Bergoglio’s elevation, coming on top of the new cold wind from the bishops’ conference under Archbishop Karlic, was a major setback for the Menem/Caselli strategy of co-opting the Church. Having been in the early 1990s the darling of the world’s financial markets, Argentina was at that moment having its knuckles rapped over its chronic corruption, uncontrolled spending, and a debt that had soared from $67 billion to an eyewatering $127 billion in a decade. The bishops’ conference not only deplored the failure to tackle growing poverty, unemployment, and gross social inequalities but the lack of separation of state and judiciary that underlay the scandalous impunity of Menem’s millionaires. Having lost the support of the body of bishops, the government’s strategy was to redouble its efforts to keep the Vatican onside. Not long after Bergoglio’s nomination was made public, Menem’s Vatican fixer, Caselli, replaced Trusso as ambassador to the Holy See.
Although Quarracino remained technically in charge of the diocese, traditionally the coadjutor archbishop increasingly took on the cardinal’s duties. In August 1997, Bergoglio led for the first time a massive procession of six hundred thousand to the shrine of San Cayetano (“Saint Cajetan”), patron saint of bread and work, in the barrio of Liniers. The historic numbers reflected soaring unemployment levels and the pain of millions of hard-pressed workers. In his first homily before such a large crowd, Archbishop Bergoglio said work, like food, had to be shared out. “Everyone should have some work,” he said. “Work is sacred because when we work we are being formed. Work teaches and educates; work is culture. If God has given us the gift of bread and the gift of life, no one can take from us the gift of earning it through work.”13
Later that month, he celebrated a huge Mass at the cathedral to welcome the arrival of a statue of the Virgin of Caacupé, who is venerated by Paraguayans. The Virgin had been brought to Buenos Aires by Father Pepe Di Paola, a charismatic young priest whom Bergoglio had helped through a crisis in his vocation. Bergoglio had sent Padre Pepe that year to take charge of one of the poorest and most violent slums in the city, Villa 21, where more than half of the forty-five thousand residents were Paraguayan immigrants and where the grip of the drug mafias was tightening all the time.
Bringing the statue from Paraguay was Padre Pepe’s idea. At the end of Mass, thousands turned up at the cathedral to collect the Virgin and take her to the shantytown. “We were walking back with her and we realized that Bergoglio was walking behind us, praying,” recalls Padre Pepe. It was a sight the residents of Villa 21 would become familiar with over the next fifteen years. Bergoglio was there so often that at least half of the villeros, about twenty-five thousand people, met him and had their picture taken with him in this one villa alone, reckons Father Juan Isasmendi, whom Bergoglio sent to Villa 21 in 2008 to support Padre Pepe. Bergoglio, who always came by bus (you need two from the Plaza de Mayo), never missed the big feasts, and did the confirmations himself, which sometimes took the whole day. The villas, says Father Isasmendi, were where Bergoglio “filled his lungs with the oxygen he needed to guide the Church.”14
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IN the mid- to late 1990s, Bergoglio grew close to an intellectual mentor he had first met back in the late 1970s: Alberto Methol Ferré, a Uruguayan lay Catholic intellectual who worked in the theology commission of CELAM and had been a major influence on the Puebla document.
Methol Ferré was arguably the most significant and original Latin-American Catholic intellectual of the late twentieth century. A writer, historian, journalist, theologian, and autodidact—he described himself as a “wild Thomist, without either seminary or academy”—he was converted to Catholicism by the writings of G. K. Chesterton while working in the port authority of Montevideo. A follower of Étienne Gilson and Perón, his two passions were the Church and Latin-American continental integration, which came together in his work for CELAM over twenty years, between 1972 and 1992. He and Bergoglio were natural bedfellows: believers in the national and popular tradition of Peronism, fired by Medellín but opposed to the revolutionary Marxism that followed, and deeply committed to continental unity. After Methol Ferré’s death in 2009, Bergoglio described him as a “dear friend” and a “great man who did so much good for the conscience of the Church and for Latin America.”
