Our secret Italian diarist suspected that “the realistic objective of the minority group that wants to support Bergoglio is to create a deadlock, which leads to the withdrawal of the Ratzinger nomination.” He also was not even sure if the Argentinian would accept the papacy, having watched him place his vote beneath the looming fresco of Christ: “He had his gaze fixed on the image of Jesus, judging souls at the end of time. His face, suffering, as if pleading: ‘God, please don’t do this to me.’”
THE SECOND AND THIRD BALLOTS
On the morning of Tuesday, April 19, the cardinals were woken at 6:30, attended mass at 7:30, and began the second round of voting at 9:30. When the results came in, it was clear that the previous evening’s discussions had been persuasive, and firm alliances were now being made.
Cardinal Ratzinger was still in the lead, having gained eighteen votes—six from Ruini and twelve from the other unnamed candidates—but he remained twelve votes shy of the total required to win. Sodano’s four supporters were not yet ready to concede, and neither were Tettamanzi’s two voters. The biggest gain of all came to Bergoglio, who received a staggering twenty-five more votes—nine from Martini, three from Maradiaga, and thirteen from new supporters—taking his total to thirty-five.
Despite this impressive leap, Ratzinger’s lead was strong enough for it now to be impossible for another cardinal to win unless a large number of voters deserted him. But the anonymous cardinal’s prediction about Ratzinger’s opponents wishing to create a deadlock was just four votes off fruition if Bergoglio were to receive the necessary one-third plus a vote total of thirty-nine in the next round. As titillating as this prospect might be, it was highly unlikely that the cardinals would let it get that far, for fear of damaging the reputation of the church with a hung conclave.
So as not to lose momentum, it was customary to proceed immediately to another ballot before announcing the results, so the cardinals voted a third time, at 11 A.M. Ambiguously gray smoke rose from the chimney just before noon, but no bells chimed, so the crowds understood there was still no pope.
The results of the third ballot showed that the election was now a two-horse race. Ratzinger’s increase of seven votes meant he needed only five more to secure the Chair of St. Peter, but with just three open voters remaining and Bergoglio’s increase of five, it was impossible for him to do so unless some of the Argentine’s supporters changed allegiance to him.
The break for lunch couldn’t have come at a more decisive moment. While the world waited, the cardinals were bused back to their hotel to quietly thrash out the results at their favorite boardroom: the dinner table. Ratzinger was described as being “the picture of calm,” while those around him scrabbled for stray votes to seal the deal. According to the diarist, Cardinal Martini had begun speculating that if the deadlock continued, then a change of candidates would be inevitable the following day and the process would have to start afresh. It was a prospect that few but Martini would relish.
THE FOURTH BALLOT
The time for conversations and campaigning over, the cardinals returned to the Sistine Chapel. When the afternoon’s voting began, the newspapers were speculating that Ratzinger was struggling to reach a convincing majority. To the electors voting inside the chapel, however, the feeling was that the race had finally been won.
At 5:30 P.M., almost twenty-four-hours exactly since the conclave began—making it one of the fastest elections in history—the votes were tallied and read aloud. Although most cardinals, including Ratzinger himself, had been keeping score themselves, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor recalled that when the elusive seventy-seventh vote was reached, “there was sort of a gasp all around, and then everyone clapped.”
Tears of joy flowed freely among Ratzinger’s supporters.
And the happiest guy in the room? Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
Over the following days, while Benedict was settling into his new role, the cardinals who were resident outside the city began to depart Rome for their respective dioceses. Many were leaving with feelings of surprise that the conclave had ended so quickly, and many were leaving with a huge sense of relief that it had, none more so than Cardinal Bergoglio. He could not wait to return home from the unexpected chaos of the conclave to his familiar streets of Buenos Aires.
