The year marked the start of that bloody period of violence in Argentina that would escalate into the brutally oppressive and murderous civil conflict known as the Dirty War (1976–83). The instability that followed the 1966 revolution resulted in civil unrest and mass protests, known as the Rosariazo and Cordobazo uprisings, between May and September 1969. Fourteen students and protesters were killed by police, prompting a surge in left-wing guerilla groups that would eventually succeed in returning Juan Perón to power after twenty years in exile.
As the lines between religion, politics, and violence became increasingly blurred—and with 10 percent of Argentina’s clergy officially endorsing Peronism and liberation theology and many more sympathetic—Bergoglio found the country much changed when he returned after completing his tertianship at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares in Spain. On March 11, 1973, the country headed to the polls for the first time in ten years and democratically elected as president former dentist, and the official representative in Argentina of the exiled Juan Perón, Dr. Héctor José Cámpora, much to the chagrin of the military junta.
While talk of Perón’s return was exciting the electorate, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was uttering rather different words: his final Jesuit vows. On April 22, 1973, he was invited to publicly promise obedience to the sovereign pontiff before privately taking his simple vows in a side chapel of the church at the Colegio Máximo de San José in San Miguel, Argentina. The next five vows Bergoglio promised were: first, never to change the Jesuit Constitutions concerning poverty, except to make them “more strict”; second, never to “strive or have ambition” for any high office in the church; third, never to strive or have ambition for any high office in the Jesuits; fourth, to “communicate the name” of any person found striving for either office to the Society of Jesus; fifth, and finally, to promise to listen to the superior general of the Society of Jesus should he ever be made a bishop.
Although they were unaware of the greatness that lay ahead, Jorge Bergoglio’s superiors had been impressed throughout his formation. Even before he had taken his final vows, they began to fast-track him toward leadership within the order, appointing him master of novices when he returned from studying in Spain, followed by a short stint as rector of Colegio Máximo. Even so, it was still a surprise to many when, on July 31, 1973, he was made provincial superior, head of all the Jesuits in Argentina. At thirty-six, he was the youngest person ever to be appointed to the position—a promotion that he himself later described as “crazy” given his age.
Having succeeded the man who had appointed him master of novices, Father Ricardo O’Farrell, Bergoglio assumed the role of provincial superior at a time of great crisis among the Jesuits. Under O’Farrell, the number of men joining and remaining in the order had plummeted, and those who had stayed reflected the familiar churchwide divisions between reformist and conservative opinions. O’Farrell’s natural successor, Father Luis Escribano, had died in a car crash, so Bergoglio was seen by his new boss, the head of the Society of Jesus, Superior General Father Pedro Arrupe, as the only man who could potentially satisfy the warring factions. He was faced with the near-impossible challenge of combining the roles of peacemaker, recruiter, and politician.
THE PRODIGAL SON RETURNS
It was not only the Jesuits and the wider church that were struggling for unified peace and agreement. Argentina was once again in crisis.
Despite the euphoria that followed the democratic election in March 1973, underlying tensions had not abated. In the eighteen years since Perón had fled to Franco-ruled Spain, his followers had splintered into left- and right-wing opposition groups, both laying claim to his message. When it was announced that Juan Perón and his third wife, María Estela (known as Isabel), would at last return, hopes were high that he could once more unite the country and put an end to the bloodshed. On June 20, an estimated 3.5 million people gathered at an airport in Buenos Aires to welcome the seventy-seven-year-old, but armed members of the right-wing death-squad the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (known as Triple A) opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen and wounding 365.
The Ezeiza Massacre marked the start of one of the most violent periods in Argentine history. The streets of Buenos Aires rapidly became the front line of the conflict between the military and leftist and rightist guerilla factions battling it out for power. After the resignation of Cámpora in July 1973, Perón was reelected president and took office on October 12, with Isabel serving as vice president. But he failed to unite the country. Right-wing groups had free rein of the city as the military set about eliminating the left-wing opposition, driving the guerilla groups further underground.
Almost no sooner had he returned to the country than Perón died from a heart attack, on July 1, 1974, and forty-three-year-old Isabel was sworn in as president. She was completely unprepared for the task, and her presidency was a disaster from start to finish. Perón’s personal secretary and, horrifyingly, minister of social welfare, José López Rega, acted as her adviser–cum–puppet master, using his position to enable Triple A, the death squad he founded, to carry out, in collaboration with the military, the state-sponsored murders of close to three hundred people, including Father Carlos Mugica, a liberation theologian.