Although Bergoglio was familiar with Methol Ferré’s writings by then, they didn’t meet face-to-face until 1978, when Bergoglio was Jesuit provincial, at a lunch at the Colegio Máximo organized by the USAL rector, Francisco Piñón. The talk over lunch, recalls Piñón, was of the historic moment for the Latin-American Church, and the role of culture that would play such a major part in the Puebla document. Methol Ferré and the Gera group of Catholic intellectuals foresaw the Latin-American Church as the catalyst of a common Latin-American destiny—la patria grande—in a global future marked by continent-states. After the failures of both the North Atlantic model of economic growth and Cuban-style socialism, they were convinced that the stage now belonged to the People of God. During the 1980s, Methol Ferré’s journal Nexo was the wellspring of these ideas, and Bergoglio, an assiduous reader of the journal, drank deeply from its insights.
Looking back through Christian history, Methol Ferré saw that in every era a Church in one part of the world becomes a “source” for the Church elsewhere, which it to a large extent reflects. Thus Alexandria and Syria were the source Church of the first Christian era, as were Spain and Italy at the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, and France and Germany at the Second Vatican Council. The Church in Latin America had been a “reflection” throughout the colonial and early-national period, but had started to move in the direction of becoming a source in the 1950s, when Pius XII encouraged the creation of CELAM, a regional Church body with a vocation to unify and integrate Latin America. CELAM was the first continent-wide collegial structure in the modern Church, one that enabled Latin-American Catholicism both to express its distinctiveness and to decide on its own pastoral policies. Methol Ferré saw the distinctive theology that came out of the CELAM gathering at Medellín in 1968 as characteristic of a source Church. Marxism had deviated it, but the CELAM gathering at Puebla in 1979 had rescued it.
That self-confidence, however, had since evaporated. Partly the decline was due to the demise of liberation theology in the 1980s, but in large part it was due to the centralist papacy of John Paul II. The pope’s concern above all was to unite the Church after the debilitating divisions of the 1970s. That meant not just asserting the papacy on the world stage through endless trips, a vast body of teaching, and an authoritarian style of government that sharply increased the power of the Vatican over the Church, but also putting the brakes on the growth of bishops’ conferences and other expressions of collegiality. In Latin America this meant promoting to key positions a group of conservative bishops who adhered to his centralist view of the papacy and wanted CELAM taken down a peg. For this he counted on three bishops in particular. Two of them were Colombian: Alfonso López Trujillo, whom John Paul II made a very young cardinal in 1983, and Darío Castrillón Hoyos, CELAM’s president after Quarracino; the other was a Chilean, the archbishop of Valparaíso, Jorge Medina Estévez. This conservative triumvirate were the enforcers in Latin America of John Paul II’s centralism.
CELAM had become the symbol of collegiality not just because it was the largest and oldest bishops’ council, but because it was consciously engaged in theological reflection, even speaking of a “Latin-American magisterium” or teaching authority, which for the centralists was a heretical idea. The tensions came to a head in 1992 over the Vatican’s attempt to run CELAM’s Fourth General Assembly in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. Rome rejected CELAM’s working document, replacing it with its own text rich in quotes from John Paul II; then, when CELAM appointed twenty periti (theologian advisers), eighteen of them were removed by Rome and replaced with Vatican appointees. In a brazen assertion of papal potestas, John Paul II did not just open the conference but stayed for three days, before sending his s
ecretary of state, Angelo Sodano, who had served as nuncio under General Pinochet, to steer the conference, aided by Bishop Medina Estévez. The Legionaries of Christ, the conservative Mexican order, ran an office in the conference center with direct lines to Rome, allowing Sodano to keep John Paul II informed. This micromanaging by Rome of the continental gathering of the Latin-American Church flew in the face of everything CELAM stood for.
