The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Around one in five of the delegates had directly or indirectly touched on the issue of Vatican centralism, but Cardinal Schotte wanted that discussion excised from the relatio. Sitting next to Schotte at his first Vatican press conference, Bergoglio was shy, speaking softly in Spanish in order, he said, to be better understood, although his Italian was clearly fluent. Asked about collegiality, he said that “an in-depth discussion on this theme exceeds the specific limits of this synod” and needed to be tackled “elsewhere and with adequate preparation.” It was a deft reply that made clear that the issue needed to be dealt with but not in a Curia-controlled synod. He impressed journalists with his clarity and conciseness, although he gave no indication to them that he was a reformer, and they regarded him as a safe pair of hands.10

  In retrospect, it is clear that the synod launched Bergoglio in the universal Church, winning him many admirers: Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who was made archbishop of New York after Egan retired in 2009, recalled how his predecessor “had often spoken glowingly of this archbishop of Buenos Aires.”11

  But Bergoglio couldn’t get back to Argentina fast enough. It wasn’t just that his country was entering a state of emergency. As cardinal, he had been named to various Vatican dicasteries (departments) dealing with liturgy, clergy, consecrated life, the family, and Latin America, but he missed many meetings. “He did not like to come to Rome, and even less with everything that was happening—the way the Curia was being run,” recalls Carriquiry. “He came to Rome much less than he was supposed to.” When he could, he tried to come only once a year, in February—his staff jested that it was his Lenten penance—when he spent no longer than was absolutely necessary: when he later said, as pope, that he hardly knew Rome, he was not exaggerating. His press officer from 2007, Federico Wals, says that Rome for Bergoglio represented “the heart of everything that he believed the Church should not be: luxury, ostentation, hypocrisy, bureaucracy—everything that was ‘self-referential.’ He hated going.”

  Yet he was not forgotten by those looking beyond John Paul II. In 2002 a leading Vatican commentator wrote of Bergoglio that since the synod,

  the thought of having him return to Rome as the successor of Peter has begun to spread with growing intensity. The Latin-American cardinals are increasingly focused upon him, as is Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The only key figure among the Curia who hesitates when he hears his name is Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano—the very man known for supporting the idea of a Latin-American pope.12

  * * *

  BERGOGLIO came back at the end of 2001 to a country sliding into an abyss. The Argentine economy was contracting, the banks were close to collapse, and because the state had run out of money, public employees were being paid in worthless tokens. After the International Monetary Fund (IMF) withheld a loan tranche, there was a rush on the banks, leading President Fernando de la Rúa in early December to freeze bank accounts, limiting withdrawals to $250 a week. The so-called corralito suddenly sucked cash from the economy, and businesses across the country went to the wall. In every city, lines at parish soup kitchens trebled.

  Together with the UN Development Program (UNDP) the bishops organized a meeting of national leaders on December 19 at the headquarters of the church agency Caritas, close to the Plaza de Mayo. There Cardinal Bergoglio and the head of the bishops’ conference, Archbishop Estanislao Karlic, spelled out the gravity of the situation: unless an emergency package of social assistance were put in place, the country would self-destruct. President De la Rúa, who had to be persuaded to attend, dismissed the warnings as exaggerated, but as he was leaving he was pelted with eggs and stones. The angry crowd forming in the square was the start of a massive popular protest. In what became known as the casserole revolt, or cacerolazo, hundreds of thousands over the next days took to the streets banging pots and pans to demand the resignation of the government. De la Rúa declared a state of siege.

  Bergoglio, incensed by the scenes of police brutality in the Plaza de Mayo he could see from his third-floor window, called the Interior Ministry to demand that they allow peaceful protest. In a communiqué, the cardinal praised the fact that this was a genuine people’s uprising—most demonstrations in Argentina are orchestrated—and said that behind it was a simple demand for an end to corruption.

