The Great Reformer

by Austen Ivereigh

  Poirier had written in that article that Bergoglio “can move pieces along with the best chess-player.” It is a metaphor that many use of him. Father Mariano Fazio, Opus Dei’s vicar in Argentina who had been with the cardinal in Aparecida, says, “At times you could feel like a chess piece on a board—he had the whole game in his head.” The same analogy is used by Father Marcó. “He’s a silent chess player, moving the pieces and seeing many moves ahead. He knows when to stop and when to make his move. You’ll never know his rules, because he never shares them.” Bergoglio, adds Poirier, “conveys the confidence of someone who knows where he stands, knows what he wants to do, where he is headed, even though he won’t tell you explicitly.”

  In this respect—playing his cards close to his chest—he was the same leader as in the 1970s, and in another respect, too. “He listened to everyone, dialogued with everyone, and then went off to discern the decision,” says Wals. “But when the decision was made, that was it—everyone was expected to fall in behind it.” Those who worked with him testify to his core of steel: once he had decided on a course of action, he couldn’t be influenced, pressured, or distracted: he had deeply absorbed Saint Ignatius’s injunction—age quod agis—to stay focused. Rabbi Skorka says he was a bulldozer. “When he decides something, he puts everything behind it: he opens up a path and baam! he just plows ahead, throwing aside the rocks in his way.”

  This focus and tenacity coexisted in a person of unusual thoughtfulness and sensitivity. Many people’s favorite anecdotes about Cardinal Bergoglio relate to these qualities: the little handwritten note of appreciation, the surprise phone call (introducing himself as “Padre Bergoglio”) on a person’s birthday, the gracious expressions of consideration and empathy. He continued to see the big horizon in the smallest of gestures. As the world later learned, Bergoglio at the end of each month used to cross the Plaza de Mayo to return to the newspaper kiosk owner, Daniel del Regno, the rubber bands he had used to deliver his daily copy of La Nación. “It’s part of your work,” the cardinal told him, when Daniel objected that it wasn’t necessary.36

  Francesca Ambrogetti, who with Sergio Rubín wrote the interview-profile El Jesuita, says that if she had to highlight a single quality, it would be this “attentiveness to the other person, his listening, being sensitive to what the other person needs.” Almost everyone cites his prodigious memory—helped by his notebook and diary—which allowed him to remember what mattered to others. Jorge RouillÓn, religious columnist in La Nación, once asked Bergoglio to pray for him because he had some medical tests coming up. RouillÓn’s tests showed up nothing, and he quickly forgot about it. Three months later, when he ran into the cardinal, Bergoglio asked him: “Can I stop praying for you now?”37

  * * *

  BERGOGLIO lived in an impossible tension, which all bishops face: being an effective leader of a major civil-society institution while remaining an attentive pastor to every individual seeking his help. If Bergoglio came closer than most to succeeding, it was because he had struggled so much with the temptation to “play Tarzan,” as he put it in El Jesuita—to act the omnicompetent executive who was too busy managing his demanding role to see Christ in others.

  At a retreat for the church agency Caritas in 2010, he gave an example of a failure in this regard that had long haunted him. At home as a child a woman called Concepción María Minuto had come two mornings a week to help his mother. She was Sicilian, a widow with children, a hard worker, and was much loved by the family. Later, when the children left home, she got work elsewhere, and Bergoglio heard no more about her. Decades later, around 1980, when he was rector of the Colegio Máximo, he was told that she was at the door to see him. Bergoglio was extremely busy and gave the message for her to come back the next day. She never did.

