At the laboratory, she educated Jorge in the diligence, patience, and thoroughness required in scientific experimentation, and taught him “the seriousness of hard work,” as he described it, but with good humor and only a bit of gentle chiding.
Bergoglio’s grief at Ballestrino’s death was connected to a great many aspects of his life. She had not only taught him the foundations of good practice and science but had also educated him in politics outside of religion. Following the example set for him by the other strong woman in his life, Nonna Rosa, he accepted her views without judgment.
During the years they spent working together in the laboratory, Esther had read him passages from Communist Party texts and given him books to read on his own. He later recalled that learning about communism “through a courageous and honest person was helpful. I realized a few things, an aspect of the social, which I then found in the social doctrine of the Church.” The passionate way in which Esther had spoken to him galvanized in him an interest in widening his understanding through further reading, and he described how “there was a period where I would wait anxiously for the newspaper La Vanguardia, which was not allowed to be sold with the other newspapers and was brought to us by the socialist militants.”
Bergoglio’s fond and happy memories of this time are marked, however, by a brutal aftermath. Having fled one military dictatorship in Paraguay, Ballestrino had lived under three further juntas in the thirty-two years she had been in Argentina, but it was the fourth coup, of 1976, that would prove to be the most barbaric in the country’s history. Outspoken people began vanishing and were soon ominously named the “Disappeared.” Following the abduction and torture of her pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter and her son-in-law, Esther joined forces with others and founded a protest group called Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. In spite of a ban on public gatherings of more than three people, the women would gather on Thursdays outside the presidential palace in the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, to demand information about their missing loved ones. Their pleas fell on deaf ears.
Even after her daughter was released after four months, in September 1977, Esther continued to campaign for the Mothers. Unbeknown to them, however, the group had been infiltrated by twenty-five-year-old Alfredo Astiz, a naval intelligence captain nicknamed the “Blond Angel of Death” on account of his fair hair and murderous nature, who was posing as the brother of a missing young man. On December 8, 1977, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo published a newspaper advertisement listing the names of their “disappeared” children, in an attempt to pressure the government for answers. Their bravery was extraordinary, but such outspokenness was not tolerated. That night, Astiz arranged for Ballestrino, along with two other founding members of the Mothers and two Franciscan nuns who had been supporting them, to be abducted and taken to the Navy School of Mechanics, which the junta was using as a detention center. It is not known how many days the women were savagely tortured, but on December 20, 1977, the body of Esther Ballestrino, along with those of her two friends, washed ashore near the beach resort of Santa Teresita, just south of Buenos Aires. They had been bundled onto a so-called “death flight” (hands and feet bound to ensure they could not fight or swim), drugged, and then rolled out the rear cargo door of a plane high above the sea. Esther was fifty-nine years old.
It was nearly three decades before forensic anthropologists began exhuming the bodies of those murdered and buried in mass graves during Argentina’s bloody military dictatorship, known as the Dirty War (1976–83). When DNA tests confirmed the women’s identities in 2005, Esther’s family requested permission from the now Cardinal Bergoglio to bury their remains in the gardens of Santa Cruz Church because, as her daughter explained to him, “it was the last place they had been as free people.” It had been almost thirty years, but still he shook with emotion upon hearing the fate of his friend and mentor.
Bergoglio had last seen Esther one evening shortly before she disappeared. In an interview with Argentinian journalist Uki Goni, her daughter Ana María recounted how her mother had telephoned her old friend to ask him come to their house and administer the last rites to a dying relative. This was a strange request, given that the family was not religious. Upon arrival, Bergoglio learned that no one was dying but that the family was fearful that their phones were being bugged and the house would soon be raided. Their bookshelves were full of works on philosophy and Marxism that were tantamount to a death sentence should they be discovered, so they asked Father Bergoglio if he would smuggle them out and hold them for safekeeping. The risk of discovery was acute, but he accepted.
“THEY WERE WAITING FOR ME”
Long days of morning work and afternoon lessons meant the years at secondary school passed swiftly for Jorge Bergoglio. The studious young boy had become a fiercely intelligent young man who astonished his fellow students with his impressive aptitude for learning and ability to absorb information instantaneously. Friend and classmate Hugo Morelli recalled how his “truly enviable intelligence was honestly far above ours. He was always many steps ahead of us.” But he was never arrogant, said Oscar Crespo, another of his contemporaries: “He supported us all the time if we had problems with any of the subjects; he always offered to assist.”
Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, what stood out most was Bergoglio’s deep and unshakable faith, which developed in intensity during this time. One old friend described him as “militantly religious.” In fact, his first moment of awaking to God came quite unexpectedly, while he was on his way to celebrate his school’s Day of the Student.