  The next day, reports came in of the deaths across the nation of dozens of protesters—including seven in the Plaza de Mayo—and hundreds of wounded. As crowds surged against the barriers around the Casa Rosada, de la Rúa fled in a helicopter, formally resigning the next day. In the following two weeks there were four presidents and the largest sovereign loan default in world history. Argentina’s $95 billion foreign debt was staggering for a population of thirty-seven million, and an indictment of a decade of public profligacy and corruption.

  On Christmas Eve, as the economy and the state lay in ruins, Cardinal Bergoglio invited people at Midnight Mass to peer through the enveloping darkness to the light of the crib in Bethlehem. “Tonight there are many things we can’t explain, and we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said softly. “Let’s take charge of hope. That’s all I want to say to you tonight. Simply that.”

  In the New Year, following an agreement between the parties, the Peronist Eduardo Duhalde agreed to serve out the remainder of De la Rúa’s term, until September 2003, and not to seek election. The convertibility law—which had long been undermined by reckless spending and lack of dollar reserves—was finally abandoned, and the peso lost 40 percent of its value. The wealthy, who kept dollars abroad, became far richer, while the salaried middle classes and the poor endured the worst peacetime crisis since Weimar Germany.

  For the next two years, the economy continued to shrink; businesses and factories collapsed, or moved to Brazil and Chile; and unemployment came close to 50 percent of the working population. Some eighteen million people entered the ranks of the poor, while nine million became destitute, living on less than a dollar a day. The new desperation was symbolized by the cartoneros, people who scoured the city’s rubbish in search of paper and cardboard that could be sold for a few pesos. In a country that once fed the world, children were dying of malnourishment. In a nation born of immigrant dreams, hundreds of thousands of young people queued for passports outside the Spanish and Italian consulates, hoping to reverse their grandparents’ journeys.

  Among those forming lines outside parish soup kitchens were educated people who had lost their homes after the collapse of their businesses, and often their marriages. The crisis was in many ways more devastating for what was once Latin America’s largest middle class. For an older generation, it was a fast route into depression and despair. Without social security to depend on, and lacking the resilience of the long-term poor, for hundreds of thousands of destitute Argentines the diocesan charity network was, literally, a lifeline.

  Because every parish in the country had a Caritas office, the infrastructure was already in place to mount a major relief operation. The Church became a battlefield hospital. In Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio mobilized the city’s 186 parishes, eight hundred priests, and fifteen hundred members of religious orders, and close to a million practicing Catholics, urging them to go out into the streets to find people in need. It became normal for Mass-goers to bring any little extra food that could be distributed. Churches were opened at night to shelter rising numbers of homeless. Ovens using gas cylinders were set up to make bread under bridges, and nursing stations appeared, offering medicines. Caritas also expanded its citywide projects as donations poured in from abroad, above all building shelters for the homeless and creating job-training programs for thousands in search of work.

  For Bergoglio, this was the time of watching over his people, helping to feed and shelter them until the crisis passed. Bergoglio told Caritas staff and volunteers not to get hung up on protocols and legal niceties, but to set up projects that could deliver quickly and directly to those in need. But being effective must never mean losing sight of the pers
on; people’s dignity, he told them, required time and attention. Inaugurating a new project in a former razor blade factory in March 2002, Daniel Gassman, Caritas director in Buenos Aires, recalls him telling them how their assistance must be “artisanal, not industrial.” For Bergoglio there were no numbers, only persons, and when Caritas staff asked for donations, they were not for beds but for those who slept in them. Theirs must be a Samaritan giving, he told them, which looked in the eye, touched wounds, and embraced.

  The Church’s credibility at this time was as high as that of politicians was low. Back in 1983, the Church was seen as a power broker complicit with dictators, more interested in itself than in ordinary people. Now a Gallup poll put the Church first of institutions that Argentines most trusted, with politicians and judiciary at the bottom. Bucking the continent’s trend, Argentines self-identifying as Catholics had actually gone up in the previous ten years, from 83 to 89 percent. The Karlic-Bergoglio policy of critical distance from the government, and the bishops’ consistent denunciation of the neoliberal, borrow-and-spend policies that had brought on the crisis, were part of the reason for the Church’s popularity. Another was the impressive capacity it demonstrated for assisting people. But mostly it was because what the Church did and said were congruent. The Church lived for the people, not itself. Cardinal Bergoglio, in particular, symbolized power as service. Even those who saw him as aloof admired his dignity and austerity, which threw into even sharper relief the rapacity of their political leaders.

