When they do happen, one has to rediscover his place.
Once he began his second year, however, Bergoglio had made his decision, explaining that “when one cultivates the choice for the religious life, he finds strength in that direction.” Buoyed by the conviction that he had chosen the right path, he also followed through on the promise he’d made to Oscar Crespo at the laboratory four years earlier and decided to apply to join the Society of Jesus. Later, when asked why he became a Jesuit priest, Bergoglio explained: “To tell the truth, I didn’t know which path to take. What was clear to me was my religious vocation.… I ultimately entered the Society of Jesus because I was attracted to its position on, to put it in military terms, the front lines of the Church, grounded in obedience and discipline. It was also due to its focus on missionary works.”
In August 1957, before he had applied to join the Jesuits, he was struck down by an infection. Delirious with fever and struggling to breathe, he was rushed to the hospital. Doctors diagnosed him with severe pneumonia and immediately operated to remove three pulmonary cysts and excise the upper section of his right lung. Two of the seminarians who had accompanied him to the hospital donated blood in person-to-person transfusions. The superior of the seminary, Fr. Humberto Bellone, stayed with him throughout and later recalled, “When he first got ill, he was in such a bad way that I thought he was going to die.”
Thankfully, the surgery was a success. After spending several days in an oxygen tent, Bergoglio had a chest tube inserted—bear in mind, this was in 1957—and “every day, saline was pumped through his body to clean out his pleura and scar tissue.” It was agony. Family and friends visited him daily, offering the usual bedside reassurances about how he would recover in no time and how wonderful it would be when he got home, but nothing permeated the pain until Sister Dolores, the nun who had prepared him for his First Communion, “said something that truly stuck with me and made me feel at peace: ‘You are imitating Christ.’”
Those words gave him a whole new perspective on pain, life, and faith. Years later he explained that “pain is not a virtue in itself, but you can be virtuous in the way you bear it. Our life’s vocation is fulfillment and happiness, and pain is a limitation in that search.… Any attempt to cope with pain will bring partial results, if it is not based in transcendence. It is a gift to understand and fully live through pain. Even more: to live life fulfilled is a gift.”
Blessed by these “gifts” and his newly developed strength of resolve, Jorge Mario Bergoglio entered the Society of Jesus on March 11, 1958.
Traditionally, it takes fifteen years to become a Jesuit. Bergoglio completed the process in thirteen: “Two years’ novitiate, a year’s juniorate (university-level humanities), three years’ philosophy, three years’ school teaching, three years’ theology, and a year’s tertianship.” As a member of an order famed for its missionary zeal and global presence, and that requires its candidates to move around during the course of their studies, Bergoglio was exceptional inasmuch as he never particularly enjoyed traveling. A self-described “homebody,” he confessed, “I love my home. I love Buenos Aires.… After a while [abroad], I always wanted to come back.” Apart from his juniorate, which he studied in Chile, and his tertianship, which was completed in Spain, he spent the rest of his training, or “formation,” in the Argentine cities of Córdoba, Santa Fe, and Buenos Aires.
Bergoglio was deemed ready to take the Jesuit vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on March 12, 1960. He then transferred to Casa Loyola, the Jesuit teaching institute just outside the Chilean capital of Santiago, where he spent a year completing his juniorate. The structure was less rigid than it was during his two years as a novitiate, and the Casa Loyola estate was opulent, surrounded by large ancient orchards, farmland, vineyards, and kitchen gardens. But the young candidates’ lives remained simple and monastic in style, in accordance with their vows. The bedrooms were sparse, newspapers and the radio were prohibited, and hot-water showers were available only twice a week. Classical music, however, was encouraged, and the rich landscape provided endless opportunities to relax in the fresh mountain air. Bergoglio, still not wholly recovered from his lung operation, was unable to participate in sports, or go hiking or camping, but he was especially fond of swimming in the surrounding rivers and lakes during the brief periods of recreational time afforded to him.
The days were largely well structured. After rising at 6 A.M., candidates would spend an hour in meditative prayer, followed by mass at seven thirty, breakfast at eight, and then housework until lessons began at nine. Predominantly focused around an intense study of the humanities, classes would last until 1 P.M., when candidates would break for a lunch—customarily, all meals were taken in silence and candidates would serve their own food and wash their own dishes. Class would resume at 2:30 P.M. and last until 8 P.M. Bergoglio’s reputation as a quiet, intellectual, and thoughtful young man remained unchanged, but for him the greatest fulfillment came on the weekends, when he and his fellow candidates traveled to neighboring villages to teach and help the poor. Having cited his desire to “go out to the neighborhoods, to the villas, to be with people” when first discussing his vocation with Oscar Crespo, Bergoglio was deeply moved by the poverty of the Chilean people. In a letter to his eleven-year-old sister, María Elena, on May 5, 1960, he wrote:
The boys and girls are very poor, some even come to school without shoes on their feet, and very often they have nothing to eat and in the winter they feel the harshness of the cold. You don’t know what that’s like because you’ve never wanted for food and when you’re cold you just get close to the stove. But while you’re happy, there are many children who are crying. When you sit at the table there are many who don’t have more than a piece of bread to eat, and when it rains and it’s cold many of them are living in tin shacks and they have nothing to cover themselves with.