  A few weeks later, he began to feel intense remorse, and to pray for her. For over twenty-five years the guilt never went away, until a chance meeting of one of his priests with the woman’s son, a taxi driver, allowed him to track her down. In 2006 Concepción, then in her nineties, came with her daughter to see the cardinal. “That day was the happiest of my life,” recalled Bergoglio. He learned from her that she had come to the Máximo that day to say good-bye, because she was going back to Italy, but it hadn’t worked out and she had returned. “Listen, Jorgito,” she told him. “I’m going to die soon and I wanted to give you this.” She handed him a holy medal necklace that he wears to this day. Thereafter they met and spoke often, until she died. “I felt so blessed,” the cardinal told Caritas. “It’s amazing how you do things without realizing, and then the Lord gets you to realize. I had the chance, eventually, after so many years of prayer, to put that right. She gave me so much.”38

  In El Jesuita Bergoglio tells of another time when, as an auxiliary bishop, he was leaving the cathedral to catch a train on his way to give a retreat to nuns, when a young man asked to confess. He told him to wait until the duty priest arrived that afternoon, but as he began to walk away, he felt deep shame and turned back to hear the man’s confession. As it turned out, he still caught the train and made it on time. After the retreat he went to make his own confession, thinking that if he didn’t he would be unable to say Mass the following day. What he confessed, thinks Ambrogetti, was that for a fleeting moment he forgot his mission.39

  That mission was to be—as the former Jesuit general, Father Arrupe, famously put it—a “man for others.” In his last years as cardinal, he became the icon of that notion, the embodiment of a life lived in caritas. The stories of his personal availability and generosity are legion, although most only became known after his election as pope.

  Poirier recalls one remarkable yet not untypical example. The cardinal got to know one of the communist protesters who camped out in the Plaza de Mayo, and learned that he was unable to pay rent on the house where he lived with his wife and children. Says Poirier: “Bergoglio took an interest in the case and told him, ‘I can help you. I can pay your rent for three years, but during those three years you have to promise that you will finish high school, get a job, and send your children to school. That is the deal.’ Apparently he phoned him every weekend to see how his children were doing in school, how he was doing, and if he was fulfilling his side of the bargain. The man eventually graduated, got a job, and was able to pay the rent.”

  Bergoglio at seventy-five was a man of many spiritualities. He remained Ignatian to the core: the Exercises, and his contemplative reading of Scripture—imagining himself in the different characters—fed his homilies, retreats, and of course his daily prayer, including the examen. But he was also imbued with the spirituality of the diocesan clergy, based on the Divine Office—psalms and readings that all clergy must pray—and the daily Eucharist. He prayed the Angelus each day, said fifteen decades of the Rosary, and sat in the chapel for an hour before the Eucharist (Catholics call this Adoration) at the end of the day. At the same time he was inspired and nourished by the so-called new ecclesial movements in the twentieth-century Church, a diverse group of mostly lay-led associations of Catholics focused on a central charism or mission. They were often regarded with suspicion by both religious orders and diocesan bishops, yet Bergoglio praised them as “miracles of new life within the Church.”40

  As well as the Charismatic Renewal, he was especially close to three movements originating in Italy with a presence in Argentina: the Sant’Egidio community, with whom he shared a vision of a Church for the poor, interreligious dialogue, and justice; Focolare, whose call to unity had much in common with the “culture of encounter”; and the Communion and Liberation movement, the works of whose founder, Luigi Giussani, he said had done him good. He prayed to the founder of another important Catholic organization that emerged in the twentieth century, Opus Dei, spending more than thirty minutes in July 2003 in front of Saint Josemaría Escrivá’s tomb in Rome to give thanks for a favor answered.41

  But for heavenly help Bergoglio mostly turned to a trusted threesome. He had a statue of the Virgin
of Luján in the chapel, a statue of a sleeping Saint Joseph in his room, and a picture of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux on his bookshelf. He looked especially to Santa Teresita, as she is known in Spanish, when he was under pressure and worried, confident that this French Carmelite nun was as active from above as she had promised to be in The Story of a Soul. (She died in 1897 at just twenty-four but became world-famous through her posthumous spiritual autobiography.) In Rome, he would always stop at a little Franciscan church close to the Vatican known as La Nunziatina to pray before the statue of Saint Thérèse there.