It was September 21, 1953, the first day of spring. The morning was crisp and dark, even at 9 A.M. Jorge, now almost seventeen, was walking down the street past his family church, San José de Flores, when he was overwhelmed by the sudden need to go to confession. When later attempting to describe the moment in Austen Ivereigh’s biography of him, Bergoglio still struggled to quantify his feelings but explained:
I went in, I felt I had to go in—those things you feel inside and you don’t know what they are.… I saw a priest walking, I didn’t know him, he wasn’t one of the parish clergy. And he sits down in one of the confessionals.… I don’t quite know what happened next, I felt like someone grabbed me from inside and took me to the confessional. Obviously I told him my things, I confessed … but I don’t know what happened.
When I had finished my confession I asked the priest where he was from because I didn’t know him and he told me: “I’m from Corrientes and I’m living here close by, in the priests’ home. I come to celebrate Mass here now and then.” He had cancer—leukemia—and died the following year.
Right there I knew I had to be a priest; I was totally certain. Instead of going out with the others I went back home because I was overwhelmed. Afterward I carried on at school and with everything, but knowing that was where I was headed.
In this moment, Bergoglio later felt he had been caught completely off guard. Yes, he had toyed with the idea, as many devout young Catholics do at some point, but in another interview, with biographers Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, he explained, “It was the surprise, the astonishment of a chance encounter. I realized that they were waiting for me. That is the religious experience: the astonishment of meeting someone who has been waiting for you all along. From that moment on, for me, God is the One who te primera—‘springs it on you.’ You search for Him, but He searches for you first. You want to find Him, but He finds you first.”
Although he had found what he hadn’t even realized he was looking for, the magnitude of this calling drew him into a long period of what he called “passive solitude.” He confided in no one until a year later. With his secondary education almost complete, and as fellow classmates were excitedly planning their careers as doctors and scientists, he finally revealed to Oscar Crespo, who worked alongside him in the laboratory, what he intended to do: “I’m going to finish secondary school with you guys, but I’m not going to be a chemist, I’m going to be a priest. But I�
��m not going to be a priest in a basilica. I’m going to be a Jesuit, because I’m going to want to go out to the neighborhoods, to the villas, to be with people.”
The Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, as they are more commonly known, was founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1534 and is currently the largest male religious order within the Catholic Church. Its members, often thought of as God’s soldiers or God’s marines, take solemn vows of perpetual poverty, obedience, and chastity, dedicating themselves to the propagation of the faith through preaching and ministering the word of God, and works of charity, especially through teaching the young and uninstructed, and through spiritual direction of souls. While they are renowned for their evangelism and obedience, the Jesuits’ commitment to social justice has recently seen them placed firmly in the liberal wing of the Church, and they have sometimes expressed more rebellious views than their history would lead one to expect.
This desire to dedicate himself to social justice, intertwined with his strong political conscience, left Bergoglio with a tremendous amount to contemplate. He was seventeen, and his thoughts, as he explained, “were not focused only on religious matters. I also had political concerns … I had a political restlessness.” In the latter years of Perón’s second term (1951–55), Argentina been suffering from a progressive economic downturn, which Austen Ivereigh argues caused Perón to become “defensive and paranoid,” eventually “descending into the authoritarian madness that commonly afflicts populist-nationalist governments in Latin America, whether of the right or left.” Relations between the church and state deteriorated, and the Vatican became more forceful in its opposition to Perón by instigating a greater political involvement than ever before.
On November 10, 1954, following the creation of the Christian Democratic Party in July of that year, tensions boiled over when Perón launched a searing attack on the church’s interference in labor unions and politics. A number of priests labeled subversive were subsequently arrested, and the government began implementing laws “aimed at restricting the Church and flouting its moral concerns, legalizing divorce and prostitution, banning religious education from schools, and derogating tax exemptions to religious institutions.” Catholics were outraged, and Jorge Bergoglio, like Nonna Rosa before him, decided to join Catholic Action and defend the church’s position in Argentine society. Following the execution of Perón’s ban on religious instruction and iconography in public schools in April 1955, and the expulsion of two priests critical of his government to Rome, tensions boiled over and people took to the streets. On June 11 the traditional Corpus Christi procession became a defiant show of protest by over a quarter of a million people, including Bergoglio, silently walking behind papal and Argentine flags.
The Vatican excommunicated Perón on June 16, and government loyalists held protests in Plaza de Mayo to denounce the alleged burning of the national flag during the Corpus Christi procession five days earlier. While church and state were fighting it out publicly on the streets and in official decrees, the military launched an abortive coup attempt in which bombing raids on the square killed 364 civilians and wounded more than eight hundred. Perón survived, and his supporters retaliated by burning sixteen churches across the city. The military retreated to lick its wounds before regrouping under the leadership of the devoutly Catholic general Eduardo Lonardi, who successfully deposed Perón three months later in the Revolución Libertadora (Liberating Revolution). In the two months that followed, Perón and his supporters were forced into exile, and order was restored.
Swept up in the political turmoil of the period, Bergoglio put his ambitions of priesthood on hold, and he expressed an interest in pursuing a career in medicine, much to the delight of his parents. Regina, in particular, was thrilled at the prospect of having a doctor in the family and, following her son’s graduation in 1955, cleaned out the attic to create a quiet place for him to work. Having assumed that the hours Jorge was spending up there were consumed with all things medical, she was shocked to discover textbooks primarily in Latin and all concerning theology.
