The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Quarracino was close to President Menem whom he had gotten to know when the then governor of La Rioja was imprisoned under the dictatorship. As Quarracino had urged, and possibly at his behest, Menem shortly after taking office issued an indult for the dirty war criminals who had been tried and imprisoned under Alfonsín: some 220 military officers, including former junta leaders, were set free, along with seventy civilians, among whom were former guerrilla leaders. Alfonsín had passed laws circumscribing the scope of criminal responsibility for the dirty war, restricting those serving jail sentences to those who had either given orders or grossly exceeded them. But Menem now set the prisoners free, arguing that it was time for the national reconciliation John Paul II had called for on his 1987 visit. The move was supported by industry, the agro-export sector, as well as the bishops, but deplored by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Alfonsín called it the saddest day of his life.

  Menem’s 1989–1999 two-term administration, the first Peronist government since the general and his widow fifteen years earlier, mixed a classically Peronist alliance of the usual interest groups—small business, trade unions—with a radically neoliberal economic and foreign policy. He forged an unexpected bond with the very part of Argentine society that had always been at odds with Peronism: the financial and agro-export sector. Their talented leaders served in Menem’s administration, crafting his economic policy and carrying out his reforms, persuaded that only a Peronist government had the political legitimacy to deliver the necessary shock therapy to Argentina’s bloated and state-dependent economy.

  That shock came in the form of a mass sell-off of public-owned enterprises and a so-called convertibility law that replaced the national currency with a new one, the peso, making it convertible to the US dollar at a rate of one to one. It was a radical attempt to kill off hyperinflation and spark economic growth. By limiting the money supply to dollar reserves, the government denied itself the right to print money, leading to an upsurge in confidence, a sudden inflow of foreign investment, and inflation reduced to almost zero. Argentina at last had some stability after the devastation of hyperinflation. In the early 1990s, the economy grew by a third and middle-class Argentines enjoyed a bonanza of conspicuous consumption.

  However, the government’s failure to build a social-security network alongside the free market left the poor unprotected, and statistics showed an alarming increase in poverty and unemployment despite economic stability and growth. The architects of the policy—led by Domingo Cavallo, the economy minister—put their faith in the workings of markets, confident that investment and growth would eventually trickle down to the poor; but at the end of the Menem decade they were still waiting. Rather than overflowing the glass once the glass was full, the glass just got bigger: the rich got richer and the poor either stayed poor or got poorer. When it all began to unravel in the crisis of 1998, what made Argentines especially furious was the revelation of corruption on an eye-watering scale: the fusion of state, market, and judiciary, and the impunity of a new, fantastically wealthy class of Menem millionaires.

  In keeping with their new policy of distance from the state, Argentina’s bishops were consistent critics of the government’s neoliberal policies and their social effects, especially of corruption and impunity. Menem, however, adopted strong pro-life policies and vigorously defended the Church on the world stage (Argentina publicly sided with the Holy See, for example, when it was left isolated in the 1994 population conference in Cairo). Menem could offset the criticism from his bishops through a warm relationship with both Quarracino and the Holy See, oiled by both direct and indirect financial assistance.

  After he was made a cardinal in February 1991, Quarracino took advantage of his relationship with the pope to get Bergoglio appointed as his auxiliary, a bishop who assists the metropolitan bishop of a large diocese. He had wanted to do this since at least 1988, when he told the Jesuit general, Father Kolvenbach, that “the Argentine Church has great expectations of Father Bergoglio.” This was confirmed in mid-1990 when the apostolic nuncio to Argentina, Archbishop Ubaldo Calabresi, warned the provincial, Father Zorzín—who had decided at that point to send Bergoglio to Córdoba—that the Church had a mission for the former provincial. “When he’s given that mission, he’ll go where he has to go,” Zorzín testily told Calabresi.

