The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

* * *

  THERE was one issue over which a direct confrontation with the government was inevitable. Although Cristina was president, it was Néstor Kirchner—then a national deputy—who drove the government’s out-of-the-blue same-sex marriage bill in 2010, inspired by the Spanish socialist measure five years earlier. Although he had never shown the least interest in gay rights or gay people, the policy was perfect tinder for Kirchner’s polarizing strategy. By positing same-sex marriage as a minority civil rights issue, he could frame the defenders of the traditional understanding of marriage as opponents of equality and the Church as seeking to impose its morality on the law. It was the kind of fight he relished: one that would galvanize the Kirchner political base while throwing his opponents into confusion.

  Bergoglio knew many gay people and had spiritually accompanied a number of them. He knew their stories of rejection by their families and what it was like to live in fear of being singled out and beaten up. He told a Catholic gay activist, a former theology professor named Marcelo Márquez, that he favored gay rights as well as legal recognition for civil unions, which gay couples could also access.8 But he was utterly opposed to any attempt to redefine marriage in law. “He wanted to defend marriage but without wounding anybody’s dignity or reinforcing their exclusion,” says a close collaborator of the cardinal’s. “He favored the greatest possible legal inclusion of gay people and their human rights expressed in law, but would never compromise the uniqueness of marriage as being between a man and a woman for the good of children.”

  Bergoglio had not raised strong objections to a 2002 civil unions law that applied only to Buenos Aires and that granted rights to any two people cohabiting for more than two years, independent of their gender or sexual orientation. He regarded it as a purely civic, legal arrangement that left marriage unaffected; it granted some privileges but not the right to adopt or any automatic right to inheritance. Yet Bergoglio was criticized from Rome for failing to oppose it when, the following year, the Vatican issued a document binding bishops and politicians to give “clear and emphatic opposition” to any legal recognition of homosexual unions.9

  At the same time, Bergoglio was quick to react to any attempt to undermine the law’s conjugal understanding of marriage. In 2009 he wrote an emphatic letter to the head of the Buenos Aires city government, Mauricio Macri, when he did not immediately strike down an attempt by a judge to authorize—contrary to the law—the “marriage” of a same-sex couple. It was the first time in his eighteen years as a bishop that he openly criticized a public official by name.10

  Federico Wals, who had been Bergoglio’s head of press since 2007, explained in early April 2010 that the cardinal’s position was resolutely in favor of the existing law upholding marriage as a union of a man and a woman, and that a same-sex “marriage” was an impossibility. But this did not prevent, he said, revising and extending the concept of civil unions, as long as this left marriage intact. At the plenary meeting of the hundred Argentine bishops a few weeks later, this was the position that Bergoglio, as their president, urged them to adopt as both right and strategically intelligent, warning them that if they opted simply to oppose the bill (without proposing an alternative that advanced civil rights for gay people), they would play into Kirchner’s hands and make a same-sex marriage law more likely.

  That is precisely what happened.

  It was the only occasion during his six-year presidency of the Argentine bishops’ conference that Bergoglio lost a vote, albeit narrowly (60 to 40). The rigoristi, led by Archbishop Héctor Aguer of La Plata, urged simple opposition on the grounds that the 2003 Vatican document prohibited legal recognition of same-sex unions in any form. Whether the document referred to civil union laws that gave rights to all cohabiting couples, not just same-sex ones, was not clear; but because the document had been signed by the man who was now Benedict XVI, it was easy for Aguer to claim that any endorsement of civil unions was against the pope’s wishes and amounted to formal cooperation in what the document called “gravely unjust laws.” The Vatican document was a classic example of what the St. Gallen group of cardinals had long criticized as Roman overreach: the document’s detailed prescriptiveness tied the hands of local bishops, depriving them of the room to maneuver in any battle to preserve a greater good.

