people on the papal plane from Rio—“who am I to judge this person?”—and had done so again with the Jesuit interview, with its battlefield hospital and his complaint about “obsessing” over certain doctrines. Many had assumed that these were off-the-cuff comments in interviews, and that a papal document would rein it all back into the comfort zone. But Evangelii Gaudium proved that his airborne remarks reflected deep thinking about the way the news media’s focus on neuralgic questions—especially the so-called pelvic issues—had had the effect over the years of overemphasizing the moral and judgmental dimension of the Church’s teaching. “The biggest problem is when the message we preach then seems identified with those secondary aspects which, important as they are, do not in and of themselves convey the heart of Christ’s message,” he observed in Evangelii Gaudium, before calling for the Church not to bury the news about God’s saving merciful love but to put it on a flagpole.

  The document paid tribute to the Church’s modern popes. At times it echoed the joyful, spirit-filled reformism of John XXIII, at others the prudent discernment of Paul VI; elsewhere it echoed the prophetic ardor of John Paul II, or the serene lyrical clarity of Benedict XVI. Yet for anyone familiar with his voice, the document was unmistakably bergogliano, treating favorite themes such as the holy-faithful-people hermeneutic and the perils of spiritual worldliness. He even managed to include his four principles—“time is greater than space,” “unity prevails over conflict,” “realities are more important than ideas,” “the whole is greater than the part.” Perhaps because sapiential wisdom was not considered appropriate for a papal document, Evangelii Gaudium linked these for the first time explicitly to the Gospel.

  Also thoroughly bergogliano was the way he combined a direct, everyman’s language with phrases of enormous complexity. The lyricism, too, was his. Francis, who endlessly reread the classics of literature, had a novelist’s gift for linking ideas and getting them to point beyond themselves. “Thanks to our bodies,” he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium, “God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement.” (In January 2014 that phrase was set on a plaque in Rome’s Biopark, next to an image of Francis in St. Peter’s Square supporting a parrot on his outstretched fingers.) Or, speaking of the Resurrection, he wrote that “each day in our world, beauty is born anew, it rises transformed through the storms of history.”

  The document was at its most powerful when it captured his vision of what he called the Samaritan Church, the Church that heals by direct personal contact. “Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others,” he wrote. “Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people.” To grow in the spiritual life, he said, was to become missionary, to come out to meet others; and when we do, “we learn something new about God. Whenever our eyes are opened to acknowledge the other, we grow in the light of faith and of knowledge of God.” As usual, the invitation was accompanied by a warning about the alternative: “We do not live better when we flee, hide, refuse to share, stop giving, and lock ourselves up in our own comforts. Such a life is nothing less than a slow suicide.” And he warned that being a missionary was not a part-time activity but required surrender to a new kind of existence—a soul-filled other-centeredness:

  My mission of being in the heart of the people is not just a part of my life or a badge I can take off; it is not an “extra” or just another moment in life. Instead, it is something I cannot uproot from
my being without destroying my very self. I am a mission on this earth; that is the reason why I am here in this world. We have to regard ourselves as sealed, even branded, by this mission of bringing light, blessing, enlivening, raising up, healing, and freeing. All around us we begin to see nurses with soul, teachers with soul, politicians with soul, people who have chosen deep down to be with others and for others.

  The part of the document that attracted most media headlines was the least original. When Francis critiqued free-market “trickle-down” theories that trusted the market to set wages and conditions, he was speaking out of a long papal tradition of teaching stretching back, in modern times, to Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century. In Rerum Novarum (1891), Pope Leo, too, had damned the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many and the idolatry of markets that justified it, while calling for state intervention to protect and succor its victims. Most recently, Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 had built on the same tradition in his sophisticated social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate.

  Yet when Francis in Evangelii Gaudium said trickle-down didn’t work (“the excluded are still waiting”) and deplored “the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed on the powerless,” it caused shock in many quarters, as if the pope were proposing to resurrect socialism just at the time everyone could agree that capitalism had created the best of all possible worlds. Former US Republican nominee Sarah Palin fretted that some of the pope’s statements “sound kind of liberal,” American talk radio host Rush Limbaugh called it “pure Marxism,” and Fox News’s Stuart Varney complained that Francis was mixing religion and politics, that the Church wasn’t competent to pronounce on economic matters, and that, in any case, the free market had delivered huge prosperity across the world. On the left, conversely, many were delighted, declaring Francis the new anticapitalist pinup.

  Yet Francis wasn’t critiquing the market in the sense of the free exchange of goods and services and ordinary human economic activity, which had indeed generated wealth since the beginning of time; and even less was he proposing a collectivist or any other alternative “system.” He was unmasking an idolatrous mind-set that had surrendered human sovereignty to a hidden deity, a deus ex machina, which demanded to be left alone to function unimpeded. What Francis deplored were “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace,” the attitude that justified or tolerated inequality and poverty by arguing that they were necessary or tolerable by-products of the ordinary functioning of the market. Thus was created “a new tyranny … which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.”

  Francis spoke not from the point of view of an alternative economic theory, but from that of the poor, and their need. If societies could regard stupendous wealth and at the same time grinding misery (long-term unemployment, wages insufficient to keep families, malnutrition) as inevitable by-products of a normally functioning market, then something had rotted in both the human soul and the mind.

  Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

  A Catholic columnist on the Forbes magazine website who said he was “spitting with rage” over the pope’s remarks perfectly illustrated the mindset Francis had identified. After posting statistics charting the embourgeoisement of millions of peasants over the past century, Tim Worstall wrote that “everything is moving in the right direction, even if not as gloriously fast as we would like it to be.… The market based economic system that he is complaining about is exactly the economic system that is in the process of solving the problems that he identifies.”1 By imagining that one day poverty would be magically solved by the market, it was an attitude that justified inaction in the here and now. Anyone who knew poor people, rather than read about them in econometric theory, understood immediately what Francis meant: waiting for the market to generalize prosperity was a different experience for the poor than for the wealthy.

  Behind this mentality Francis saw “a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God,” one that, like all idolatries, increased its hold on human hearts and minds through addiction (consumerism) while demanding a constant supply of human lives (the impoverished, the unemployed) for sacrifice on its altar, while claiming the autonomy to continue operating unimpeded by laws and state regulation. Challenging the idea that states should interfere as little as possible with the workings of the market, Francis called for “a vigorous change of approach on the part of political leaders” aimed at “a return of economics and finance to an ethical approach that favors human beings.”

  The most startling and original part of the document was the least discussed in the media: an unprecedented attack by a pope on his own Church. No modern pope had ever given his fellow believers such a tongue-lashing. In an early section entitled “No to spiritual worldliness,” he named and shamed “adulterated forms of Christianity” in which pious Catholics glorified themselves rather than Christ, and self-appointed elites lorded over ordinary mortals in the Church, deploring them either for their backwardness (in the case of liberal Catholics) or their lack of doctrinal purity (in the case of conservatives). Francis deplored the “dour judges bent on rooting out every threat and deviation” as well as “querulous and disillusioned pessimists” afflicted by “the evil spirit of defeatism,” which is “the fruit of an anxious and self-centered lack of trust.” Quoting Pope John XXIII’s famous words at the start of the Second Vatican Council criticizing the “prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster,” he lambasted the “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism” and “narcissistic and authoritarian elitism” of self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy who spend their time “inspecting and verifying” rather than evangelizing. He also deplored those with “an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine, and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people” and the way liturgical backwoodsmen turned the Church into “a museum piece, or something which is the property of a select few.”

  It was hard not to see this as a response to those who, during his first Easter as pope, had criticized him for washing the feet of twelve juvenile detainees at the Casal del Marmo, a young offender institution in Rome, on Holy Thursday. One of them was a girl from Serbia, who became the first Muslim and the first woman ever to have their feet washed by a pope. The inclusion of women was technically a violation of a 1988 edict from the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, which held that because the rite reenacts Jesus washing the feet of his apostles, only men should participate. But most dioceses in the world (including Buenos Aires) had long ignored that rubric. Francis, as he always did as archbishop, was restoring an early-church practice when bishops washed the feet of the poor.

  His attack on spiritual worldliness went beyond particular mind-sets to include—although he did not mention them by name—bishops and others prominent in the Church. Deploring “a fascination with social and political gain” and “an obsession with programs of self-help and self-realization” (meaning, presumably, the kind of self-centered therapy workshops found in certain retreat centers), he also criticized “a concern to be seen,” “a social life full of appearances, meetings, dinners, and receptions,” as well as “a business mentality, caught up with management, statistics, plans, and evaluations whose principal
beneficiary is not God’s people but the Church as an institution.”

  In this way, Francis was extending the holy-faithful-people hermeneutic, using it now not to attack Argentine armchair revolutionaries but self-referential church leaders. The symptoms were the same: “spiritual masters and pastoral experts who give instructions from on high,” who “indulge in endless fantasies” and “lose contact with the real lives and difficulties of our people.” The Jesuit provincial who once lambasted left-wing Catholic ideologues in Argentina now deplored bishops and prominent lay people in almost exactly the same terms:

  Those who have fallen into this worldliness look on from above and afar, they reject the prophecy of their brothers and sisters, they discredit those who raise questions, they constantly point out the mistakes of others and they are obsessed by appearances. Their hearts are open only to the limited horizon of their own immanence and interests, and as a consequence they neither learn from their sins nor are they genuinely open to forgiveness. This is a tremendous corruption disguised as a good. We need to avoid it by making the Church constantly go out from herself, keeping her mission focused on Jesus Christ, and her commitment to the poor.2

  * * *

  THE story of how Bergoglio came to be made bishop begins with Pope John Paul II wanting Antonio Quarracino, the archbishop of La Plata, to replace Cardinal Juan Carlos Aramburu of Buenos Aires when the latter reached retirement age in 1987. Quarracino was a gifted churchman who after attending the sessions of Vatican II went on to play major roles within the Church both in Argentina and continent-wide. As president of CELAM, he had formed a bond with the Polish pope.

  Quarracino was John Paul II’s sort of bishop: close to workers, solid in doctrine, pro-life, and pro–social justice. An articulate polemicist with a strong sense of irony, he had great gifts of clarity and a Peronist’s capacity to connect with ordinary folk. But he could be crude, and his tendency to shoot from the hip led him to be seen as more reactionary than he was. A fierce critic of President Alfonsín’s attempts to separate Church and state, introduce divorce, and ban religious education from schools, Quarracino in 1987 tried to claim that an address by John Paul II to the Argentine ambassador to the Holy See was an indictment of the Radical government’s policies. Alfonsín asked the Vatican if this was true; the Vatican said no; and the Radical president thereafter had a perfect excuse to use his presidential powers under the patronato to veto Quarracino’s appointment to Buenos Aires. Cardinal Aramburu was now asked to stay on, and not until Carlos Menem became president at the end of 1989 could Quarracino finally be named to Argentina’s mother diocese. He was installed in July 1990—shortly after Bergoglio was moved to Córdoba—and made a cardinal the following year.