Poverty of this kind was shocking to the twenty-three-year-old Bergoglio, who had never traveled farther than the streets of Buenos Aires, and only increased his desire to dedicate his life to social justice.
After completing the yearlong juniorate, he returned to Argentina in March 1961 and began his studies in philosophy at the prestigious Jesuit Colegio Máximo de San José in San Miguel, a city in the northwest of Buenos Aires Province. In his absence, the three-year reign of the democratically elected left-wing government of Arturo Frondizi had shown signs of cracking. The continued suppression of Peronism, coupled with the kidnapping in Argentina of the Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann in May 1960, had led to an emergence of far-right guerilla groups with links to other exiled Nazis, who began a campaign of anti-Semitic violence and bombing across the country.
For Bergoglio, however, the political turmoil was little match for the personal upheaval he was about to encounter. On September 24, 1961, his father, Mario Bergoglio, was watching his beloved San Lorenzo play football at the stadium in Flores with his youngest son, Alberto, when he suffered a heart attack and died. He was just fifty-one. Despite all his training, Jorge Bergoglio found himself completely at a loss as to how to deal with grief and death. In a letter he wrote to Fr. Cayetano Bruno twenty-nine years later, he described a moment of great shame that had haunted him throughout his life: “Fr. Pozzoli came to the funeral parlour and wanted to take a photo of dad with the five children.… I was ashamed, and with all the superior pride of a young man I saw that it did not happen. I think Fr. Pozzoli saw my stance but he said nothing.”
The awkwardness of that occasion was compounded by another tragedy less than a month later, when Father Pozzoli himself died. Bergoglio had now lost his spiritual father as well. This was the man who had baptized him, who had listened to his confessions, and who had supported and facilitated his desire to become a priest. Again, Bergoglio felt himself unequal to the moment. When Bergoglio heard that Pozzoli was gravely ill in the hospital, he visited but found him sleeping:
I did not want to wake him (I felt bad deep down, and did not know what I would
say to him). I left the room and stopped to talk with a priest who was there. After a moment, another priest came out of the room and told me that Fr. Pozzoli was awake, that they told him about my visit, and he asked if I was still there to come. I told them to tell him I had gone. I don’t know what came over me, if I was timid or … I was 25 years old and already in 1st year philosophy … but I can assure you … that if I could have this moment back again, I would do so. How often I have felt deep sorrow and pain for this “lie” of mine to Fr. Pozzoli at the time of his death. There are moments in life (perhaps a few) when one would like to be able to relive them and act in a different way.
CHANGING THE CHURCH
The strength Bergoglio had discovered during his own illness was a great help when guilt and shame bore down on him. These losses were devastating, but he managed to continue and complete his studies in philosophy by the end of 1963. Just as the world was experiencing a marked shift in societal attitudes, so, too, was the Catholic Church. The previous year, Pope John XXIII (1958–1963) had convened the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (Vatican II) to discuss the future of the church in the modern world. Described by historian John W. O’Malley, S.J., as “the most important religious event of the twentieth century,” it signified the growing divide between those wishing for reform and those staunchly opposed to it in any form. For young seminarians hoping to make a difference in the world, such as Bergoglio, this was an immensely exciting time.
For four council sessions over three years, more than twenty-eight hundred bishops from around the world descended on Rome. The Argentine contingent constituted the tenth-largest group. The Catholic Church in Argentina had remained loyal to the Vatican’s teachings and had fought hard against any attempts to separate church and state that would have diluted its position in society. Bergoglio and his fellow classmates were, according to friend Fernando Montes, firmly “on the side of those who wanted a more open Church, not a Church of resistance to the world.” This view, combined with their philosophical explorations, dominated their discussions during the council’s three-year deliberations.
In 1964, twenty-eight-year-old Bergoglio applied to Father Pedro Arrupe, the first Jesuit provincial for Japan, who had been living in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped in August 1945, to complete the regent phase of his formation at a Japanese mission. He was turned down on account of his lung condition and was instead sent to the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción in Santa Fe to teach literature, art, and psychology. It was an incongruous placement after his outreach work in Chile: this was an esteemed and expensive boarding school for the children of wealthy families who wished for their offspring to follow in the footsteps of its many illustrious alumni.
But Bergoglio’s scientific background proved no hindrance to his teaching of the arts, and the rigorous routines of Jesuit institutions suited his methodical nature. In his first year at the college, he taught the boys about Spanish literature, and in the following year turned his attention to Argentine works. With particular focus on gauchesco literature, he introduced the class to one of his favorite poems, Martín Fierro, the 1872 epic by José Hernández (a saga likened by many to Don Quixote and The Divine Comedy) and even arranged for the legendary author Jorge Luis Borges to visit and lecture on the significance of this movement in literature. Students were enthralled by the varied and engaging education he offered, and as Germán de Carolis, a former pupil, recalled, “[Bergoglio] was serious as far as personality went but youthful and with a sense of humour. He had authority, earned respect, and was popular with the students. His knowledge of the subjects he taught was immense, and his literature lessons captivated us. You could tell that he liked teaching and that he was totally convinced of his priestly vocation. It was impossible to doubt it.”
