The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Bergoglio in 2006 was increasingly bold, demonstrating more and more of the parrhesia, or apostolic courage, of which he spoke regularly in that retreat. Back in Rome for the post-synod meetings after the Spanish retreat, he met Pope Benedict in a bid to free the Argentine Church from the Sodano-Caselli nexus, which since 2003 had been strengthened by Sodano’s appointment of a conservative nuncio to Argentina, Adriano Bernardini. According to media reports based on Vatican sources, for some years the views of the Argentine episcopate had been ignored in the selection of new bishops: the conservative appointees were favorites of Caselli and Aguer, not of the Argentine bishops’ conference. When he returned to Buenos Aires, Bergoglio was quick to play down the suggestion of any conflict—“the Holy Spirit is not in those who have made a political reading of church affairs,” he said—but spoke warmly of the pope, rather than the Holy See. A few months later, the matter was partly resolved when Benedict XVI removed Sodano as secretary of state, although Bergoglio’s appointees would continue to be blocked in Rome.

  Back in Buenos Aires, Bergoglio and Kirchner continued to dance around each other. The president had avoided John Paul II’s funeral (Duhalde and Menem were there) but attended Benedict XVI’s installation; when the ambassador to the Holy See tried to bring the cardinal and the president together beforehand, they both said it was unnecessary. But in April there was a brief thaw, on the occasion of a prayer service remembering the 1976 massacre of the Pallottine fathers at the church where they were killed, a religious event that Kirchner could embrace politically.

  It was uncertain if the president would come, and he arrived late, but Bergoglio insisted on waiting on the steps of San Patricio parish. When he arrived, they shook hands and went inside together. Kirchner prayed the Our Father. It was a brief moment, says Marco Gallo of the Sant’Egidio Community, who organized the event, “but it suggested that something else was possible.” As he left the service, Kirchner told journalists that he had never had a bad relationship with the Church. No one believed him: the fact that he was in the same place as the cardinal qualified as news.39

  Having refused to attend the May 25 Te Deum at the cathedral the year before amid tension over the president’s unilateral sacking of a military chaplain, Kirchner returned to the cathedral for the 2006 national ceremony. The cardinal preached on the Beatitudes in an address that had not been sent beforehand to the Casa Rosada. “Blessed are we when we stand against hatred and permanent confrontation, because we do not want the chaos and disorder which leave us hostages to empires” was one, widely reported dart, aimed at the soft flesh of the Kirchners’ anti-imperialist discourse. A more skilled and secure politician would have turned the address to his advantage by engaging with it; but that would have meant acknowledging a spiritual authority outside the state. By taking umbrage—Kirchner would never step inside the cathedral again—he made himself look weak, and Bergoglio paradoxically powerful.40

  Later that year relations again nosedived after the retiring bishop of Puerto Iguazú ran against the state governor of Misiones, a Kirchner crony, in order to prevent his perpetual reelection. The Spanish-born bishop Joaquín Piña—who won by 60 percent of the vote—saw it as a local matter of justice for the people of Misiones; Kirchner saw it as the Church defying the government. On the grounds that Bergoglio was president of the bishops’ conference and both men were Jesuits, Kirchner publicly accused the cardinal of orchestrating the campaign, declaring him to be—in a phrase that would become famous—“the spiritual leader of the political opposition.”

  The cardinal, as always avoiding direct confrontation, stayed silent, but a week later, giving the homily during a massive pilgrimage to the national shrine at Luján—over two million went that year—he criticized elites distant from the people who foment the division among them. He prayed to the Virgin to be allowed to live as brothers and sisters, free from the devil, “the father of discord.” The news media called Marcó insistently, demanding to know if the cardinal was referring to the Kirchners. “Say that I was aiming it at everyone,” Bergoglio told him. But the line wasn’t convincing, and Marcó allowed himself, on one call, to express the personal opinion that it was not good for presidents to point accusing fingers. In the furor that followed, Kirchner said that if pursuing justice for his people was sowing discord, then he was sowing discord. He added, in the acid language of old-fashioned anticlericalism, that “the devil gets to everyone: those of use who wear trousers and those who wear soutanes.”41