  * * *

  PRESIDENT Eduardo Duhalde was an exception. A practicing Catholic whose outlook wasn’t far from the bishops’, he sought to carry Argentina through the crisis without personal gain, and to put in place—with the few resources at the state’s disposal—emergency relief for the poor. Cardinal Bergoglio and Archbishop Karlic went to see him at the Casa Rosada three days after his inauguration in early January 2002. They agreed to formalize what had begun that day in December: the Church would host the meetings, which Duhalde would commit the government to, while the UN supplied technical support. Thus was born the Diálogo Argentino (Argentine Dialogue), a seven-month process of intense civic engagement that not only kept society from total breakdown but created the potential for a new kind of politics. Duhalde would later write that Bergoglio was one of the “giants” of that time, people who behind the scenes worked to save Argentina from disaster by shoring up civil society.13

  The Diálogo’s great strength was that it gave voice to the expansion of civil society in those years, in which the Church was the main but by no means the only player. People banded together to organize transport, food, child care, health care, and other basics, and exchanged goods and service by bartering. The networks and neighborhood groups began uniting and demanding a say, occupying the vacancy left by a bankrupt state. In all, some two thousand organizations found their voice through the Diálogo, which dealt with both immediate and long-term challenges, creating consensus for short-term initiatives while crafting ideas for long-term reforms to institutions. “Everyone came to talk. It was a way of channeling people’s anxieties,” recalls Bishop Jorge Casaretto, who coordinated the Dialogue on behalf of the Church. “People came to ask for things, to make demands. But this was very important, because it helped define a national strategy.”14

  Bergoglio was adamant that it was Duhalde, not the Church, who convened and led the Dialogue. “The Church offers the space for dialogue, like one who offers his house for his brothers to meet and be reconciled,” he told an Italian journalist, Gianni Valente. “But it is not a sector or lobby, a party taking part in the Dialogue alongside interest or pressure groups.” Equally, their involvement did not compromise the bishops’ independence from government, which they continued to critique on behalf of civil society. “We bishops are sick of systems that produce poor people for the Church to look after,” Bergoglio said in a document handed to the president a month after his inauguration. “Just 40 percent of state assistance reaches those who need it, while the rest vanishes along the way because of corruption.” Bergoglio blamed the way the deification of the state by left-wing ideologies had been followed by the evisceration of the state by neoliberalism. The only way out of the crisis was to rebuild from below. “I believe in miracles,” he told Valente, before going on to quote a character in Manzoni’s The Betrothed: “‘I have never found that the Lord has begun a miracle before ending it well.’”15

  Bergoglio spelled out the miracle at the May 25 Te Deum attended by President Duhalde that year. Using the story of Zacchaeus in Luke’s Gospel, he said Argentina was like the corrupt, short publican who climbs a tree to see Jesus, who notices him and invites him to come down and join him, leading to Zacchaeus promising to give back what he stole. Argentina could again rise to its correct height, said the cardinal, but first it needed to accept the invitation to come down, for “no project based on great plans can be realized unless it is built and sustained from below, through the renunciation of our own interests, and lowering ourselves to the patient daily work that conquers all arrogance.” The publican was not asked to be what he wasn’t but to be like everyone else—an ordinary, law-abiding citizen. It was an invitation to be part of the pueblo and serve it.

