The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Many bishops are teachers or administrators, whose natural home is their desk, but Bergoglio was a practiced pastor. He began as he would continue as archbishop and cardinal: without a driver or assistant, keeping his own diary, making his own calls, and moving around the city on the bus and the subway, or by foot. He spent much of his time in the villas miseria, building up the team of slum priests, and procuring funds and resources for their projects. The priests could see he knew parish life, says Giannetti, by the way he tenderly, patiently guided teenage candidates for confirmation. “He was teaching us a style of pastoral outreach that is not about pointing out to people what they’re doing wrong but bringing them in, enabling their encounter with God,” he recalls. It was what Bergoglio meant by the Church as facilitator rather than regulator.

  Early on, Bergoglio asked Father Guillermo Marcó, then a young curate in a parish in Flores, to accompany him on his walkabouts. With a Protestant mother and atheist father, Marcó was interested in interreligious dialogue and communications, and had a radio program on a commercial channel. Bergoglio was intrigued by him, and years later would recruit him to manage his press relations. For his part, Marcó was struck by the new bishop’s “way of being, his simplicity. He was quite captivating.”

  Another young priest who would be a key future aide was Father Accaputo, who gave a course in a Flores parish on Catholic social teaching. Impressed, Bergoglio asked him to come and work in the Church’s charity agency, Caritas, in Flores. But the priest first wanted the bishop to know his views. Accaputo explained that he was orthodox, neither conservative nor progressive, that conservatives wanted to put faith inside a box whereas progressives talked so much they emptied faith of its meaning. And he went on to share his views on the universal as well as the local Church, including some areas of disagreement with Cardinal Quarracino. “At the end of it Bergoglio said great, no problem, and we started to work together,” recalls Accaputo. “I felt for the first time that I had a met a man with authority in the Church with whom I could speak person to person, as an equal.”6

  After eighteen months, just before Christmas 1993, Cardinal Quarracino put Bergoglio in charge of administering the archdiocese. Naming him vicar-general on top of the Flores vicariate meant a significant increase in his responsibilities and brought him into regular contact with the whole clergy of the diocese.

  He became the cardinal’s right-hand man, his stand-in, and the hidden hand behind many of his speeches and homilies. Quarracino, who as president of the bishops’ conference until 1996 was the public face of the Argentine Catholic Church, came increasingly to depend on his vicar-general’s advice and industriousness. But Bergoglio wasn’t always able to save Quarracino from himself. Although the cardinal was a pioneer of dialogue with Jews and progressive in many respects, he was viscerally homophobic, proposing in 1994 on his regular live television slot that gay people should be sent to live in a “large zone” with its own media and laws in order to avoid “a stain on the face of society.” The remark—the worst of a series he had made over the years—led to the threat of a lawsuit and a task force of lawyers was needed to defend him. Bergoglio, horrified, would try to make amends later, as archbishop.7

  Bergoglio also disliked Quarracino’s closeness to Menem and the way he allowed the Church to be absorbed into the government’s patronage network. When Quarracino stood down as bishops’ conference president in 1996, Bergoglio supported attempts by his successor, Archbishop Estanislao Karlic of Paraná, to put clear blue water between the Church and the government. On the ground, Bergoglio was aware of how corrupting the relationship could be. Millions of pesos (at that time equivalent to the US dollar) were being used to fund church projects in exchange for loyalty, and much of it was being siphoned off along the way.

  At this time two government officials “who claimed to be very Catholic” came to see Bergoglio at the Flores vicariate, offering him public money for church projects in the shantytowns. Bergoglio was suspicious and got them to admit that of the 400,000 pesos they wanted him to sign as having received, they would give half and keep the rest. Rather than refuse point-blank, Bergoglio told them that any deposits had to be made into the diocesan curia’s central bank account and receipts signed for, at which point the men disappeared. But the fact they had come to him with that scheme meant, he later said, that “someone in the Church had previously been open to such an operation.”8