Confronted with his mother’s confusion—“You said you were studying medicine”—Bergoglio simply replied, “I didn’t lie to you. I’m studying medicine—but medicine of the soul.” But this response did nothing to alleviate her fears, and she insisted he remain at university and complete his degree before deciding on his future path. Bergoglio recalled later, “Since I saw where the conflict was heading, I went to see Fr. Pozzoli and told him everything. He examined my vocation. He told me to pray, to leave everything in the hands of God and gave me the blessing of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.” He considered the advice of his priest and decided to raise the subject with his father. “I definitely knew my father was going to understand me better. His mother was a very strong religious role model for him, and he had inherited that religiousness, that fortitude, as well as the great pain that comes from being uprooted,” he recalled. Bergoglio’s sentiment was sincere, but it was also a tactical move. Well aware that his parents would ask their priest for guidance on the subject—for it was he who had baptized their son nineteen years earlier—he waited to declare his intentions until the day of their twentieth wedding anniversary, when the family had arranged a celebratory breakfast following the commemorative mass that Don Enrico Pozzoli was holding for them. Mario suggested, “Why don’t we go ask Fr. Pozzoli?” And Bergoglio remembers, “And I, with my best straight face, said yes. I still remember the scene. It was December 12, 1955.”
When the question of his desire to enter the seminary eventually arose over breakfast, Don Enrico handled it sensitively:
Fr. Pozzoli said that yes, university was good, but things have to be taken up when God wants them taken up … and he began talking about different vocations (without taking sides), and finally spoke about his own. He said how a priest had suggested he become a priest, and how in a very few years he became a subdeacon, then deacon and priest.… Well, by this stage my parents had already softened their heart. Of course Fr. Pozzoli did not finish up by telling them to let me go to the Seminary nor did he demand a decision … Simply let them see that they should soften, and they did … and the rest followed on. It was typical of him.
Regina, however, agreed reluctantly. She felt it was all happening too quickly and that a decision of such magnitude required much greater time and consideration. Bergoglio later admitted that his mother was “extremely upset” that her eldest child was to leave the family and considered it “a plundering.” She was so distressed that she even “refused” to accompany her son when he entered the San Miguel seminary in March of the following year.
It is interesting that in all the interviews with Jorge Bergoglio throughout his life, he happily regales biographers and journalists with stories of his kind and loving grandmother Rosa, who, upon hearing of his news, exclaimed with joy, “Well, if God is calling you, blessed be.” And he always speaks with deep respect and gratitude of his courageous and passionate mentor Esther: “I loved her very much.” But there are no equivalent accounts of his mother. Being denied her support at this most significant moment of his life cast a shadow over what should have been a joyful announcement, especially since the resentment persisted even when he began his life at the seminary.
It was four long years before Regina visited her son, by which time he was a Jesuit novice in Córdoba, Argentina, the Spanish colonial city four hundred miles from Buenos Aires. He would not feel her true acceptance until she knelt before him and asked for his blessing following his ordination as a priest on December 13, 1969. It was fourteen years and one day since the anniversary breakfast conversation with Father Pozzoli.
ENTERING THE SOCIETY OF JESUS
Life in the Diocesan Seminary of Villa Devoto in San Miguel suited Bergoglio very well. He was affectionately nicknamed El Gringo by his friends, on account of his perceived lack of Latin looks, and described himself as “a normal guy, happy in life.” Once again he excelled in class and impressed fellow students with his int
elligence and aptitude for learning. Days were filled with a variety of activities ranging from study to mass to communal prayer, and leisure primarily revolving around football.
It’s easy to paint a picture of a young man who had finally found his calling and was happily on his way to becoming a priest, but Bergoglio admitted in a 2010 interview with Rabbi Abraham Skorka for the book On Heaven and Earth that it was not always a simple choice for him. He was a young man considering a way of life that requires the disciple to relinquish all forms of physical interaction just at the time in his life when he would naturally begin to explore this: “We are so weak that there is always a temptation to be contradictory. One wants to have his cake and eat it too, he wants the good things from the consecrated life and from the lay life. Before entering the seminary, I was on that path.”
Bergoglio was also a late starter, as it were, in joining the seminary at twenty-one, and admitted that at times his resolve was greatly tested:
When I was a seminarian, I was enchanted by a young woman at my uncle’s wedding. I was surprised by her beauty, the clarity of her intellect … and, well, I kicked the idea around for a while. When I returned to the seminary after the wedding, I could not pray during the entire week because when I prepared to pray, the woman appeared in my mind. I had to go back to thinking about what I was doing. I was still free because I was only a seminarian, I could have gone back home and said see you later. I had to think about my choice again. I chose once again—or allowed myself to be chosen for—the religious path. It would be abnormal for these types of things not to happen.
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