Shortly after taking power, Kirchner’s secretary called the cardinal to invite him to the Casa Rosada for a meeting with the president. Bergoglio, sensitive to the choreography of Church-state relations, said no, but would be delighted to receive him across the square in his offices in the Curia. “If the president wants to see me, he comes to my office. If I want to see him, I go to his,” he explained to his staff. President and cardinal eventually met in August 2003, when Bergoglio went to the Casa Rosada with the new president of the bishops’ conference, Archbishop Eduardo Mirás of Rosario, for a meeting the bishops had asked for. But it soon became clear that Kirchner—whom his fellow Peronist Julio Bárbaro describes as having zero religious sensibility—had no interest in listening to a Church he could not control.
After sending a courtesy copy of his May 25, 2004, address to the Casa Rosada, Bergoglio received through a government intermediary a haughty reminder that the purpose of the Te Deum was to pray for the nation in thanksgiving for the Revolution of May 1810.18 Undeterred, the cardinal’s fifth address on Argentina’s national day was his most powerful and passionate yet, and strikingly similar even in some of its phrases to his Jesuit talks and articles in the 1970s. He was back in battle with ideological elites on behalf of the pueblo fiel.
The Gospel was Luke’s account of Jesus returning to his hometown of Nazareth and reading from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue, provoking astonishment that turns to anger and an expulsion. The title of his address was a line from the same Gospel: “A prophet is without honor in his own country.” Bergoglio suggested that those who were scandalized by Jesus were self-sufficient, self-justifying elites disconnected from the wisdom of their people. In seeking to stone Jesus, he said, their “weak way of thinking” and mediocrity were exposed. The cardinal went on to reframe the idea of social exclusion, which was caused, he said, not solely by unjust structures, but by attitudes of sectarianism and intolerance that claim to divide society into those who belong and enemies. Yet “the soul of our people” was not taken in by deceitful and mediocre stratagems or partisan squabbles, but was focused on “the great challenges” that face any society. He ended with an image of Christ among his people proclaiming a message that was intolerable to the enlightened elites, who sought to stone him and run him out of town. Bergoglio invited his listeners, in Ignatian fashion, to choose with whom they wanted to identify.19
Kirchner, who had a fever that day, told journalists he thought the address had referred to some of the country’s realities in a clear way. Argentina, he said, was rediscovering its identity and that “recovering social inclusion is a fundamental task.”20
* * *
IN early 2004 Bergoglio began to be treated by a practitioner of Chinese medicine, a Taoist monk who had been recommended to him by a priest. When Liu Ming sat opposite the cardinal at their first meeting in his third-floor office, Bergoglio stayed silent, looking at him. “At that moment I had the feeling he was transmitting his thoughts to me,” remembers the monk, who had arrived from Jiangsu in China only a year earlier. “Then he told me about his health problems.”
In addition to diabetes and a creaky gallbladder, the cardinal, then in his late sixties, was suffering heart pains for which his doctors had prescribed a battery of pills. Bergoglio had lived with a phenomenal workload throughout his country’s crisis and was paying for the constant stress in blocked arteries. The monk said he wanted to use regular acupuncture and massages to get the blood flowing and to shift the blockages; in the meantime he should forget the pills. The cardinal agreed.
When Bergoglio took off his clothes for the first acupuncture session, Liu Ming was shocked. “His clothes had holes, they were very old and worn. I thought, ‘How can such an important man be so humble?’”
For the next three years Liu Ming saw him twice a week, until Bergoglio felt better; thereafter, when he was cured, once a month. The cardinal called him his Chinese torturer, tried to persuade him to support San Lorenzo, suggested a name for his daughter (as a result she is called María Guadalupe), and gave him books: the I Ching in Spanish, the Bible, and a book called Reasons to Believe. Liu Ming chatted to him about how the body contains within itself its own capacity to heal itself, how Western medicine considers only the outside, not the inside, how with Chinese medicine you can live 140 years (“you think I’ll live that long?” Bergoglio asked him, laughing), and about Tao and God; the cardinal always listened attentively. Liu Ming was amazed at his pulse, which was stronger than any he had encountered. And he was impressed by his spirituality, his lack of ego: Bergoglio “was not concerned with what was outside but what was within,” the monk-doctor later said.21
It was a lesson Pope John Paul II was, at that time, giving every day. In the past three years his deterioration had been steady; by July 2004, when he went to the French shrine of Lourdes at the foot of the Pyrenees for his last apostolic visit, he had become an icon of human suffering. Drooling, slumped, trembling, no longer in control of his body, John Paul II taught from his wheelchair some of the most important lessons of his papacy. There was a moment in Lourdes that summed it all up. At the conclusion of the recital of the Rosary at the famous grotto, a young handicapped man, also slouched and with his body twisted to one side, was brought forward to receive a blessing. The two men gazed at each other wordlessly from their wheelchairs, equal in their shared vulnerability, for a prayer-pregnant eternity.22
Bergoglio had first encountered John Paul II in 1979, the year after Cardinal Wojtyla’s election, when the Jesuit provincial joined a group reciting the Rosary led by the pope in Rome. While there he had a profound experience that he later recorded, after the pope’s death in 2005, as part of the evidence being gathered for the cause of his canonization.