  It was all too easy for a bishop to accept a little largesse, and to prefer the company, and by degrees also the interests, of the wealthy; and thence to slip into spiritual worldliness. Bergoglio dealt with the threat using Saint Ignatius’s technique of agere contra. Faced with a temptation, said the founder of the Jesuits, you should redouble your effort to go in the opposite direction: to combat greed, for example, you should fast; to combat a loss of interest in prayer, double your prayer time. In Bergoglio’s case it meant spending even more time with the young and the poor and turning down all dinner invitations and freebies, preferring to say Mass for prostitutes in San Ignacio church and spending Saturdays in the slums. As Pope Francis would later say in Evangelii Gaudium, the option for the poor was a constant, clear imperative of Scripture and the early Church that created “a prophetic, countercultural resistance to the self-centered hedonism of paganism.”

  He stood by the poor politically, too, backing his team of slum priests when they went on a hunger strike in January 1996. The protest was over the resumption of the building of a major new freeway that went over Villa 31, and specifically an exit road off it that required destroying several blocks of the slum. Elections were close, and the city’s mayor, Jorge Domínguez, was campaigning for reelection on the promise of “100 public works in 100 days,” one of which was the so-called Arturo Illia freeway. Having failed to reach agreement with the residents over the compensation they were due, Domínguez—a firm Menem ally—ordered in the police and the bulldozers, but they found the entire team of slum priests in their way, along with a pack of reporters jostling among them with cameras and microphones.

  For fourteen dramatic days the ten priests ingested only fluids as they lay in a tent in the choking humid heat of the Buenos Aires summer. The coverage was intense: journalists turned up daily, ready to capture the first moments of a priest being taken away in an ambulance. Furious, Menem raged against the priests as tercermundistas (“Third-Worldists”), in reference to the pro-socialist clerical group of the early 1970s.

  The insult showed that the president was out of touch. These were different times, and the slum priests had changed: no longer socialists who placed the “Church of the poor” against the hierarchy, the young priests saw themselves as politically nonaligned, holding the state to account on behalf of the poor. Bergoglio assisted in this transition. From the start of the dispute, he had stayed closely in touch with them, appearing regularly in the villa to check on their health and to see what they needed. Crucially, he persuaded Quarracino, by then unwell, to come with him in a public show of support for the priests, causing the government—whose strategy was to frame them as dissident clergy—to back down. In a deal stitched together by Bergoglio behind the scenes, the priests called off the strike once the authorities agreed on television to put the exit road elsewhere.

  The symbolism of this was even greater because Villa 31, close to Retiro station, had been Father Mugica’s base. Mugica, gunned down by the Triple A in 1974, was the Church’s Che Guevara, whose picture was everywhere in the slums; his martyr’s death and love of the poor made him a potent symbol. The death of Marxism and the guerrillas made it now both safe and right for Bergoglio to honor him. In October 1999, after he became archbishop, Bergoglio agreed to a bid by the team of curas villeros to bring Mugica’s body from the aristocratic cemetery of La Recoleta to be buried in the chapel of his old parish of Christ the Worker, which was by then under the new freeway. Bergoglio took charge of the paperwork and the Vatican permission, and celebrated the Mass, in which he prayed “for Father Ca
rlos’s material assassins as well as those who ideologically justified the murder, and for the silent accomplices of a large part of society and the Church.” He then unveiled a plaque to Father Mugica, “who honored with his preaching and action his Christian commitment to the poor.”

  Predictably, there were some on the left—including former curas villeros who had left the priesthood—who saw this as a cynical attempt by the Church to domesticate Mugica. But the curas villeros themselves were deeply impressed. Bergoglio’s option for the poor was real, and measured not just in words but in actions—not least the dozens of visits he made to the slums to be with the people and to support their priests.