  Archbishop Quarracino invited Bergoglio in January and April 1990 to give retreats to dozens of his clergy in La Plata. In the first, “Our Flesh in Prayer,” Bergoglio reflected powerfully on Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, the story of the foreigner who comes to the aid of a traveler beaten by brigands. He showed that those who passed by on the other side—symbolized in Jesus’s telling by the priest and the Levite—used a series of distancing techniques, which were all temptations: either they intellectualized the suffering they saw, or evaded responsibility for it by reassuring themselves that this is how life was. The Samaritan, on the other hand, got on his hands and knees to get close to the victim, opened his heart to him and bound his wounds, shouldered him and spent his money on him. “That is what we will be judged on,” Bergoglio told the priests, adding that this proximity was at the heart of the Incarnation. Jesus, far from “passing on the other side,” paid the ultimate price in sacrificing his own flesh for those who suffer; and God’s closeness to humanity is the reason why “prayer touches our flesh in its very nucleus, it touches our heart.”

  Prayer, he told the priests, meant enduring the possibility of change; it meant a willingness to suffer. When a person ceases praying and starts complaining, “he ceases to serve the Gospel and becomes a victim. He canonizes himself.” Making oneself the victim, rather than Christ, was blasphemy; “and a flesh that is used to blasphemy, which does not know how to ask for help for its own wound and sin, is a flesh incapable of helping the wounds of others.” Even if he dedicates his life to God he will only ever be able to come close to himself. “It is the asepsis of the Pharisee,” Bergoglio warned: “neither virus nor vitamin.”3

  Bergoglio was impressing on the priests of La Plata a model of Church that would be key to his teaching and leadership as bishop and cardinal: one that was intimate, physically close, looks the poor in the eye, and speaks to the heart. He showed that Catholicism was a fleshly business; it was how God saved humanity—by coming close, and embracing reality as it was. Yet too often the Church was tempted to flee that reality, taking refuge in bureaucracy, ideology, or rationality. Salvation can only happen, he suggested, one person at a time, through direct personal engagement. Unless love was incarnated, it was not love; meanwhile, the poor could be lifted from poverty if they were treated and loved as individual human beings.

  The retreats only made Quarracino more determined to secure Bergoglio for the diocesan Church. He had seen the way Bergoglio’s pastoral operation had transformed San Miguel and was shocked at how the Jesuits had ostracized him. Temperamentally, the Jesuit and the bishop were wholly unalike. Where Bergoglio was quiet, discreet, and austere, Quarracino was a wordy extrovert who relished the limelight and the trappings of his office. But there was a natural affinity in their common background and their political and cultural inclinations. They were both sons of 1920s Italian émigrés who shared a similar theological outlook—pro-Medellín, anti-Marxist—in the “national and popular,” Peronist tradition of the teología del pueblo. Both were committed to CELAM, and to the idea of a transnational Catholic unity for Latin America. And both were admirers of the Uruguayan philosopher Alberto Methol Ferré. But at a deeper level, Quarracino saw Bergoglio as what both he and the Church needed. Despite his bluffness, Quarracino was in humility aware of his own shortcomings. He was also in awe of Bergoglio’s spiritual depth and leadership qualities, recognizing in his prudence and discernment—he referred to him affectionately as el santito, “the little saint”—precisely what he lacked.

  Shortly after the second retreat, Bergoglio left for Córdoba and Quarracino began making moves to have him named bishop. It took another eighteen
months. Appointments of Catholic bishops follow a lengthy consultation within the local Church organized by the nuncio, who sends a terna—a list of three names—to the Congregation of Bishops in Rome, which decides whether to appoint, to refuse, or to delay pending further information. In Bergoglio’s case, there were hurdles: the negativity toward him of the new Jesuit provincial, Ignacio García-Mata, and his socius, Juan Luis Moyano. But Quarracino managed to bypass the Vatican’s Congregation of Bishops to speak directly to John Paul II, who signed the nomination on May 20, 1992.

