The task now was to equip the Latin-American Church for that historic task of evangelization. A month after the conclave, Bergoglio was in Lima, Peru, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of CELAM. He said it was time for a continent that included half of the world’s Catholics “to lend a service to the universal Church,” to share the gifts that the Holy Spirit had showered on its people. “This is the prophetic dimension that Latin America must assume in this Fifth Conference,” he told them.45 When the theologian Father Carlos Galli, on his way to a planning meeting for the Conference, called the cardinal to ask him if there was any point he wished him to emphasize, Bergoglio told him: “Christ and the poor.” Galli thought that was a little obvious and asked him two more times if there was anything else. “Three times he gave me the same answer: ‘Christ and the poor,’” Galli recalls.
The path to that new continent-wide gathering, the first since 1992, had encountered endless knots in the last years of John Paul II, but one by one they began to be untied. John Paul II’s secretary of state, Cardinal Sodano, and the Latin-American curiali who had with him streamrollered CELAM at Santo Domingo, had opposed the idea of another General Conference, arguing instead for a special synod in Rome—part of their strategy to reduce CELAM to a secretariat rather than the voice of the local Church. But Benedict XVI did not indulge their view. After his election, the pope held a meeting with four Latin-American cardinals: the new CELAM president, Francisco Errázuriz of Santiago, Chile; Pedro Rubiano Sáenz, archbishop of Bogotá, Colombia, where CELAM was based; the Brazilian Claudio Hummes, recently appointed to head a Vatican department; and Bergoglio of Buenos Aires. At that meeting it was agreed that the Fifth General Conference would be held in Latin America, at the shrine of Aparecida, Brazil, in May 2007.
Alberto Methol Ferré, the visionary whose conviction that Latin America was becoming a source Church had so influenced Bergoglio, was too ill to attend Aparecida, and he died two years later. But like Moses on Mount Nebo glimpsing the Promised Land at the end of his life, the Uruguayan prophet lived to see it happen. In his intellectual testament, Latin America in the Twenty-First Century, which Bergoglio would distribute to many friends when it came out, Methol Ferré had predicted that Benedict XVI’s engagement with the Latin-American Church in the 1980s would bring about a new spring of Latin-American Catholic thinking loyal to the Magisterium.46 That, essentially, is the story of Aparecida.
It now seems clear that Benedict XVI shared Methol Ferré’s view that Latin America was becoming a source for the universal Church. According to Carriquiry, on the flight from São Paulo to Aparecida to open the CELAM assembly, Benedict XVI said: “I am convinced that from here will be decided—at least in part, but a fundamental part—the future of the Catholic Church. For me this has always been clear.”47
This also explains the apparent paradox that Benedict XVI, who as Cardinal Ratzinger had provided the theological justification for Vatican centralism in the 1980s and 1990s, now allowed CELAM to prepare for the Fifth Conference in complete freedom, without interference from Rome, yet with his support and blessing—just as had happened in Medellín (1968) at the time of Paul VI. The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, pioneer of liberation theology, would later say that “Aparecida mostly happened thanks to Ratzinger.”48
Cardinal Bergoglio, who redacted the magnificent final document that came out of that gathering, described it as “an act of the magisterium of the Latin-American Church” which Benedict XVI had green-lighted: “the pope gave general indications on the problems of Latin America, and then left it open: over to you, over to you!,” he recalled later that year.49 Benedict fully recognized this magisterium—the authority to teach—of the Latin-American Church because it was carried out in dialogue with the pope; it was cum et sub Petro. CELAM’s president, Cardinal Errázuriz, recalls that “we took the conclusions to Pope Benedict XVI for him to look at and approve, but he said he wasn’t going to approve them in order not to confuse the episcopal with the pontifical magisterium.” The pope would later pay his own compliment to the document by quoting often from it. Aparecida, recalls Cardinal Errázuriz, was “a beautiful experience of communion with the pope.”