  Kirchner now took a cue from the regimes he admired in Cuba and Venezuela, and began to treat Bergoglio not just as an enemy of the government but of the state (there was little distinction in his mind). A senior Catholic layman who at this time went to see the cardinal was surprised to find a classical radio station playing in his office at a volume higher than background music, yet not so loud to prevent them speaking. When the layman commented on this, Bergoglio took him to the window and pointed down at a white truck with aerials on its roof. He explained that the SIDE—the state intelligence agency—had a highly sensitive microphone trained on his window that could pick up conversations. But it wasn’t a problem, he said, because after a pang of conscience the engineer in the truck had come to confess what he was doing. Not wanting the man to lose his job, they had agreed that the eavesdropping should continue, but with the right level of music to prevent Kirchner’s men hearing him across the Plaza de Mayo.

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  THE photo of the cardinal on his knees, eyes closed, with pastors holding their hands over his bowed head, created shock waves when it appeared in La Nación, and led some traditionalist Catholics to declare him an apostate. Bergoglio’s bold move came at a charismatic prayer gathering of thousands at a Buenos Aires stadium in June 2006. His growing openness, in his late sixties, to charismatic spirituality—involving Spirit-filled praise, praying in tongues, and an early-church expectation of miracles and wonders—represented a significant shift in his interior life.

  From his early days as archbishop, building on Quarracino’s existing relationships and assisted by Father Marcó, who was involved in interreligious dialogue, Bergoglio had developed strong bonds with leaders of the historic Protestant and Orthodox churches, as well as with Jewish and Muslim leaders. The relationships were forged during various crises between Cardinal Ratzinger’s Dominus Iesus in 2000—a Vatican document that offended non-Catholic Christians—and Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ, which was perceived as anti-Semitic. The dialogue bore fruit, above all, in the economic crisis of 2001–2002, which saw a series of meetings, declarations, and pledges to work together to tackle common problems. As a result, by 2005 Buenos Aires—to a unique extent in Latin America and possibly the world—had a flourishing interreligious and interchurch dialogue, at the heart of which was Bergoglio’s web of friendships. Marco Gallo, head of the Sant’Egidio community in Buenos Aires, recalls that at an interreligious meeting in 2004 organized by the bishops’ conference, “Bergoglio was the one most at ease with the faith leaders. He knew them all really well.”

  But while relations with the historic Churches were warm, Bergoglio at that stage had few links with evangelicals. Before the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church considered them heretics, after it, separated brethren; but as Pentecostalism expanded in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, they were disparagingly described in Catholic documents as “sects.” Bergoglio had no links to them before being made a bishop, and inherited no relationships when he took over from Quarracino. That changed only after he began to get to know Catholic charismatics.

  The so-called charismatic renewal began in the Catholic Church in the late 1960s after Catholics were prayed over by Pentecostals, and came to share with them the conviction that the Church was being called to a new baptism in the Spirit. The official estimate for the number of charismatic Catholics is 120 million, perhaps 20–25 percent of the practicing Catholic population in the world.

  Charismatics use a spiritual
style of worship similar to that of Pentecostal evangelicals, combining it with a fully sacramental and orthodox Catholic belief and practice. As Jesuit provincial, Bergoglio, like other church leaders at the time, had little time for this phenomenon, and in the 1970s criticized charismatics for “claiming to be in possession of the Holy Spirit.”42 Both he and the provincial who succeeded him, Andrés Swinnen, forbade Alberto Ibáñez Padilla—the Jesuit who brought the renewal to Argentina—from being involved. As Francis explained in 2013 on the plane back from Rio de Janeiro, he used to think that charismatics “confused the holy liturgy with a school of samba,” but that later he was “converted when I got to know them better and saw the good they do.”

  The conversion happened in 1999, when he began celebrating an annual Mass for the charismatic Catholics in Buenos Aires. “He saw what was holy and profound in the charismatic renewal,” recalls one of its leaders in Buenos Aires who later became a close collaborator of Bergoglio’s. “He said, ‘When I hear the praise as I’m coming to the altar, I feel my heart fill.’ As a man of deep prayer, he recognized that this was the Holy Spirit.” They asked him if, when he raised the eucharistic host and chalice, he could allow them fifteen seconds of praying in tongues, and he agreed.