On December 8, 1965, the bells of St. Peter’s Basilica signaled an end to the Second Vatican Council and the dawn of a new era of change within the Catholic Church. During the three years of intense debate, the world, too, had changed: seventeen coups had overthrown governments in developing nations across the globe; Cold War tensions had eased, somewhat, following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962; the fierce battle for civil rights and social progress in America gave rise to Martin Luther King Jr.’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963) and Malcolm X (1965); and by the close of 1965, the war in Vietnam had rapidly escalated following the deployment of more than two hundred thousand U.S. ground troops.
Society, as a whole, was desperately calling for change, and in a series of sixteen published documents, the Vatican answered those calls by lowering the drawbridge and opening up the church not just to its followers but to the world and other religions. It was a watershed moment, this attempt to humanize the church.
Mass was to become more inclusive, doing away with archaic Latin liturgy in favor of allowing people to worship in their native languages. Anti-Semitic references were removed from Catholic writings, and the previously fierce condemnation of atheism was softened, and discrimination was condemned in any form “against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion.” While papal infallibility was by no means abolished, collegiality was also emphasized, which meant that bishops, including those from developing countries, would from now on have a greater role in decision making, therefore diluting the previously formidable powers of the Roman Curia. Most significantly for Bergoglio and other Latin American Catholics, however, was the focus on social justice and peace. These were at the forefront of a desire, as expressed by Pope John XXIII at the opening of the council, to return the institution as a whole to being a “Church of the poor.”
It was a clear message of reform, but problems arose when progressives and conservatives, who had been wrestling it out for three years, chose to interpret the council’s findings in markedly different ways. The most notable radical interpretation of Vatican II occurred in Latin America, where returning bishops began reassessing the ways in which they could help the continent’s poor and marginalized peoples. In Argentina, priests who dispatched themselves to so-called villas miserias (literally, “misery villages”) to fight poverty and protect the rights of the poor in slum shantytowns, joined together to form the Movement of Priests for the Third World (Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo, or MSTM).
Through their support of the poor and the rights of workers, the movement developed a greater association with trade unions, which were predominantly Peronist and socialist in their political leanings, but it was still disorganized, and its message remained unclear until a landmark 1968 publication by Rubem Alves, a Brazilian theologian, entitled “Towards a Theology of Liberation,” united the MSTM’s struggles with those of other movements from across the continent under one banner: liberation theology.
While not endorsing MSTM by name, the Latin American Catholic Bishops’ Conference (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano, or CELAM) supported many of the theories put forward by the movement when it met in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968 to discuss the continent’s interpretation of Vatican II. But at a time when revolution and rioting were erupting around the world and the threat of communism still loomed large in the minds of Western democracies, liberation theology’s Marxist undertones were perceived as dangerous to the institution of the church as a whole. Consequently, the conclusions reached in Medellín warned firmly against Marxist and liberationist systems that stood in opposition to the dignity of the human person, and quoting the words of Pope Paul VI, they denounced violent revolutions that “engender new injustices, introduce new inequities and bring new disasters. The evil situation that exists, and it surely is evil, may not be dealt with in such a way that an even worse situation results.”
Despite its unifying intentions, the Second Vatican Council’s reforms had not been able to bridge the divide between grassroots priests and the senior echelons of the church. According to Paul Vallely, prior to the meeting at CELAM, “1,500
priests from the Movement of Priests for the Third World signed a letter to Paul VI condemning ‘violence of the upper class’ and ‘the violence of the state’ as the first violence. In the face of this, they argued, the violence of the poor was an understandable response.” Argentine bishops, having experienced another military coup in 1966, and acknowledging that many in the church were “seduced by Marxism,” issued their own interpretation of CELAM in the 1969 Declaration of San Miguel, which concurred in its condemnation of Marxism, social protest, and challenges to authority but promoted the idea that people should be active agents of their own history, stating that “the activity of the Church should not only be oriented toward the people but also primarily derive from the people.”
The declaration had such a profound influence on the soon-to-be priest that throughout his spiritual life, Bergoglio would continue to refer back to it, as he did in this 2010 testimony, and eventually use it to form the basis of his entire papal outlook:
The option for the poor comes from the first centuries of Christianity. It’s the Gospel itself. If you were to read one of the sermons of the first fathers of the Church, from the second or third centuries, about how you should treat the poor, you’d say it was Maoist or Trotskyist. The Church has always had the honour of this preferential option for the poor. It has always considered the poor to be the treasure of the Church.… At the Second Vatican Council the Church was redefined as the People of God and this idea really took off at the Second Conference of the Latin-American bishops in Medellín.
A VOCATION FULFILLED
On December 13, 1969, five days before his thirty-third birthday, and watched by his mother, grandmother Rosa, and siblings, Bergoglio stepped forward in the chapel of Colegio Máximo and was ordained by Archbishop Ramón José Castellano.
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