The three-week meeting of two hundred Latin-American bishops in the great Marian shrine one hundred miles northeast of São Paolo was held next to the world’s largest basilica. Smaller than St. Peter’s, yet holding many more (forty-five thousand), and drawing twelve million visitors a year, the basilica houses the little blackened wooden statue of the Virgin which is the source of all the fuss. In 1717 the statue turned up in the nets of three fishermen from nearby Guaratinguetá who had prayed to her for a good catch. The miracles attributed to her raised the dignity of the fishermen and slaves, and it is above all the poor who continue to flock to her shrine.
The constant backdrop of God’s holy faithful people was a reminder of what Benedict XVI in his opening address called “the rich and profound popular religiosity” of the Latin-American peoples that was the Catholic Church’s “precious treasure.” Bergoglio would later say that the document “was born of the interplay between the labors of the bishops and the simple faith of the pilgrims, under Mary’s maternal protection.” The theme of popular religiosity became, as a result of the Argentine contingent at the conference, a key theme in the document.
The Aparecida gathering offered a glimpse of what the synod of bishops in Rome could be. Rather than working from a predetermined document, it began with a diagnosis of contemporary culture and trends from each country, then worked them into concrete issues that could be discussed. It was bottom-up, not, as in the synods, top-down. Key to its success were warm relationships between the different national bishops’ conferences, and a close friendship between the conference’s two principals, the CELAM president, Cardinal Errázuriz, and the chair of the drafting commission, Cardinal Bergoglio. Father Mariano Fazio, an Argentine priest of Opus Dei sent out from Rome as one of the eleven theological experts, was struck by the collegiality of the meeting. “There were disagreements, as is right and normal, because there are different points of view, but there was a basic unity. Those who had been in Santo Domingo told me they couldn’t believe the contrast with Aparecida.” The Vatican representatives were warmly received, and spoke with complete freedom. But it was CELAM’s show.
Speaking first as president of the Argentine bishops’ conference, Bergoglio said that those who earlier had been spoken of as marginalized or oppressed could now be called sobrantes, the left-over people, because they are superfluous to a market economy that does not need them. He linked that idea to what he called the cultura del descarte, the throwaway culture: the poor, the elderly, the children, the unborn, the migrants—these were now dispensed with like out-of-date gadgets. In his homily at a huge Mass in the shrine after the departure of Benedict XVI, Bergoglio used another striking metaphor when he spoke for the first time (at least in a major public arena) of las periferias existenciales, the existential margins. Almost every bishop at Aparecida lived in a city whose peripheries were being constantly swelled by the arrival of migrants, and the phrase struck many chords. It suggested not just the slums, but a world of vulnerability and fragility, a place of suffering and longing and poverty, yet also joy and hope—the place where Christ had chosen to reveal Himself in contemporary Latin America.
It was this genius for identifying trends and giving them a new, startling language that led the delegates to vote overwhelmingly for Bergoglio to take charge of writing the concluding document. It was an epic task of synthesis that required distilling and converging proposals emerging from a host of subcommissions, then securing approval for modifications as the document developed. “It was amazing to watch him move in Aparecida,” recalls Father Víctor Manuel Fernández, then vice-dean of the Catholic University in Buenos Aires, “to see his ability to knit together a consensus, to create the right atmosphere, to instill trust.”50 Fazio recalls that “he acted with a super-low profile a
nd real efficiency. He spoke with everyone, was always available, forged agreements between people of different views, never lost his cool, and worked hard late into the night, always smiling.” It was a brilliant performance that brought people clapping to their feet at the end of the conference. Bergoglio left Aparecida a leader of the Latin-American Church.
Yet throughout he had been almost invisible to the outside world, glimpsed usually deep in conversation while walking with other bishops and staying well clear of the media. “A tall, thin, serious-looking man, he has always refused to give interviews to the press,” complained one correspondent, who resorted to asking a Central-American participant who had met him for the first time to describe the Argentine cardinal. “He is very silent, and offers an opinion only when he is asked,” said the delegate. “He is very humble. But also very intelligent. He is a holy man.”51
Together with another Argentine theologian, Father Carlos Galli, Fernández assisted Bergoglio in the final task of drafting. Both were thoroughly imbued in the Argentine teología del pueblo; Galli was a disciple of its pioneer, Lucio Gera. Bergoglio was keen that the final document boost the importance of popular religiosity, and asked the theologians to draft those sections, which are among the document’s most beautiful and striking.