  His reputation was now spreading among the clergy of Buenos Aires. Father Carlos Galli, who would later be a theological collaborator, had been recruited to replace Bergoglio as teacher of pastoral theology at the Colegio Máximo in 1991 and, being friends with Yorio and his circle, had heard no shortage of bad Bergoglio stories—especially from some in the Society of Jesus. But he also noticed that the younger Jesuits described him in very different terms—the same as those he was now hearing. It wasn’t that Bergoglio had changed: what he was doing in Flores was almost exactly what he had done at the Máximo—an intense pastoral focus on the poor by mobilizing the young. But now that the option for the poor was no longer equated with Marxism, there was greater openness to Bergoglio’s option for the poor, with its focus on both the villas miseria and the traditional sanctuaries. Galli recalls:

  The stories I heard from people who were not involved in the polemics about him was that he was a fine pastor—a priest and a father to people. And I began to think, could this be the same Bergoglio I had heard about from some of the Jesuits? I think everyone in Buenos Aires was discovering at that time his immense pastoral charity. I began to hear stories all over the place. A nun’s mother dies, and he turns up at the wake, not to lead the service but just to sit there and pray the Rosary. A priest in the villas can’t get a supply, so he replaces him during the summer. And then there was a cousin of mine who left the priesthood and he helped him to discern that he should leave, and then he helps to speed up the process in Rome, gets him a job in a school and gives him money for three years’ worth of rent. There are so many such stories of his immense pastoral charity, but you’ll never hear about them from him.

  Bergoglio was at this time handing out Mary, Untier of Knots prayer cards and suggesting her intercession to all who came to see him with a problem. One such person was Ana María Betta de Berti, who in the 1990s worked in the administrative department of the Salvador University. She fell in love with the picture and oil-painted a copy, which was hung in the university chapel. Maria Knotenlöserin was now an Argentine immigrant, and as immigrants do, had adopted a creole version of her name: María Desatanudos. People began arriving at the university asking to see the picture, and took away prayer cards with the image. Stories of favors she had granted—little miracles of healing and reconciliation—began to circulate.

  Shortly after he became parish priest, Father Rodolfo Arroyo was asked by three devotees of the image if he would hang the copy in his parish. Father Arroyo had a large blank wall at the back of San José del Talar church in the barrio of Agronomía, and couldn’t think of a reason to say no, but he knew nothing about holy pictures and told them he would speak to the archbishop. Quarracino told Arroyo he was a devotee of the Virgin of Luján, Argentina’s national shrine, and that “the Desatanudos is Bergoglio’s thing: ask him.” But when Arroyo called Bergoglio, he was told: “Look, don’t get me involved. I just brought the prayer card over. But if Quarracino says it’s OK, go for it. It’s a beautiful image.”

  Father Arroyo got permission from the cardinal, and did some research into the rites for inaugurating a holy picture. When it came to the official hanging on December 8, 1996, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the priest had a shock: 5,000 people came to venerate the picture that day, with long lines forming down what was normally a quiet street in the barrio of Agronomía. It was just the beginning. Father Arroyo found his church swamped by 10,000 people on the eighth of each month, and tens of thousands each December 8, reaching 70,000 in 1998 and 130,000 in 2011. The numbers were easy to track, because every visitor received a prayer card.

  In 2012, Cardinal Bergoglio celebrated the December 8 Mass in San José del Talar. The Virgin’s grace, he told an immense crowd, was to untie the knots caused by original sin. “Knots in our personal or family lives, knots in our communities and workplaces—all these knots, which are caused by sin, weaken our faith to the point where God’s grace cannot flow freely through the silk threads of our lives,” he explained. He added: “Mary’s kind hands unravel these knots one by one, and the angel shows us that the thread is untied, as if telling us that we can pray with confidence, because we will be heard.”9

  * * *

  AUXILIARY bishops are usually moved on after some years to take charge of a diocese, but Bergoglio had told the cardinal that if possible he preferred to remain as an assistant bishop in the capital. “I’m a native of the city and I’d be useless outside Buenos Aires,” he told Quarracino.

  At the time of the priests’ hunger strike in early 1996, Quarracino had begun to suffer from cardiovascular problems, presiding over Corpus Christi in July that year in a wheelchair. Because of his ill health, he knew that the following year, when he turned seventy-five, his resignation was likely to be accepted. Quarracino’s secret plan was to name Bergoglio as his coadjutor archbishop with right of succession, meaning that when the cardinal died or stood down, Bergoglio would become archbishop of Buenos Aires without any need for a formal nomination from Rome, which could be blocked by the government.