  “When I have a problem,” Bergoglio told Rubín and Ambrogetti, “I ask the saint, not to solve it, but to take it in her hands and help me accept it. And as a sign, I almost always receive a white rose.” Stefania Falasca recalls Bergoglio telling her in Rome that “one time, when he had to make an important decision about a complex matter, he left it in her hands. Sometime later, an unknown woman placed three white roses at the doorstep of the sacristy.”42 His collaborators in Buenos Aires say this happened often. Bergoglio often found a white rose on his desk—left at the door for him by a stranger—and would say: “So Santa Teresita’s been in, I see.” The anonymous rose-givers tracked him down even when he was away from the curia. Bergoglio’s close collaborator remembers one time being at a meeting with the cardinal at a church on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, when a woman appeared at the church door with a huge bunch of stunning white roses. “Are they for the Virgin?” she asked her. “For the cardinal,” the woman said and, leaving them, vanished.

  Federico Wals’s white rose story is even more dramatic. The cardinal’s head of press used to accompany him to the San Cayetano shrine festival every August 7, a physically grueling day that included a huge outdoor Mass, a major homily on work and unemployment, followed by a ten-block walk down a long line for a three-hour meet-and-greet with God’s holy faithful people. Bergoglio looked forward to it, but when the cardinal came in a car driven by a friend to collect Wals on the icy wet morning of August 7, 2010, he looked awful. He told Wals he hadn’t slept all night from a terrible pain in his leg and none of the analgesics he had swallowed had taken effect. But he had prayed to Santa Teresita, he said, and if God willed, he would make it.

  After the Mass, however, the pain was worse, and the cardinal was limping badly. As he began to walk the ten blocks down the line of thousands of people, shaking hands and exchanging words, his face was wreathed in pain, and Wals was sure he couldn’t go on. At the start of the second block, he sent Wals to ask the car to wait at the next corner. Wals gave the driver the message and returned to keep the cardinal company.

  When we got to the second corner, this big burly guy appears. He must have been about forty; he really was tall—the cardinal is tall, but had to look up. The guy stepped out in front of him, with his arm inside his raincoat, like Napoleon, and in a very rapid movement, he took out a white rose and gave it to him. The cardinal took the rose, looked at him, blessed him, and didn’t say anything. The guy just stood there. So I made to guide the cardinal to the car, and he said to me, “No, no, you don’t get it. This is the message I’ve been waiting for. It will be okay now.” He gave me the rose, and at that moment I looked up at the guy and he had gone. The cardinal said: “This is the presence of Santa Teresita. Tell our car to wait for us at the Vélez soccer pitch. We’re going to make it.” The cardinal carried on, and he was fine, walked the whole ten blocks, feeling no more pain in his leg that day.

  * * *

  IN September 2011, Bergoglio stood down at the conclusion of his six-year term as president of the bishops’ conference, handing the mantle to an ally, Archbishop Arancedo of Santa Fe. Two months later, when he turned seventy-five, he submitted his offer of resignation to the pope, as church law requires bishops to do. The letters are offered nunc pro tunc (“now for later”), for the pope to act on at some point in the future, unless health or some other imperative requires an immediate acceptance. But he could expect his successor to be announced perhaps late in 2012 and installed in early 2013. He knew there was pressure in Rome from the usual quarters to install Héctor Aguer of La Plata as the next primate of Argentina, and that part of the same plan was to get Bergoglio out of the way by naming him head of a Vatican department. This was a fate he dreaded (he joked to Wals about “being taken prisoner in the Vatican”), and he planned to resist. As rumors began to fly, Wals teased him that he had already been named and he was keeping it from them. “Are you crazy?” Bergoglio told him. “They’ll never drag me to Rome. You know I’m going to die in Buenos Aires.” He had a ground-floor room booked in the clergy retirement home on Condarco Street in Flores. Asked what he planned to do there, he said he would “finish the doctoral thesis I never completed, share the home with the other priests, work in Flores. Of course,” he added presciently, “you never know what role God is preparing for you.”43