  In 2000 Bergoglio began giving talks at the Catholic charismatics’ annual school of formation, in which he developed his thinking about the renewal of the Church: how lay people needed to assume their responsibility to evangelize, how the Church had to get out into the street, how he preferred a Church that was bruised and dirty to one that stayed inside. “Everything you hear Francis saying now,” says Bergoglio’s collaborator, “he said to the charismatic renewal in those talks.”

  Out of a friendship born in Italy between the Buenos Aires evangelical pastor Jorge Himitian and a Catholic charismatic renewal leader, Matteo Calisi, a unique ecumenical initiative was born in Argentina, started by four evangelical pastors and four lay Catholics.The Communion of Renewed Evangelicals and Catholics in the Holy Spirit (CRECES) began to hold prayer-and-praise type gatherings from 2003, and grew rapidly amid talk of a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit. In 2004 and 2005 the cardinal discreetly attended the CRECES gatherings, not getting involved (“I’ll just be there like everybody else,” he told the organizers), but sat among the Catholics and evangelicals, with his flask and gourd of mate, observing the invocations of the Spirit, the high-octane “praise” music, the initially unsettling practice of singing in tongues, and the way people prayed over each other, confident of the healing power of the Holy Spirit.

  In June 2006, when CRECES invited the pope’s official preacher, the charismatic friar Raniero Cantalamessa, to preach in Buenos Aires, Bergoglio arranged for the event to be held in the seven-thousand-seat-capacity Luna Park stadium. Amazingly, it was packed that day with an audience made up more of Catholics than evangelicals. An ecumenical gathering on this scale was a first anywhere in the world.

  Leading the praise was the Mexican evangelical musician Marcos Witt, and as well as Cantalamessa there were the four CRECES pastors, including Himitian. The cardinal spent the morning, as usual, seated in the rows along with everyone else. At one point, Pastor Witt invited people to take the hand of whoever was beside them and pray for them. Bergoglio was caught by the photographer Enrique Cangas in an intense prayer with a forty-two-year-old evangelical, the cardinal’s head resting on the man’s shoulder. Edgardo Brezovec later said he had not known who it was, and only realized when the people behind him said the priest was the archbishop of Buenos Aires.

  In the afternoon, when Bergoglio was invited to come up and speak, he asked the preachers first to pray for him, and knelt, with his head bowed, as they held their hands over him. The pastor’s prayer was long, in the charismatic style, wordy and urgent, thanking the Lord for raising up a prophetic voice in Argentina, and asking for the cardinal to be blessed with gifts of wisdom and leadership. “Lord, as brothers in Christ, without differences or barriers, we bless him, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, and ask you to cancel out all power of evil over your servant,” intoned Pastor Norberto Saracco, who, as the stadium erupted in applause, ended with a crescendo of invocation: “Fill him with your Spirit and power, Lord! In the name of Jesus!”

  When Bergoglio took the microphone he spoke of the beauty of a people becoming a “reconciled diversity,” in which no one had to give up being who they were, yet who could walk together in a common path. He went on to preach around three themes: the wind, the embrace, and the wound. But what was extraordinary, especially to those who knew him, was the new fervor—the passion, urgency, clarity, and strength—with which he preached. He even shook raised arms and stabbed the air in the best revivalist tradition.

  The cardinal was on fire.

  “That was a turning point,” says Pastor Himitian’s daughter, the journalist and Bergoglio biographer Evangelina Himitian. “He began to feel much freer. The key was his openness to the Spirit, his letting himself be guided by a new experience, even at his age.” Thereafter Bergoglio would not just attend CRECES meetings but be up onstage, staying for the whole day of prayer and praise. Enrique Cangas, a freelance photographer who followed the cardinal around for twelve years, says: “The best smile I ever got from him—almost the only one in all that time—was at CRECES.”