The Argentines were aware that, even though the document was the fruit of consensus—each paragraph had to be voted on by delegates—the Argentines’ emphasis on popular religiosity took the document in a different direction from what had been planned. “In a complicated moment, Bergoglio said to Fernández, ‘If the document turns out badly, they’re going to blame us, because here we are, three Argentines working on it,’” recalls Galli. But they pulled it off. Cardinal Errázuriz says this part of the document was very much an Argentine contribution—“we were struck by how much Argentina valued popular religiosity”—but says the delegates were grateful. “The text is easily the best thing there is on popular religiosity. We applauded the Argentines for how they reflected it.”
Bergoglio’s other achievement at Aparecida was less visible, yet also far reaching.
Early in the drafting, many delegates wanted the document to begin with an analysis of contemporary realities using the traditional see-judge-act method. Bergoglio had no problem with the method but wanted it preceded by an introductory chapter on how to see, namely, as missionary disciples moved primarily by “the love received from the Father, through Jesus Christ, by the anointing of the Holy Spirit” (no. 14). After debate and some tension, Bergoglio’s view carried.52 When, as Pope Francis, he returned to Brazil in July 2013, he spoke to the CELAM leaders of “a temptation that has been present in the Church from the beginning: the attempt to interpret the Gospel apart from the Gospel itself and apart from the Church.” He gave the example of the Aparecida meeting, “which, at one particular moment, felt this temptation … to opt for a way of ‘seeing’ that was completely ‘antiseptic,’ detached, and disengaged, which is impossible. The way we ‘see’ is always affected by the way we direct our gaze.… The question was, ‘How are we going to look at reality in order to see it?’ Aparecida replied: ‘With the eyes of discipleship.’”
That had been his argument with the progressive Jesuits in the 1970s. In claiming to be using scientific analysis to view society’s problems, they were discarding the eyes of faith. That left them open to ideology, which turned faith into an instrument—the error of Marxist liberation theology.
The Aparecida document was the fruit of the Argentine Church carrying the flame of Latin-American theology over twenty years, safeguarding the insights of liberation theology from the pitfalls of liberal and Marxist thinking. It had done so by sticking close to the poor and their culture—the pueblo fiel hermeneutic—which Bergoglio’s Argentine team ensured took pride of place in the document. As a result, Aparecida could safely unleash, to a greater extent even than Medellín in 1968, the riches of the Latin-American Church, and give flesh to its great insight, the option for the poor, which appears dozens of times.
Aparecida was the expression of a new maturity, of a local Church come of age—Methol Ferré’s source Church. In its vision and vigor, its fierce advocacy of the poor and its missionary spirituality, its bold proclamation of the birth of a new springtime of faith, Aparecida was now the program, the key to a major new effort of evangelization in Latin America. Nowhere else in the world was there anything to compare with it. That made it, just as obviously, the program for the universal Church.
All that was needed now was a Latin-American pope to bring the flame out from the periphery, into Catholicism’s increasingly tired and desolate center.
EIGHT
MAN FOR OTHERS
(2008–2012)
TO FIND CRITICS of Cardinal Bergoglio it helps to go north from Avenida Rivadavia to the Barrio Norte, which is not one but many barrios bordering the banks of the River Plate. In the neighborhoods of La Recoleta, Palermo, Belgrano, and Olivos, great avenues—Libertador, Santa Fe, Córdoba—fan out from Retiro station like spokes from a hub, past the Jockey Club and the Aeroparque and the Hippodrome, the museums and the art galleries and the embassies. The streets here are lined with marble-fronted apartment blocks that look out on craft markets and organic pasta stalls. There are awesome mansions and high-rises, but mostly these streets glimpse Argentina’s frustrated destiny as a middle-class crossroads of European urbanity and New World ambition. This is the Buenos Aires people hope to live in and try hard not to leave.