  The agreed bishops’ declaration, which made no mention of civil unions, was a vigorous defense of marriage as rooted in the complementary sexuality of man and woman, vital to society and to children, whose essential properties were key to their upbringing. The bishops rejected the idea that such a concept was discriminatory, while arguing that a same-sex marriage law would reduce the legal understanding of marriage to a mere partnership, thereby weakening it in the eyes of future generations.11

  The bill was narrowly passed (126 to 110) by the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, on May 5, redefining marriage as a partnership between any two people, with full rights to adopt children. The bill then went for endorsement from the upper chamber, where there was strong opposition from most of the seventy-two senators, especially those representing interior provinces. In the run-up to the Senate debate in mid-July, Bergoglio mobilized the diocese, urging Catholics to make their views known and asking for the bishops’ statement to be read out in all of the churches on July 8.

  But that day another, private letter that Bergoglio had sent a fortnight earlier to the four Carmelite monasteries of Buenos Aires was leaked—how and why is not known. Its dramatic language ensured that it dominated the headlines and eclipsed the public statement. The letter to the nuns has been described as a “dangerous tactic” that backfired.12 But it wasn’t a tactic at all. It formed no part of any political or internal church strategy, and was never intended to be made public. Bergoglio had an intense devotion to the Carmelite saint Thérèse of Lisieux and was close to the Carmelite nuns in Buenos Aires. He had great confidence in their power of prayer, and had often over the years sent the nuns letters asking for their prayers for this or that intention, especially when he was under pressure. This was no exception. “It was a letter in which he was sharing what was in his heart with his intimates, intercessors, in the language of spiritual people,” says Bergoglio’s close collaborator.

  The cardinal told the Carmelites what he discerned at stake in the same-sex marriage legislation: a serious threat to the family that would lead to children being deprived of a father and a mother. It was “a frontal attack on God’s law”: not simply a political battle but “a bid by the father of lies seeking to confuse and deceive the children of God.” He went on to ask for the nuns’ prayers for the assistance of the Holy Spirit “to protect us from the spell of so much sophistry of those who favor this law, which has confused and deceived even those of goodwill.” He had spotted the serpent’s tail, with all its usual telltale signs: hysteria, division, confusion, envy. This was “God’s war,” as he put it later in his letter.

  To anyone who knows his spiritual writings, this was vintage Bergoglio. It was the language he had used with the Jesuits, language that is common among contemplatives, on retreats, or in spiritual direction. He saw behind the political battle another, spiritual contest, in which the devil, driven by and provoking a sense of rivalry (gay people suddenly discovering a resentment at being disqualified from marriage), appeared, as usual, sub angelo lucis, in the guise of light (equality, justice, and civil rights—all good things), and thereby deceiving people of goodwill.

  At the heart of the bill was a lie: same-sex marriage claimed to add to conjugal marriage or to exist alongside it, while in reality dismantling it. Allowing gay people to marry required that the ancient, natural, God-given institution of matrimony be stripped of the very thing that made it a reflection of the divine plan: the bonding of man and woman, and the begetting and raising of children by their natural parents in a relationship of permanence and sexual exclusivity. As Bergoglio put it in his official, public letter, a law that recognized marriage as male-female did not discriminate but appropriately diff
erentiated—appropriately, because a man-woman bond, like a child’s need of a father and a mother, were core human realities. To try to make marriage something else was “a real and serious anthropological step backward.”13

  Taken out of its context of spiritual discernment, and without this accompanying explanation, the letter was a firebomb. It sparked outrage from the kirchneristas and considerable discomfort in the Church, where many lamented its language. Because the bishops had vetoed Bergoglio’s bid to advance the social inclusion of gay people, Kirchner had been handed a huge target. As he triumphantly declared that it was time for Argentina “definitively to leave behind these obscurantist and discriminatory views,” the government-funded Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo dutifully declared that the Church’s complicity with dictatorship meant it “lacked the moral authority” to argue on the issue. From China, Cristina Kirchner adopted a presidential pose of regret at the tone of the opposition to the bill. It was a shame, she said, that “equal marriage” was being seen as a question of “religious morality” when “all we’re doing is looking at reality as it is.”