Toward the end of the gathering, CELAM rebelled. When the Vatican appointed five members to redact the final declaration, CELAM bishops voted on a sixth member, the president of the Brazilian bishops’ conference, Luciano Mendes de Almeida. As the conference drew to a close, the CELAM bishops through Archbishop Mendes tried to counter the Rome version but were continually blocked by Sodano. Eventually Mendes, with the CELAM bishops, stayed up all night to redact their alternative version, which was a defense of the approach the Latin-American bishops had taken at Puebla and Medellín. The next day he went straight to the microphone and read it. “Sodano could do nothing,” recalls a bishop prominent in CELAM at the time, who is now a key cardinal in the Francis papacy. “He just sat there, powerless, while the whole auditorium broke into applause. It was like the Holy Spirit had won out after all, at the eleventh hour.”15
That final declaration, rescued by the local Church, contained a call dear to Quarracino, Methol Ferré, and Bergoglio to “encourage and assist efforts in favor of the integration of Latin America as a patria grande.” But in general, Santo Domingo was a damp squib. The pre-conference tussles and Roman interventions had weakened participation, and the results were meager. Reflecting on it many years later, Methol Ferré pointed out that, just three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conference lacked the needed perspective to reflect on a world that was no longer bipolar and in which “neoliberalism”—as Methol referred to a belief in unfettered free markets—appeared triumphant.16
Methol Ferré left CELAM after the conference and moved back to Montevideo, from where he would regularly visit Bergoglio over the River Plate in Buenos Aires. They spent many hours discussing the state of the world, and Latin America’s place in it, concerned that the decline of liberation theology and the rise of neoliberalism had undermined the Church’s engagement with the poor. Methol Ferré was convinced that the enemies of that engagement were now relativism and consumerism, and that the Latin-American Church needed to recover its option for the poor, asserting the sacrifices needed for true solidarity.
With Quarracino ailing, Bergoglio was invited as a Latin-American Church delegate to Cuba during John Paul II’s historic visit to the island in January 1998. The Holy See and Havana had long danced around each other, with visits being prepared and then canceled. The pope wanted to speak of democracy and freedom, and to encourage the long-suffering Cuban Church; Fidel Castro, still a master of the dark arts of propaganda, saw it as a chance for a little favorable publicity, and to add to the pressure on the United States to lift its forty-year trade embargo, which the Vatican had long opposed. Media fascination over the trip, naturally, was intense: here were two veterans, each a symbol of their respective global creeds, for a few days occupying the same stage.
It was a success for John Paul II, yet without humiliating the socialist regime. The pope offered Cubans the prospect of a new revolution—one that would return Cuba to its Christian and democratic roots—while giving Cubans an experience of freedom they would not again taste. After years of an official discourse of dialectical opposition and confrontation, they heard a new language—of peace, freedom, solidarity, and reconciliation—and long-lost tunes that reminded them of their true selves.17
A little-known book Bergoglio wrote about the visit came out later that year, the second half of which contained the speeches by the pope and Castro. As an author, Bergoglio could not have been more self-effacing: nowhere does he even mention that he was present in the Cuban visit, while describing himself as the book’s “coordinator.” The text was dutifully written, at the request of the Vatican. But the main interest of Diálogos entre Juan Pablo II y Fidel Castro (Dialogues Between John Paul II and Fidel Castro) is the way it steers a resolutely independent course, one that rejects both Marxism and neoliberalism as alien to the soul of the Cuban pueblo—and by extension that of Latin America as a whole.
The régime comes in for heavy criticism—in terms very similar to those expressed by Cuba’s bishops—for the totalitarian state’s restrictions on freedoms, both religious and political, as well as for the “anthropological error” of socialism and the destitution that sat alongside the wealth of the dollar (tourist) economy. Bergoglio was particularly devastating about the way communism had destroyed a popular culture that passed values and virtues from one generation to the next, as well as the dismemberment of the family through sky-high rates of abortion and divorce, alcoholism and promiscuity, not to mention emigration and the imprisonment of political prisoners.