For Catholics in the Barrio Norte, Francis has been a revelation, for they hardly knew Cardinal Bergoglio. But for the launch of some book whose prologue he had written, he was seldom present at gatherings or functions, and people complain that he hardly ever came to parish functions or dinners, and when he did he couldn’t get away fast enough, saying his brain didn’t work well after 9:00 p.m. “I don’t know if he didn’t feel comfortable there, but he didn’t see it as a priority,” says the recently retired bishop of San Isidro, Jorge Casaretto. It wasn’t just geographical. A senior priest who has spent many years working to connect the business world with the Church’s social teaching says Bergoglio “showed no interest at all in the middle-class world of Catholics—not the world of business, or banking, or the arts or university.”
This was not a pastoral neglect. Barrio Norte had a bishop, and no shortage of clergy to minister there. Nor was this an inverse social prejudice: Cardinal Bergoglio had relationships with people of all backgrounds, including the wealthy, the powerful, and academics. But he only had so much time away from his desk and the cathedral, and he chose to spend it in the poorer parts of the city. This choice, exercised consistently over thirteen years, gave the cardinal an elder son problem. In the Gospel parable of the Prodigal Son, a dissolute younger brother returns to the loving embrace of his forgiving, indulgent father, while his upright elder sibling—who had worked the fields all the time his feckless brother drank away the family inheritance—seethes with resentment. The father focuses on his younger son not because he loves him more but because the prodigal son needs him more, and has a heart cracked open by repentance to receiving his father’s love. The parable is the iconic gospel tale of God’s reckless mercy. But it might also be about what happens in a diocese whose bishop takes seriously the preferential option for the poor.
A distinguished group of Barrio Norte liberal Catholics complains—just as the Jesuit intellectuals in the Argentine province did in the 1980s—about Bergoglio’s embrace of popular devotions. Their assumption is that the poor need to be weaned off their premodern religiosity, not indulged by their archbishop. The María Desatanudos fervor drives one priest in this group to distraction: “What sense can it have, in a city stuffed with devotions, to introduce another?” Under Bergoglio, he complains, “popular devotion has become the paradigmatic piety.” Listening to them develop this topic—calls to improve catechesis and the understanding of the sacraments—it’s hard not to hear something of the elder sibling: on the one hand are t
he faithful Catholics who turn up to Mass weekly and worship according to the rules and the rubrics; and on the other there are those people who don’t seem to go to Mass much at all, yet who turn out in great numbers on pilgrimage to the national shrine of Luján, often arriving drunk.
Other groups in the Barrio Norte raise different objections. The anti-Peronists object that the cardinal’s style of government was personalist rather than republican, and that his idea of pueblo risked confusing a political with a theological category. Left-wing intellectuals suspect him because of Yorio and Jalics, right-wing intellectuals say he gave too much time to social commentary rather than morality. Liturgical traditionalists claim he made it hard for Catholics to celebrate the old Mass, progressives that he didn’t oppose the Vatican. In the Barrio Norte, in short, there are many critics, and they are happy to share their views, before adding what a wonderful pope Francis is—and asking not to be identified.
Barrio Norte Catholics took the same image from TV as everyone else, and saw Bergoglio as aloof and dour. Their refrain is one of metamorphosis: unable to reconcile the unsmiling cardinal in Argentina with the joyful and charismatic pope in Rome, they say it’s a miracle how he’s changed. Juan Martín Ezratty, a documentary maker who lives in the Barrio Norte, used to have this view, too. But scrolling through archive footage of Bergoglio in the slums or at shrine festivals like San Cayetano to make a film about Francis’s pre-papal existence, he was shocked to find a different man from the one he thought he knew, one whose face was lit up like the pope’s.
The Great Reformer Page 39