  Bergoglio found out only the week before, when the nuncio asked to meet him at Córdoba Airport on his way back from Mendoza to Buenos Aires. Archbishop Calabresi, who like Quarracino rated Bergoglio highly, often telephoned him to consult him about candidates for bishops. This time, however, the nuncio asked for a face-to-face meeting. At the airport they spoke about “serious matters,” Bergoglio later recalled, until it was time for the nuncio to board. “Ah, one last thing,” Calabresi told him as he made to leave, “you’ve been named auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires and the designation will be made public on the twentieth.”

  * * *

  “MY mind went blank,” Bergoglio recalled in his 2010 book-length interview, El Jesuita. “Whenever something really unexpected happens, whether good or bad, my mind always goes blank.”4

  Any priest invited to be ordained a bishop has the right to refuse if asked (ordinations are sacraments, which cannot be forced). Professed Jesuits have a particular reason not to accept: they have taken a special vow not to seek ecclesiastical office. But when the pope himself makes the request of a Jesuit, he usually agrees, accepting episcopal ordination as a fulfillment of his fourth vow to go on mission wherever (and however) the pope needs him. In accepting, like other Jesuit bishops at the time—most prominently the archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini—Bergoglio remained a member of the Jesuit order; and like Martini, he would always put the letters “SJ” after his name. But it was a nominal belonging. Being made a bishop released him from his Jesuit vows of obedience and poverty: the first because he was no longer under orders from the general, the second because under church law a bishop must own property. In all practical senses of the word, in other words, he ceased to be Jesuit.

  The appointment amazed Church observers. The only Jesuit ever to have been made a bishop in Argentina was Joaquín Piña, a Spanish missionary who in 1986 was asked to lead the small diocese of Puerto Iguazú in Misiones. It was also surprising because Quarracino would now have six auxiliaries, when only four in the past had been needed. But mostly it was surprising because, outside a few small circles, most Argentines had no idea who Bergoglio was. It was neither the first nor last time that, amid general astonishment, he would appear seemingly from nowhere to take up senior office.

  Together with twenty others receiving their mitres on June 27, 1992, the fifty-five-year-old Bergoglio was ordained a bishop in the metropolitan cathedral of Buenos Aires by Cardinal Quarracino, together with the nuncio and the archbishop of Luján, Emilio Ogñénovich. Asked to address the congregation briefly, Bishop Bergoglio drew on his La Plata retreat. “There are brothers and sisters,” he said, “who with their lives ask us please not to cross over to the other side but instead discover in their wounds those of Jesus Himself.”

  Bergoglio stood out from the other bishops in two respects. Father Carlos Accaputo, who would later become one of Bergoglio’s closest collaborators, had heard negative things about the new auxiliary. At the ordination, however, he “was struck, when it was over, by the large number of very poor people who went to greet him—they were all people from the margins. At which I thought: aha. There’s something going on here I need to find out about.” The second curiosity was the prayer card which Bishop Bergoglio handed to well-wishers. Where the other bishops’ cards portrayed favorite saints, his was a German painting of the Virgin Mary unraveling a silken thread. (“We had no idea what it was about,” remembers another priest present, Father Guillermo Marcó.)

  Every new bishop chooses a coat of arms. Bergoglio’s was a blue shield, on which was imprinted the Jesuit symbol—the monogram IHS, (the first three letters of the name of Jesus in Greek) against the background of blazing sun—and below it a star, standing for the Nativity, alongside a spikenard, representing Saint Joseph. Underneath was the motto he had chosen: Miserando atque eligendo, the phrase used in a homily by the Venerable Saint Bede describing Jesus recruiting Saint Matthew: And looking at him mercifully, he chose him. That homily is in the Church’s daily prayer readings for Saint Matthew’s feast day, October 21—the spring day in 1953 when the young Jorge Mario was “mercy’d” by God in the confessional of the basilica in Flores.