At sixty-eight, Bergoglio would be eligible for retirement in just over six years, and he had even decided where he would like to spend his final days: back at the humble priests’ house he had lived in for five years when he was vicar general of the parish of Flores in Buenos Aires between 1993 and 1998. All he needed was a simple room, preferably on the bottom floor, as he didn’t “want to be above anybody else.”
2
FRANCIS
After the election of Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, a biography of Cardinal Bergoglio would have been of mild interest to the world’s conclave watchers. Who was this mysterious Argentinian who had almost beaten the favorite to the title of pope? But there was nothing. Diligent Catholics might have found a solitary copy of Meditations for the Religious (1982), Reflections of Hope (1992), or Putting the Motherland on One’s Shoulders (2003) in a very well-stocked library, but these books were by the man, not about him. Bergoglio had never worked in Rome, so the usual Vatican gossip channels proved fruitless; nor did he come from a country with a strong voice in global Catholic debate. So who was he?
Born in the central district of Flores, Buenos Aires, on December 17, 1936, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the eldest of the five children of Regina María Sívori (1911–1981) and Mario José Bergoglio (1908–1959). Regina was the daughter of immigrants from Genoa-Piedmont, and Mario had arrived in Argentina from Piedmont with his parents in 1929. They met at mass in 1934 and married the following year. Jorge later recalled, “My strongest childhood memory is that life shared between my parents’ house and my grandparents’ house. The first part of my childhood, from the age of one, I spent with my grandmother.” This was Mario’s mother, Nonna Rosa. Biographer Austen Ivereigh, who interviewed Francis at length following his election as pope, described her as “the single greatest childhood influence” and “a formidable woman of deep faith and political skill, with whom he spent most of his first five years.”
Rosa and her husband, Giovanni, having decided to leave their home in an impoverished Italy controlled by the totalitarian government of Benito Mussolini, had originally bought tickets for the family to sail to Argentina aboard the illustrious Principessa Mafalda in 1927. But they were not the only family in the region fearful of the rise of fascism and planning their escape. So great was the number of hopeful émigrés that the Piedmont housing market crashed and prices plummeted, preventing the couple from selling off properties and forcing them to sit tight and wait for the situation to recover. Little did they know how lucky they were. On October 11, 1927, the once-great vessel set sail from Genoa for Buenos Aires. After nine years of ocean crossings, the crumbling ship began to sink off the coast of Brazil. It was chaos. Crew were alleged to have disembarked first in some of the only seaworthy lifeboats, leaving terrified passengers to scramble for what was left as rescue vessels watched on, fearful the ship might explode. A total of 1,252 passengers were saved, but 314 perished in the shark-infested waters.
Grateful for their miracle escape, Giovanni and Rosa eventually managed to sell their properties and arrived in Argentina fourteen months later. According to Paul Vallely’s biography Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, “family legend has it [Rosa] came down the gangplank of the steamship Giulio Cesare on a sweltering morning wearing a full-length fox fur, not because she had failed to appreciate that she would be arriving in the southern hemisphere where January would be high summer, but because sewn into its lining was the entire proceeds of the sale of the family’s home and café back in Piedmont.” This shrewd move enabled Rosa and Giovanni to support themselves during the subsequent economic crash of 1929 and a military coup that put an end to seventy years of civilian constitutional government in 1930.
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By the time Jorge was born, life in Buenos Aires was tough for both his parents and grandparents, but his grandmother Rosa’s stoic nature brought richness amid the poverty. She taught him how to pray; told him stories about Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints; and imbued in him a religious tolerance. His parents had developed a more puritanical outlook. Bergoglio later recalled, “If someone close to the family divorced or separated, they could not enter your house, and they believed all Protestants were going to hell.” Rosa, on the other hand, taught him “the wisdom of true religion,” whereby non-Catholics doing good deeds were still loved by God. She had had firsthand experience of the toxicity of intolerance back in Italy during the 1920s and had been a vocal campaigner for Catholic Action, a European movement that fought against anticlericalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rosa regularly stood on soapboxes in the streets denouncing Mussolini—who was known as mangiaprete, or “priest-eater,” in his youth—and his fascist government’s harassment and curtailment of the Catholic Church.