  Let us contemplate the end of the story. A Zacchaeus who has come to terms with the law, who lives without pretensions or disguises alongside his brothers and sisters, who is seated next to the Lord, confidently and with perseverance allowing his initiatives to develop, capable of listening and dialoguing, and above all able to give way and share joyfully. History tells us that many peoples have been raised up, like Zacchaeus, from ruin and abandoned their meanness. We must give space to time, and to creative organizing efforts; we should rely less on sterile demands, on illusions and promises, but dedicate ourselves instead to firm, persevering action. This way we allow hope to flower, this hope that will not disappoint because it is God’s gift to the heart of our people.16

  Bergoglio’s hope was that from his nation’s purgation a new democratic politics and economy could be born, one that was rooted in, and served, the people, and in which vigorous civil-society institutions could hold the state accountable. In this Te Deum and in others, he kept urging Argentines to take advantage of the moment, to be patient, and to build; it was as if—as he had described the bishop’s role at the synod—he was keeping watch over his people, to give God time and space to act. Yet there were many pressures and temptations to take shortcuts out of the process. His reference to “sterile demands” was a likely critique of the piqueteros, a new form of social protester who in traditional Argentine fashion made angry claims on the state.

  The cardinal feared that a state-focused populist could capitalize on this anger, using it to polarize Argentine society. His fears turned out to be well founded. Néstor Kirchner, the governor of the oil-rich Patagonian state of Santa Cruz, was a little-known figure nationally with a reputation locally for an efficient, high-spending administration. He and his glamorous senator wife, Cristina Fernández, had been active in the Peronist revolutionary left in the early 1970s, close to, if not active in, the montoneros. After the coup they had gone south to build a successful law firm specializing in mortgage foreclosures before entering politics—Néstor as mayor of Rio Gallegos, then governor of Santa Cruz, Cristina as a member of the provincial assembly and later the national Congress.

  Unable to persuade his preferred candidates to run, yet anxious to stop Menem’s third bid for the presidency, Duhalde reluctantly gave his backing to Kirchner. The election came down to a run-off between two candidates, Kirchner and Menem, the first of whom was unknown, the second discredited. After Menem withdrew at the last minute, Kirchner won unopposed, but with a mere 22 percent of the votes, most of which came from Duhalde’s backing. His first task after his inauguration on May 25, 2003, was to build a political base, just as the economy began growing again. At the Te Deum that day, Bergoglio warned against returning to the “resentment of sterile internal arguments,
of endless confrontations,” insisting that “only healing reconciliation will bring us back to life.”17

  Kirchner wasn’t listening. Rather than look to the Argentine Dialogue to build his base from civil-society organizations, using its copious recommendations as the basis of his program, Kirchner opted instead for a 1970s rhetoric based on a friend-enemy logic and a traditional carrot-and-stick use of state largesse. When he was offered two thick files of proposals from civil society, the fruit of seven months’ work by the Diálogo, the president wasn’t interested. “We offered him what we had,” recalls Bishop Casaretto, “but they said no, we’re going to govern with a different plan.”

  The plan was to resurrect the old binary politics, pitting “people” against the “corporations”—the armed forces, the agro-export sector, the big industries—who were blamed for colluding at the time of the dictatorship to suppress “the people.” Kirchner, who described himself as “a son of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” began at once to give political posts to human-rights groups, and—to their delight—derogated the amnesty laws passed by Alfonsín and Menem to allow retrials of military officers. The official line of the government was that there was only one reprehensible violence in the 1970s, that of the army (the guerrillas were fighting for “the people”) egged on by their right-wing allies, the Church and the oligarchy. Any attempt to claim otherwise was tarred as a discredited “two-devils” theory.

  Buoyed by high economic growth rates linked to favorable world trade conditions, Kirchner reproduced the model of governance he had used in Santa Cruz and began channeling income from exports to reward loyalty from cash-starved public administrations. In a short time he had his own substantial political base, gaining more than 40 percent in the 2005 midterm election. Yet rather than tone down the rhetoric and adopt a politics of inclusion, he sharpened the polarization: no longer dependent on Duhalde or even the Justicialist (Peronist) party, he reduced his cabinet to Kirchner intimates who shared his sectarian worldviews. Over the next years, with the help of loyally pro-government journalists like Horacio Verbitsky, Kirchner mobilized supporters by making repeated attacks on the regime’s clearly defined enemies at home and abroad—the generals, the bishops, the bankers, and the exporters, all in league with foreign interests in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the World Bank.