One afternoon I went to pray the Holy Rosary that the Holy Father was leading. He was in front of us, on his knees. It was a very large group. With the Holy Father’s back to me, I entered into prayer. I was not alone, but praying in the middle of the People of God to which I and all those who were there belonged, led by our Pastor.
In the middle of the prayer I became distracted looking at the pope.… And time began to fade away. I began to imagine the young priest, the seminarian, the poet, the worker, the child from Wadowice, in exactly the posture he was now, praying Hail Mary after Hail Mary. His witness struck me. I felt that this man, chosen to guide the Church, was the summation of a path trod together with his Mother in heaven, a path that began in his childhood. And I suddenly realized the weight of the words spoken by the Mother of Guadalupe to Saint Juan Diego: Do not be afraid. Am I not your Mother? I grasped the presence of Mary in the pope’s life.
His witness did not get lost in a memory. From that time onward I have prayed the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary every day.23
In the same evidence, he recorded how after he was made archbishop in 1998 he had had a number of “private personal meetings” with John Paul II, in which he had been deeply impressed by the pope’s “almost infinite memory: he remembered places, people, and situations he had encountered on his journeys, proof that he was paying total attention at all times.” Bergoglio remembered how the pope had put him at ease. “Because I was a bit shy and reserved, at least on one occasion when I had finished speaking to him about the topics we were covering at the audience, I made to leave so as not to waste his time. He grabbed me by the arm, invited me to sit down again, and said, ‘No! No! No! Don’t leave,’ so we could keep speaking.” Bergoglio had no doubt, he told the tribunal, that John Paul II “lived all the virtues in a heroic way.”24
When the pope entered the last stage of his life in February 2005, Cardinal Bergoglio was dealing with the aftermath of a Buenos Aires nightclub fire weeks before that had led to almost two hundred deaths and close to fifteen hundred injured. He was one of the first on the scene at the República de Cromañón club in Once, accompanying the relatives, anointing the bodies, praying with the bereft, standing quietly and supportively amid the shock and pain. He
put one of his auxiliaries, Jorge Lozano, in charge of a team giving pastoral support to the wounded and the grieving, and ordered Mass to be celebrated on the thirtieth of each month to remember the date of the tragedy.
His firm but gentle presence from dawn until late at night in the hospital and at the morgue won the hearts of the city. It also showed up the politicians, who seemed absent and unsure. As the causes of the tragedy unraveled—a sad litany of safety measures bypassed for the sake of the bottom line—it was clear why: behind it lay a putrid nexus of corruption, cover-up, and connivance involving high-ranking city officials and police.
“What was revealed were networks of corruption that caused people to look the other way,” recalls Bishop Lozano. “The emergency exit doors were shut up with chains and padlocks to stop people getting in without paying, and there were many more people inside than were allowed. What Bergoglio pointed to out of this was how society in Buenos Aires organized spaces for young people without caring for them, putting profit first, and how those who should be controlling were being paid not to control.” The cardinal, furious at the immolation of the young on the altar of greed, gave voice to the feelings of his people. “We are neither powerful nor rich nor important,” he said at the cathedral on January 30, 2005, “but we suffer … a pain that cannot be expressed in words, a pain that has overtaken whole households.” And he prayed for justice, “that this humble people not be mocked.”
At an anniversary Mass later that year, in one of his best-remembered homilies, in a cathedral packed with hundreds of grieving relatives, he led an extraordinary outpouring of emotion. Speaking softly, his voice cracking, he created the image of a city that was both a grieving mother and a distracted, self-obsessed place that was trying to bury its pain.
Today we are here to enter into the heart of that mother who went to the temple full of hope and who returned with the certainty that those hopes would be shattered, cut short. Entering into this heart let us remember the children of the city, of this city that is also a mother, that they be recognized by her, that she realize that these, like the children of Abraham in the First Reading, are the children of her inheritance; and the inheritance that those children who are no longer with us give us, is a very clear one: harden not your hearts! Their photos here, their names, their lives symbolized in these candles, are shouting at us not to let our hearts harden. This is the inheritance they have left us. They are the children of an inheritance that tells us: “cry!”
Distracted city, spread-out city, selfish city: cry! You need to be purified by tears. Those of us here praying, we give this message to these our brothers and sisters of Buenos Aires: let us together cry—we so need to cry in Buenos Aires.… Let us cry here. Let us cry outside, too. And let us ask the Lord to touch each of our hearts, and the hearts of our brothers and sisters of this city, that they, too, may cry; and that with our tears we might purify this, our superficial, flighty city.25
In February, John Paul II was rushed to the hospital with severe respiratory difficulties. It was serious, but many assumed he would rally as he had done so often before. But by the end of March, after a tracheotomy, there were signs that the end was near. John Paul II tried to deliver an Easter Sunday blessing from his apartment in the Apostolic Palace but no words came out. He looked defeated. An aide made to steer him from the window, but the pope pushed him away; he wanted to stay a moment, to communicate with his people, just as he had on the day of his election in October 1978, when he had spoken to the people in the square to tell them that the cardinals had gone to “a far country” to seek the bishop of Rome and asking them to correct his Italian. Now, raising his hands to his throat as if to explain why he could no longer speak to them, he made a sign of the Cross in the air; then he just stayed, looking. At that moment, the realization spread through the crowd: he was saying good-bye. Thousands stood in the square and openly wept.