Rosa believed strongly in education and had encouraged her son Mario to study for a degree in accountancy back in Italy. His qualifications were not recognized in Argentina, however, and he was able to secure only poorly paid work as a bookkeeper in a factory. So while Regina was tending to her youngest children and Mario was out at work, young Jorge began his own education. During the days he spent with his grandmother, he learned Italian—Rosa and Giovanni still conversed mostly in a Piedmontese dialect, while their son and daughter-in-law spoke Spanish at home—and was introduced to poetry and literature. Bergoglio later said that his grandparents “loved all of my siblings, but I had the privilege of understanding the language of their memories,” and this widened his perspective to include a world outside of his own.
The Bergoglios worked hard to provide a stable and loving home for their five children, and Mario frequently took on multiple jobs to keep their heads above water. Despite their hardships, the children’s memories from this time were happy ones. María Elena, Jorge’s younger sister, felt they “were poor with dignity” and described her father as “always a joyful man.… He never got angry. And he never hit us.… He was so in love with Mama, and he always brought her presents.” The family was also bound together by faith, and when Mario returned from work each night, he would lead them in prayer around the table. Weekends consisted of Saturday mornings at home playing cards until, at two o’clock sharp, they would gather around the phonograph and listen to their parents’ beloved Italian operas; Sundays the family went to mass. After the birth of her fifth and final child, Regina was partially paralyzed for several years, but Bergoglio recalled that even then, “when we got home from school during that time, she would be sitting down peeling potatoes, with all of the ingredients ready. She told us how we should mix them together and cook them, for we had no idea what we were doing: ‘Now put this in the pot, put that in the pan…’ she would tell us. This is how we learned to cook.”
Outside of the home, Jorge enjoyed football with his neighborhood friends and inherited his father’s devotion to their local team, San Lorenzo, which he has carried with him to this day. In true Argentinian style, he also was fond of the tango and was said to dance it very well. Most friends from this time, however, remember him as a particularly studious boy, “always with his nose in a text.” The young Bergoglio did well at primary school and seems not to have been affected by turbulent politics within Argentina and the global disasters of the Second World War. As it had during the first war, the country remained neutral and resisted American pressure to join the Allied nations but still was perceived to have strong sympathies with the Axis powers, due in part to its large German immigrant population. When the government began to look as if it might bow under the pressure of international isolation from Allied nations, a breakaway faction of the military—including the fiery nationalist Colonel Juan Domingo Perón—stepped in to remove the president.
By 1945, Perón, alongside his soon-to-be second wife, the twenty-six-year-old actress and radio presenter Eva “Evita” Duarte, was serving as vice president, secretary of war, and, perhaps most crucially, minister of labor in that government. His support for labor unions and the introduction of Argentina’s first system of national insurance made him hugely popular among the marginalized poor. So popular, in fact, that after the war ended, he was arrested by colleagues who had grown fearful of the powerful support he commanded. Mass protests in the streets, however, forced them to release him. The people had spoken. Five months later, on February 24, 1946, he was elected president.
In 1949, with Regina still paralyzed, and while Rosa was caring for the two youngest Bergoglio children, Alberto and María Elena, it was decided that twelve-year-old Jorge and his other two younger siblings, Marta and Oscar, should be sent to boarding school for a year to alleviate the pressure on their mother. Don Enrico Pozzoli, the family’s priest, found the boys, Jorge and Oscar, places at a Salesian-run school called Wilfrid Barón de los Santos Ángeles. The Salesians of Don Bosco were founded in 1859 by Saint John Bosco with the simple mission to “be a friend to young people who were poor, abandoned or at risk, and in doing so be a friend to Christ.” In a letter dated October 20, 1990, Father Bergoglio detailed how the year spent at the school had shaped him:
I learned to study in the school. The hours of study, in silence, created a habit of concentration, of a quite strong control of dispersion.… Sport was an essential aspect of life. One played well and a lot.… In study, as in sport, the dimension of competition had certain importance: we were taught to compete well and to compete as Christians.… A dimension that grew a lot in the subsequent years to the one spent in the school was my capacity to feel good: and I realized that the base was set the year of boarding school.… They educated my sentiment there.… I am not referring to “sentimentalism” but to “sentiment” as a value of the heart. Not to be afraid and to say to oneself what one is feeling.