  Quarracino faced strong opposition to his plan from a powerful aide to President Menem, Esteban “Cacho” Caselli, known also as “the bishop” because of his close ties to the highest levels of the Vatican. Caselli was the link between the Vatican and Menem, securing Argentine financial and political support for Rome in exchange for political influence. Much to their annoyance, Caselli had persuaded the Vatican in the mid-1990s to soften John Paul II’s criticisms of the social situation in Argentina when he addressed its bishops on their visit to Rome.

  Caselli had ties above all to two men: the all-powerful secretary of state, Angelo Sodano, sometimes described as the “vice-pope”; and the Argentine diplomat who would be his number two, or sostituto, from 2000, Archbishop Leonardo Sandri. Sandri and Caselli were tied by a number of bonds—including membership of a chivalric order, the Knights of Malta—to Héctor Aguer, one of the Buenos Aires auxiliaries. It was Aguer whom they wanted to succeed Quarracino.

  Quarracino’s bid for Bergoglio to succeed him brought him up against this powerful nexus. When the cardinal flew to Rome to persuade the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops to name Bergoglio as coadjutor, he found himself blocked. It was a major knot. Quarracino however for the second time went over their heads to the pope, who had great affection for him and a dislike of the Church being in bed with political power. In one account, Quarracino wrote out a letter of appointment for the pope to sign and gave it to the Argentine ambassador to the Holy See, Francisco Javier Trusso, to give to John Paul II at a forthcoming scheduled audience. When Trusso gave the pope the letter, he signed it there and then, and gave it back to the ambassador, who sent it on to Quarracino.10

  Why John Paul II agreed is not clear. But one hypothesis seems reasonable. Quarracino was aware by that time that the Church in Argentina, through him, had become too closely identified with Menem and his entourage, and that revelations of corruption would sooner or later bring the spotlight onto the Church. The austere Bergoglio, he may have argued to John Paul II, was the Church’s best chance of moving clear of the muck headed toward them down the tracks.

  The nuncio in Argentina, Ubaldo Calabresi, broke the news to Bergoglio in his customarily mischievous way, this time by calling him on the morning of May 17, 1997, and asking him to lunch. When the
y had reached the coffee course, the waiters suddenly appeared with a cake and sparkling wine. Bergoglio asked if it was the nuncio’s birthday. No, said Calabresi, grinning. “What’s happening is that you’re the new coadjutor archbishop of Buenos Aires.”

  When his nomination was made public in June it again caused surprise, for the sixty-year-old Bergoglio had almost no public profile: the bishops’ conference president, Archbishop Karlic, was the best-known face of the Church, and other bishops familiar to the media had been touted as Quarracino’s successor. Bergoglio’s elevation, reported La Nación, “was in response to a request made directly by Cardenal Quarracino to the pope that he be relieved of his pastoral obligations owing to his health problems.”

  Much of the journalist’s story was taken up with the gap between Bergoglio’s invisibility and his attainment of high office. “Archbishop Bergoglio prefers not to speak and zealously protects his lower-ranking image,” wrote La Nación’s veteran religious affairs commentator, Bartolomé de Vedia, adding: “He will continue to do everything possible to avoid the attention of journalists” and to maintain “the low profile he has cultivated … since arriving in the archdiocese.” The other theme of the profile was the high esteem he enjoyed among his clergy as a good shepherd, who described him as accessible, ready to listen, intelligent and prayerful, a humble man of few words but great lucidity. “Among the young clergy, he is one of the best-loved auxiliaries,” de Vedia wrote.11 The religious correspondent of the other major daily, Clarín, saw the appointment as confirmation of John Paul II’s priorities of theological orthodoxy, social concern, and distance from political power. Bergoglio, wrote Sergio Rubín, “is an unpretentious and affable Jesuit, who is very far from the susceptibility to the corridors of power that the menemistas were looking for.”12