  The basilica was in the area Quarracino had entrusted to Bergoglio, one of four districts that made up the huge archdiocese of Buenos Aires, with a stable resident population of three million that more than doubles by day. Compared to the others—Belgrano in the north, the Center in the east of the city, and Devoto in the west—the vicariate of Flores in the south was by a long shot the poorest: it included forty-five parishes in five lower-middle-class or working-class barrios, most of the city’s large shantytowns, including the one where Yorio and Jalics had been abducted, and almost all of its popular shrines. Quarracino wanted Bergoglio to take charge, above all, of the ten-strong slum priests’ team, and to do for Flores what Quarracino had seen him achieve in San Miguel.

  He was allocated an office and residence in the clergy retirement house in the calle Condarco, a few blocks from the basilica of Flores. The Divine Mercy sisters who had played such a role in his infancy were still close by, among them Sister Dolores. But the house he grew up in on Membrillar Street had been sold after his mother’s death in 1981, and his brothers and sisters had long since married and had families of their own.

  While the Condarco rooms were being made ready, Bergoglio spent nearly three months at the Jesuit curia house, Regina Martyrum, in the center of the city, going to his office each day. Father Kolvenbach had told the new Jesuit provincial, Father García-Mata, to place himself at the service of Bishop Bergoglio, and the provincial had invited him to live there after his nomination was announced in May. But it wasn’t an easy relationship. Bergoglio blamed García-Mata for defaming him in a report the provincial had written to Rome—the report was secret, but one of the consultors had informed Bergoglio—while García-Mata felt threatened by Bergoglio’s popularity among the younger Jesuits. As the weeks went by the provincial began to be irritated by what he regarded as Bergoglio’s “interfering” presence. Things came to a head at the end of July 1992, on the feast of Saint Ignatius, when García-Mata asked him when he was leaving.

  “But I’m very comfortable here,” Bergoglio told him.

  “Jorge,” the provincial answered, “it’s not right for an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires to be living in a Jesuit community. There’s no province where that happens.”

  If he wanted him out, said Bergoglio, he should inform him formally. So García-Mata wrote to Father Kolvenbach, who backed the provincial, who left the general’s letter in Bergoglio’s room. García-Mata received a written response in return, in which Bergoglio gave the date of his departure.5

  Thus, painfully, did Bergoglio leave his Jesuit life.

  Most Jesuits who become bishops retain strong links with the Society, often staying in Jesuit residences while traveling, and looking in on the Borgo Santo Spirito when in Rome. But over the next twenty years, on many trips to Rome, Bergoglio never once stepped inside the Jesuit curia, nor spoke to Father Kolvenbach; and although he had good relations with Father Alvaro Restrepo, the Colombian who replaced García-Mata as Argentine provincial in 1997, he severed most of his links with the Argentine Jesuits until after his election as pope.

  * * *

  BERGOGLIO was not the kind of bishop the clergy were used to. He was un-clerical, straightforward, humble, austere, and effective. He had endless time to give the faithful and their pastor
s, and was always available. He had no secretary, was easily reached on the telephone after his morning prayer (he woke at 4:00 a.m. and could be reached after 6:00 a.m.), and if unable to answer would call back within a couple of hours. Problems were solved swiftly, often by him directly. “It was a way of being a bishop that was much physically closer than we were used to,” recalls Father Fernando Giannetti, parish priest of Our Lady of Mercy in Mataderos, a sprawling parish where the streets once stank with the offal from the city’s slaughterhouses. “He came to see you and he listened. That created a very close bond between him and the priests of the area as well as with the faithful.”

  The clergy liked his personal approach. When he wanted to talk, he took the trouble to visit. He was still decisive and a good decision maker, but the torment of Córdoba had softened him: he dialogued more, and consulted. He went from parish to parish, spending time with clergy, drinking mate, asking about the time they gave to prayer, and finding out what they needed. Priests who were ill found him by their bedside, or moving in to say Mass and hear confessions for them, sometimes cooking and cleaning for them. When a priest couldn’t find another to replace him during their vacations, Bergoglio—who never took vacations—would supply for him, sometimes for weeks. There are many stories of the help he gave to priests struggling with vows or addictions or simply pastoral challenges.