  All eyes were now on the Senate. As Catholics and evangelicals demonstrated outside on July 15, the senators divided into three groupings: those favoring the government bill redefining marriage as gender-neutral, those opposing, and those proposing a French-type pacte civil (but which also included the right to adopt). With Bergoglio’s backing, the Federal Peronist (anti-Kirchner) senator of San Luis, Liliana Negre de Alonso, brokered an agreement between the second two groups to reject the government bill in favor of an expanded civil unions bill but without the right to adopt children. “The fact that Bergoglio understood the need for an alternative proposal and supported us was a huge comfort,” recalls Negre, a member of the Catholic organization Opus Dei. “With great effort we managed to get agreement for a civil union bill that offered practical benefits [to gay people] but left marriage law intact. I sought the advice of many people at that time, among them the cardinal. He called me at home and said, ‘You’re on the right track.’”

  Heading into the debate, the Negre proposal had the support of a clear majority of the senate. But over the next twenty hours, the kirchnerista senators used the cardinal’s leaked letter to mount a ferocious, scornful attack in the tradition of fanatical anticlericalism. “The things I heard about the cardinal during those twenty-four hours we were in session are unrepeatable,” Negre recalls. She was herself reduced to tears with accusations that she was a Nazi who wanted to do to gay people what Hitler did to the Jews. At the end of the debate, the Senate president, under pressure from the leader of the pro-government bloc, arbitrarily nullified the compromise solution, forcing senators to vote yes or no on the government bill. In the midst of confusion and angry scenes, during which a number of senators walked out in protest at the government’s steamrollering, the bill passed by just six votes. “We beat Bergoglio!” Negre remembers the head of the kirchnerista bloc crowing, “as if the whole debate had been between them and him.”14

  * * *

  THREE months later, Néstor Kirchner was dead at the age of sixty. His cardiac problems had twice that year led to him being hospitalized—Bergoglio had sent a priest to offer the sacrament of extreme unction, who had been turned away by Cristina—but the heart attack at his Patagonian home in Santa Cruz was a huge shock. A wake was held at the Casa Rosada, followed by a funeral back in the South. Bergoglio said a requiem Mass at the cathedral the same day the news broke. Given all Kirchner had thrown at the Church and at him in particular, his homily was a model of graciousness. “We are here to pray for a man named Néstor,” the cardinal said, “who was received by God’s hands and who in his time was anointed by his people.”

  Kirchner’s discourse had exemplified what Bergoglio called adolescent progressivism. It was based on vengeance for the dictatorship and a vindication, politically and morally, of the guerrillas, in which “the people”—in reality, young urban progressives—were pitted against cardboard-cutout enemies: Church, army, establishment newspapers like Clarín and La Nación, foreign banks, agro-exporters, the United States, and Britain (the list was long).

  The government’s key allies for the previous seven years had been the human-rights organizations, bound by ties of blood and sympathy to the previous generation’s guerrillas. The government had channeled huge sums to many of these groups to fund inquiries and hearings into the dirty war that were then used to bring prosecutions. By 2010 there had been close to one thousand charges, and hundreds were serving sentences in prison. Bergoglio had always cooperated with any requests for information, giving access to church archives, and speaking out on the need for relatives of the disappeared to get at the truth. He told Rabbi Skorka that many people still did not know what happened to their relatives: “They lost the flesh of their flesh and have nowhere to cry over them.” But healing and reconciliation had to follow. “Hatred will solve nothing,” he said.15

  The efforts of the vast, state-funded human rights industry had led to little new information about disappearances—the final toll of desaparecidos was actually less than the Sábato commission had estimated in the 1980s—while in many ways making it harder for Argentines to come to terms with the 1970s. Any attempt to bring the role of the guerrillas into the equation was met with blasts of official scorn, there being, in the official view, only one devil—the armed forces and the death squads. This simplistic dualism fueled a punitive attitude. Convinced that those responsible had not yet paid the price of their iniquity—the Alfonsín and Menem amnesties were continually excoriated—the human-rights groups used witnesses’ evidence in fact-finding hearings to bring more and more prosecutions. This was what lay behind the summons to the cardinal to give evidence in November 2010 on the Yorio and Jalics case, as part of an epic long-term inquiry into the naval torture center ESMA.