Yet the book also strongly objects to neoliberalism. The Church, Bergoglio pointed out, had no difficulty with capital accumulation that increases productivity—what he calls “capitalism as a pure economic system”—but rather “the spirit that has driven capitalism, utilizing capital to oppress and subject people, ignoring the human dignity of workers and the social purpose of the economy, distorting the values of social justice and the common good.” Although neoliberalism respected religious values, it did so by relegating them to the private sphere, he went on, adding that “no one can accept the precepts of neoliberalism and consider themselves Christian.” The core Christian concept was that of solidarity—knowing how to share what God has abundantly given. The opposite was neoliberalism, which “brings about unemployment, coldly marginalizing those who are superfluous,” empties economic growth of human content, is “concerned only for numbers that add up,” and “corrupts democratic values, by alienating from these the values of equality and social justice.”18
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SHORTLY after that trip, on January 25, news reached him of the death of Cardinal Eduardo Pironio from the bone cancer he had battled for months. Pironio’s remains were brought from Rome to Buenos Aires, where thousands paid their respects before a solemn funeral presided over by an ailing Cardinal Quarracino, along with forty bishops and nearly 150 priests. Pironio was Argentina’s most famous churchman, a close collaborator of both Paul VI and John Paul II, and considered papabile in the conclave of 1978. But his greatest achievement was the 1968 CELAM conference at Medellín that gave the Latin-American Church its voice. In a poignant symbol of how the Latin-American Church had, since Puebla, lost that voice, among the twenty new cardinals Pope John Paul II created just after Pironio’s funeral were just four Latin-Americans, two of whom had led Rome’s intervention in Santo Domingo: Medina Estévez and Castrillón Hoyos.
Days later, Argentina lost its other cardinal. After spending time in the hospital on a respirator, fighting for his life following an intestinal blockage, Quarracino died on February 28. His friend President Menem asked Bergoglio to allow the lying-in-state to take place in the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, rather than the cathedral, so the nation could honor him. Bergoglio said no: the wake was held in the cathedral. To the fury of Caselli, he also refused to allow Menem to give a speech there; Bergoglio was the sole speaker.
Bergoglio spent three days in a silent retreat, preparing for what now lay ahead of him. He emerged to lead a packed funeral attended by Argentina’s religious and political elite and a congregation of three thousand. In his tribute, he said that few had seen behind Quarracino’s bluff persona to his forgiving heart, but that God’s faithful people had known it. He was, said Bergoglio—paying him the highest of his compliments—a true pastor.
Bergoglio was now archbishop of Buenos Aires, but there was little to suggest the fact. He refused a ceremony of installation and reception, and gave no interviews. He didn’t even want new clothes. He asked the nuns who cooked in the curia to adjust Quarracino’s purple-piped black tunics to his size
(the cardinal was a bulky man). His first official function on March 18 was a celebration organized by Menem in the White Room of the presidential palace to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the ordination of the papal nuncio, Ubaldo Calabresi. Bergoglio, in a simple clergy suit, was a ghost amid the bonhomie. Many of the high-ranking dignitaries had no idea who he was.
In taking on the new mission he sought to change as little as possible of his own lifestyle. He turned down the official archbishop’s residence—a seigneurial affair fifteen miles from the center in the leafy suburb of Olivos, close to the presidential mansion—as well as the official limousine and chauffeur. Instead he moved into the modern archdiocesan office building known as the curia, next to the cathedral on the north side of the Plaza de Mayo. (The Olivos residence became a hostel for clergy and the driver was found another job.)
Inside the curia he refused the elegant and spacious archbishop’s office in order to occupy a small office on the same floor with a desk and three chairs. On his desk he placed images of Saint Joseph, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and María Desatanudos. On the third floor he took a small bedroom with a simple wooden bed above which he hung the crucifix that belonged to his grandparents Giovanni and Rosa, and an adjacent room with a cupboard to hang his clothes and some shelves for books and private papers. In his bedroom he had a heater, which he put on in winter after the staff went home and on weekends, when the building’s heating shut down.
He had a little kitchen with a stove to boil water for his mate and to rustle up pasta, and close by a chapel with a statue of the Virgin of Luján where he would spend the beginning of each day from 4:30 a.m. contemplating the Scriptures of the day and making decisions by discerning spirits. At 7:00 a.m. he said Mass in the curia chapel (or in his private chapel on the second floor at other times). After breakfast and the papers he would be at his desk by 8:30 a.m., before the first meetings of the day. After a light lunch prepared for him by the nuns in the curia and a forty-five-minute nap, he would be back at work in the afternoon, sometimes spending the early evenings in parishes or on visits. He was usually in bed by 10:00 p.m., the time many porteños are having dinner.
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