  The next surprise came straight after that Luna Park gathering. Bergoglio, who did not know the pastors, told Himitian he would like to pray regularly with them. “So we met once a month, beginning in 2006,” the pastor recalls,

  four or sometimes five of us, for an hour and a half. We talked a little about the situation and we prayed together for the country and for society. We didn’t speak about Scripture, we mostly just prayed. We prayed spontaneously, the way we evangelicals do, and he did the same, prayed with great directness and simplicity. From the first day he asked us to use [the informal] vos rather than [the formal] usted, and to forget “archbishop” and “cardinal”—either we’re brothers or we’re not, he’d say. We discovered a man who was humble, simple; a man of prayer, close to the people.

  The pastors—Himitian, Saracco, Carlos Mraida, Angel Negro, and later Omar Cabrera of the Future Vision Church—took turns hosting the meetings, to which Bergoglio would always arrive by bus and subway. The pastors saw the meetings as a fulfillment of Jesus’s words in Matthew, chapter 18, that when two or three gather in His name, He would be among them. In this case, it was two or three churches, traditions, rivals for five hundred years, that were now praying together, united by the same Holy Spirit.

  After one of the meetings, in 2009, Himitian told the cardinal that they were concerned that the Catholic Church was talking about a new evangelization, yet 95 percent of its priests had not had a personal experience of the Risen Christ. “Jorge [Bergoglio] said, ‘I agree. What do you suggest?’” The pastors proposed a spiritual retreat for clergy in which they would preach on conversion. “We told him: ‘We’ll get the pastors, you get the priests.’ He agreed and pulled out his diary and asked, ‘What date?’”

  It was held in the bishops’ retreat house in 2010, the pastors preaching to around a hundred clergy for a day and a half. It was repeated in 2012, this time with Father Cantalamessa joining the pastors after returning to Luna Park. There were objections from people in both traditions. Some of the Catholic bishops didn’t like it, and the pastors were given a hard time by some evangelicals. But the priests liked it. And nobody was trying to convert anybody, except to the one Jesus Christ. For Bergoglio, it was about “reconciled diversity.”

  The pope’s preacher was bowled over. In all his years spent on the spiritual frontier between Catholics and evangelicals, he had never seen anything like it. “The whole Church is watching very carefully what is happening in Buenos Aires,” Father Cantalamessa told the thousands on his return to Luna Park in 2012.43

  * * *

  BERGOGLIO’S boldness in the years after the 2005 conclave was also born of a sense that the Church in Latin America was resuming
its historic journey to integration, to becoming la patria grande, and a source for the world Church.

  Just days after John Paul II’s death, Bergoglio finished a prologue to a book by his friend in the Vatican, Guzmán Carriquiry. The book, Una Apuesta por América Latina (“Betting on Latin America”), was an essay on the continent’s historic destiny and challenges, to which Bergoglio’s prologue reads like a State of the (Latin-American) Union address.

  “This is the time for educators and builders,” the cardinal declared. “In the next two decades Latin America will play a key role in the great battles that are taking shape in the twenty-first century.” Above all, he wrote, “it is time to move along the paths to integration, toward the configuration of the South-American Union and the Latin-American patria grande.” The journey would mean confronting major challenges: new models of sustainable economic development to defeat some of the sharpest social inequalities on the planet, as well as a reform of politics and the state to ensure that these served the common good. Yet none of this could happen without “a vast task of education, mobilization, and participation” of peoples—an “organized community” that drew on “a Catholic and Latin-American self-consciousness.”

  The door to this bold future was a new evangelization to unleash the energies of solidarity, freedom, and hope. What would close that door would be a return to anachronistic ideologies or the decadent culture of “individualistic ultra-liberalism” and “consumerist hedonism.”

  Bergoglio saw particular dangers in two kinds of “weak thinking.” The first was an imperialistic version of globalization that destroys particular identities (he suggested that the proper image of a “true” globalization was not a sphere but a polyhedron, in which each culture preserved its own identity but united in a common good). The second was what he called an “adolescent progressivism” based on a militant secularism—he had in mind not just kirchnerismo in Argentina but chavismo in Venezuela—which was merely a new imperialism of state-centered ideologues. Both of these strains threatened to sap evangelizing energies and condemn Latin America to endless destructive cycles.44