  Two months earlier a catechist who had been present in the Bajo Flores shantytown at the time of the Jesuits’ abduction claimed it had happened because Bergoglio had withdrawn their license to minister, thereby leaving them exposed, and had done so because he had objected to them working with the poor. This sounded suspiciously similar to the mythical Mignone/Verbitsky narrative, but the attorney driving the inquiry, Luis Zamora, a Trotskyite politician and a long-standing colleague of Verbitsky’s in the human rights organization CELS, was not about to question it. His starting assumption, as he told a TV program, was the “undisputed fact that the Church was complicit in the dictatorship and formed part of its repressive apparatus.”16 Seizing on the testimony to arraign the cardinal, Zamora was determined to prove the Verbitsky accusations over two days of questioning and extract something from the cardinal that would allow a prosecution against him.

  Argentine law allows senior public figures to be questioned in a place of their choosing. Conscious that Zamora was trying to stage the hearing as if the cardinal were being accused of a crime, Bergoglio chose for the hearing to take place in the archdiocesan curia rather than in the courts. (“They wanted to make him part of a show,” says Wals. “He wasn’t going to let them do that.”) Bergoglio was tense beforehand, but told his staff to carry on as normal, telling them: “They’re coming for me, not you.” El Jesuita, Bergoglio’s book-long interview with journalists Sergio Rubín and Francesca Ambrogetti, had come out earlier that year. There he had spoken for the first time in public about the dirty war, referring vaguely to those whom he had helped escape. Wals wanted to contact them, so they could tell journalists their stories, but the cardinal said no: only they could choose to reveal themselves if they wanted to. “Relax, Federico,” he said, “the time will come.”

  After the hearing, Zamora tried to claim that Bergoglio was evasive and had something to hide. “It was a very reticent testimony,” he told a TV reporter. “He knew after three days where the priests were being held, but when I asked him how he knew, he was vague, refused to give names. When he did give a name, it was someone who was dead and so couldn’t be called.”1
7 Both video and transcript tell a different story. Under at times aggressive questioning—the judge repeatedly had to remind Zamora that the cardinal was not on trial—Bergoglio volunteered detailed information about both events and their background over four hours, which was more than sufficient to destroy the Verbitsky version. He did hold back names of Jesuits, in order to protect them from the government’s inquisitorial machine, and he avoided making any criticism of Yorio and Jalics or anyone else. He never tried to justify himself, but stuck to facts, supplying full contextual information to help the inquiry understand what happened. It was a tour de force, which left Zamora fuming.

  The cardinal gave further evidence the following year over a woman who had turned to him for help in 1977 and whom he had referred on to a bishop. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Verbitsky would afterward claim that he had lied in his testimony when he said that he had only found out in the 1980s about the systematic taking of babies born to mothers in detention. Verbitsky said he “must have” known. But this was one of the dirty war’s dirtiest secrets, and while there were rumors at the time, it would be surprising if he had known anything concrete.18

  Although their standing abroad was intact, in Argentina the credibility of the iconic human-rights group, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, had been severely damaged over the years. In addition to its financial scandals and endless internal disputes, the Madres leader, Hebe de Bonafini, had harshly pro-abortion and anticlerical views, and her expressions of sympathy for terrorists—she applauded the attacks on the Twin Towers as well as the atrocities committed by the Spanish and Colombian militants, ETA and FARC—frequently left even kirchneristas spluttering. It was not easy for Bergoglio to have relationships with groups that hurled accusations at him that he was a “betrayer” (entregador) and complicit in torture—representative of what they called a “right-wing Church” rather than what they called “the Church of the people.” But he never responded to the attacks; and asked by Rubín and Ambrogetti if he agreed that Bonafini’s rhetoric was unhelpful, he kept the focus on the Madres’ pain. “I imagine these women searching desperately for their children and coming up against the cynicism of the authorities, who humiliated them and sent them from pillar to post. How can we not understand what they’re feeling?”