At Mass at the cathedral on April 4 Bergoglio paid warm tribute to a man of total integrity, who never deceived, lied, or tricked, who “communicated with his people, with the coherence of a man of God, with the coherence of one who every morning spent long hours in adoration, and who, because he adored, let himself be shaped by God’s strength.” John Paul II was a “coherent man,” said the cardinal in a startling phrase, “because he let himself be chiseled by God’s will.”
This coherent man who … saved us from a fratricidal massacre; this coherent man who loved to take children in his arms because he believed in tenderness; this coherent man who more than once had homeless people brought from the Piazza Risorgimento to speak to them and give them a new start; this coherent man who when he had recovered asked permission to visit the prison to speak with the man who had tried to kill him. He is a witness. I end with his words: “What this century needs is not teachers but witnesses.” In the Incarnation of the Word, Christ is the faithful witness. Today we see in John Paul an imitation of this faithful witness. And we give thanks that he has ended his life in this way, coherently, that he might have finished his life being simply this: a faithful witness.26
* * *
THEN he left for Rome, which for the next few weeks became the turning point of the globe. Some four million people were arriving in those days, forming a great flood of humanity from the Tiber to St. Peter’s, singing, praying, waiting—and queuing, sometimes all day and night, to pay their respects. As they arrived from the five continents, the cardinals and visiting dignitaries were brought into the basilica through the aptly named Porta della Morte, emerging out of a narrow marble and stone corridor into an astonishing scene that assaulted the senses.
Kneeling on a prie-dieu before the shrunken, waxen body laid out on a red velvet bier—the pope’s head was raised on three red pillows, his feet shod in his trademark oxblood shoes—the cardinals saw, sliding behind the catafalque, a gentle torrent of grieving, praying humanity. Here, as had never been seen in modern times, was an eruption of God’s holy faithful people, bussing out of small towns across central Europe or flying in on budget airlines, drawn to the inert remains of their pope by some ancient magnet that the world’s media struggled to explain.
Awestruck by this outpouring, and conscious that they had been handed a precious legacy to preserve, the cardinals joined their confrères for daily meetings in the synod hall. Except for the dean of the college, Joseph Ratzinger, and US cardinal William Baum—the only electors to have been given their red hats by Paul VI—this was a wholly new experience for the cardinals: no pope had died, and none had been elected, since far-off 1978.
Yet while the media outside endlessly drew up profiles of the ideal next pope, there was little chance for the cardinals to do the same in their meetings, known as the General Congregations. During the sede vacante—the time between the death of a pope and the election of his successor—cardinals govern the Holy See, and must debate and vote on a series of often tedious matters. The first week of the General Congregations was mostly taken up with a careful line-by-line examination of the canon law of the sede vacante, followed by long discussions of the funeral on April 8, which would be the most-watched event in the history of television. Only after the funeral, during the so-called novemdiales, or nine-day mourning period prior to the conclave, were the cardinals able to get down to discussing the needs of the Church and its future direction.
After a 2003 consistory had added twenty-three more cardinals, there were now 115 electors from dozens of nations, plus some 50 who were too old to vote. A few cardinals had newspaper cutouts with profiles of each, so they knew who was speaking. Their task was to elect one among them, yet they hardly knew each other.
Cardinal Ratzinger chaired these sessions superbly. He had been at the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), for twenty-four years, greeting bishops on their Vatican visits, and had a phenomenal memory. He was a paradox: the theologian who justified Roman centralism was also the most collegial of the curial cardinals, praised b
y visiting bishops for his courtesy and attentiveness to them. Now, at the general congregations, these qualities proved vital. The cardinals knew him, and he them; he could name them and usually speak their language. Over that fortnight before the conclave, he pastored and united a body that was fragmented and disoriented.
The general congregations themselves were a poor forum for discerning John Paul II’s successor. The addresses were long-winded and vague—cardinals who were over eighty, unable to vote, were keen to share their wisdom at the first conclave in nearly thirty years—and often went over the seven-minute limit, leading some to grumble wryly that it was all too much like a bishops’ synod. Perhaps half of those present did not speak Italian, and the translation facilities were poor; nor could they learn much about each other through the media, because the cardinals had self-imposed a ban on interviews after the funeral.
The real discussions, in fact, went on in the evenings, when cardinals hosted discreet dinners at their national colleges or—in the case of the curiali—in their Roman apartments. Here the discussion could be more intimate and forthright, and might turn to specific candidates. Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor of Westminster, for example, hosted a dinner for the St. Gallen group and their guests at the English College after the funeral. Yet most cardinals, and especially those from Asia and Africa, were ignorant of these gatherings and depended on the general congregations for their discernment.
The Great Reformer Page 36