All these things configured a Catholic culture. They prepared me well for secondary school and for life. Never (in so far as I remember) was a truth negotiated. The most typical case was that of sin. The sense of sin is part of the Catholic culture … and what I brought home in that sense was reinforced, took shape. One could then play the rebel, the atheist … but imprinted deep down was the sense of sin: a truth that could not be thrown out, to make everything easier.
When this formative year came to an end, Jorge returned home for the summer before he enrolled in secondary school at the Escuala Nacional de Educación Técnica, with a view to gaining a diploma as a chemical technician. Happily reunited with his old friends from the neighborhood, it soon became apparent that one relationship in particular had begun to develop in a new and different way.
In true humble style, Jorge Mario Bergoglio fell in love with the girl next door. Well, four doors down, and it was as innocent a childhood romance as one could have asked for from a man who would many years later become pope. Amalia Damonte and Jorge Bergoglio, both the children of Piedmontese immigrants, had grown up together, and that summer, she later recalled, they “mostly played on the sidewalks or in the parks in the area” and before long “started to spend all our afternoons together.” Jorge, she remembered, “always liked to joke” but was definitely a “gentleman.” But there was a complication. That his impactful school year with the Salesians seems to have coincided with his first inklings that he might be considering joining the priesthood was revealed in a somewhat unconventional way. He wrote Amalia a letter in which he drew a white house with a red roof and explained that it was the house he would buy her when they were married. However, so as not to look too confident, and to let her know he had options, he clarified that “if you don’t marry me, I’m going to become a priest.”
Unfortunately, when Amalia’s horrified parents discovered the letter, her father beat her because she “had dared to write a note to a boy.” The Damontes were traditional Catholics, with what their daughter d
escribed as “good principles” that held that the children “were still too young for love.” Amalia described later how she “never saw him after that—my parents kept me away from him and did everything possible to separate us.”
And with that, the romance was over. And of course, Jorge Bergoglio did go on to become a priest.
When the summer was drawing to an end, Jorge began preparing for life at his new secondary school, albeit with a slightly broken heart. After his brush with love, he stepped firmly toward a life filled with greater responsibility. Mario informed his son that because the school day lasted from 2 P.M. until 8 P.M., the time had come for him to begin working: he had secured Jorge a position as a cleaner at the hosiery factory where he worked, from 7 A.M. until 1 P.M. Jorge dutifully agreed and put his priestly ambitions back on the shelf for the time being. Over the next two years he cleaned the factory every day before school; this was followed by a year helping with administrative tasks, then taking a job in a food chemistry laboratory.
In a 2010 biography entitled El Jesuita, Bergoglio told interviewers, “I’m so grateful to my father for making me work. The work I did was one of the best things I’ve done in my life. In particular, in the laboratory I got to see the good and bad of all human endeavor.” It was in this role that he encountered another of the strong female role models who were to have considerable impact on his life and outlook. Her tragic death, several years later, also left a deep mark on him.
Described as “an extraordinary boss,” thirty-two-year-old Esther Ballestrino de Careaga was an exceptionally bright young woman. She was born in Uruguay and spent her youth in Paraguay. After achieving a doctorate in biochemistry, she had become a founding member of Paraguay’s first feminist movement, but her outspoken communist sympathies became too dangerous under the ruling military junta, and she felt forced to leave the country for the safety of Argentina in 1947.
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