  In late 2011 he contacted the director of the Claretian publishing house in Buenos Aires that had earlier brought out the anthologies of his homilies and addresses. He told Father Gustavo Larrazábal that he was sorting through his writings in preparation for his retirement, and wanted him to assess which were worth publishing. Over the next year, Claretian brought out a series of collections, culminating in his favorite, a series of forty-eight meditations—many of them from his Jesuit days—published as Mente Abierta, Corazón Creyente (Open Mind, Faithful Heart), a compendium of a lifetime’s wisdom and insight. The mature Bergoglio was still an acute discerner of spirits, an exposer of deceit and false directions, a master retreat-giver who could fire up and send out. But there was now a lyrical gentleness that had been lacking in the younger Bergoglio. Writing, for example, of the exile from Eden of Adam, whom he likened in one meditation to the Prodigal Son, he reached for something close to poetry:

  Even when wandering far from home, the son felt in his bones the unsettling memory of the Father’s house. Although a drifter, the son was gifted with a sense of direction, and, in obedience to that gift, he sought a re-encounter with his truer self. He found space for questioning and sought to correct the direction in which he was heading. He realized the significance of that guiding star within his heart, though he knew not whence it came nor where it led. That is, he prayed—and he prayed for his return. All flesh follows its own paths, and it is precisely in prayer that the meaning of its existence falls into place. It is only in prayer that our heart comes to see clearly where it’s coming “from,” what it’s moving “toward,” and where it presently stands.44

  The final meditations, which concern the triumph of divine power through human failure, bring out more clearly than ever why Bergoglio saw the need to be close to the poor. “Our Catholic elites,” he writes, “miss the point of the Beatitudes, which Jesus proclaimed precisely for those times when we experience failure.… Jesus was speaking mostly about the failures that humble folk experience, since it was to them that he addressed this message, but when our privileged elites hear the same message, they turn up their nose at the thought of failure and are scandalized.”45

  He was seventy-five, and still worked more intensely than most men half his age; but in 2012, as he waited on his fate, people noticed in him a new tiredness. You had to lean in, sometimes, to hear him; and in the cathedral, where the acoustics were anyway a challenge, it was sometimes a strain to make out what he was saying. What weighed on him was a repeat of what he had undergone in the 1980s, when he had been forced powerlessly to watch the undoing of God’s work. The reform of the archdiocese in line with the vision of Aparecida was under way and would need at least another generation to be implemented. But it could all easily be reversed. Wals thinks he was tired by a sense of what might not, now, be achieved. “He had a clear program for the Church from Aparecida but couldn’t implement it without reforming the universal Church.”

  Bergoglio’s theologian assistant at Aparecida, the rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina (UCA), Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, rec
alls meetings at this time in which, looking ahead to Bergoglio retiring, some Argentine bishops together with “some representative of the Holy See” (not, he made clear, the nuncio) felt free now to excoriate Bergoglio. “They criticized him for not being more demanding with the faithful, for not being clearer about priestly identity, for not preaching enough on matters of sexual morality, etc.” Fernández was struck by their confidence that the succession would go their way.

  Bergoglio’s friendship with the then archbishop of Quebec, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, led him to accept Ouellet’s invitation to speak at the 2008 International Eucharistic Congress, the only time, apart from Rome and Aparecida, he was away from Buenos Aires in those years. After Ouellet was made head of the Congregation of Bishops in 2010, Bergoglio could finally have his bishop nominees accepted. A 2012 Argentine press report carried the names of a terna of three archbishops being put forward by Bergoglio and the bishops’ conference; Aguer was not one of them.46

  But the conservative, anti-Bergoglio faction in Rome remained strong, and they continually backed Argentine rigoristi. It had taken the cardinal eighteen months to get Fernández officially sworn in as rector of the UCA, for example, because some conservative groups in Argentina had raised question marks over the rector’s orthodoxy. Yet when Bergoglio arranged for Fernández to respond to the claims in Rome, the rector was continually rebuffed: after having appointments rescheduled, Fernández would turn up in Rome to be told that they had no record of the appointment, and subsequent attempts to book an appointment were met with silence. Bergoglio urged Fernández to be patient, but the cardinal himself was furious: this arrogance was symptomatic of a Curia that stifled, rather than served, the local Church.47