Now one year into his six-year term as superior, Bergoglio was desperately trying to convince Argentine Jesuits not to get drawn into the conflict and to put aside “sterile inter-ecclesiastical contradictions” in favor of a “true apostolic strategy.” But politics had infiltrated the Jesuits. How could it not have? Their work as missionaries brought them face-to-face with the poverty of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire of corruption and violence; as far as they were concerned, they were following the teachings of Vatican II. However, almost ten years on, its message was still producing widely differing interpretations. The superior general, Father Arrupe, also believed he was following the council’s guidelines to support the separation of church and state when he tasked Bergoglio with depoliticizing Jesuits by carrying out “a sweeping purge of left-wing students and radical teachers, among them several Jesuits who had taken control of the Jesuit University of Salvador, in Buenos Aires.”
The move made Bergoglio deeply unpopular with many Jesuits, primarily because the replacement teachers and directors belonged to an anti-Marxist militant Catholic group loyal to Peronism called Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard). Bergoglio had known them in the early 1970s, when he was a novice master and rector of Colegio Máximo, but despite his assurance that these men would run the university in accordance with Jesuit principles, his stance was viewed as a political betrayal, for which many would never forgive him. His intent was to realign the Jesuits with Ignatius’s teachings and the conclusions of the conference of CELAM, but his actions throughout his tenure as superior were perceived as quite the opposite, and for many years he was labeled a staunch conservative.
THE COUP TO END ALL COUPS
The disastrous tenure of Isabel Perón came to an end on March 24, 1976, when a military junta, led by General Jorge Videla, Admiral Emilio Massera, and Commander Orlando Ramón Agosti, assumed control of Argentina.
With the country’s economy in ruins, many welcomed the intervention of the military, which, as Jimmy Burns notes in his biography Francis: Pope of Good Promise, was comparatively “bloodless, serene and quickly executed, with a majority of the population breathing a sigh of relief with the end of the Peronist government.”
Although rumors quickly began circulating of the many “disappeared,” it was years before the general population understood the true and horrifying extent of the carnage caused by the Dirty War conducted by the military dictatorship between March 24, 1976, and October 30, 1983.
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It is estimated that thirty thousand Argentines were “disappeared” during this time.
Many of their bodies were dumped in unmarked graves, never to be recovered, leaving families with an unending quest for information and justice. Most were young people, aged betwee
n sixteen and thirty. Their murders constituted what Argentines have described as “the killing of a generation.” These harrowing figures do not include the 3 percent of captured women who were pregnant when kidnapped and gave birth in the death camps before they were murdered, leaving an estimated 270 babies unaccounted for.
An overwhelming sense of guilt and shame followed, not least for the Catholic Church. In declassified U.S. State Department documents published by the National Security Archives on the thirtieth anniversary of the military coup, the U.S. embassy officer in charge of human rights, F. Allen “Tex” Harris, filed a report on December 27, 1978, following an “informal meeting” with Nunciature First Secretary Kevin Mullan, in which he stated that “a senior army official had informed the [Catholic] Nuncio that the armed services had been forced to ‘take care of’ 15,000 persons in its anti-subversion campaign.”
The shocking proof that the church, more than most, was acutely aware of the extent to which the junta was disposing of its critics was compounded by testimonies given during the 1984 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, in which several victims alleged that “priests of the church cooperated with the military to the point of inviting prisoners to confess everything in order to serve their nation. Numerous survivors tell of fruitless searches for their loved ones, in which officers of the church refused help but passed on information given in confidence [to the junta]. When the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo sought support and a place to meet, the churches in the centre of the city were unable or unwilling to accommodate them.”
Furthermore, leading figures within the church such as the cardinal primate of Buenos Aires, Juan Carlos Aramburu, never turned down the junta’s invitations for public functions. Between 1976 and 1981 the bishops issued only four pastoral letters condemning the torture and abuse of human rights, but at the same time seemed to acquiesce to the military’s determination to act in any way that it deemed proportionate to maintaining society. At no point did the church take a public stand against the junta, even when its own priests began being murdered. In total, during the Dirty War twenty priests and members of religious orders were killed, eighty-four were “disappeared,” and seventy-seven were exiled.
All things combined, the church found herself too internally divided to agree on an appropriate response. So, too, it would seem, was Jorge Bergoglio.
Superior General Arrupe had set him two key tasks. First and foremost, he must protect the Jesuits; his second task was to aid civilians caught in the conflict. As Austen Ivereigh notes, “The two objectives were, obviously, in tension with each other: if it had been known that their provincial was abetting subversives sought by the state, all Jesuits would have been suspect.” Ivereigh argues that “it was a high-wire act, but Bergoglio pulled it off. Not one Argentine Jesuit lost his life in the dirty war, and he managed to save dozens of people.”
In later years, as pope, when Francis would regularly state, “I am a sinner,” making clear that he is someone who has sinned in profound ways, it is obviously his actions and inactions during the black days of the Dirty War to which he is mostly referring: days of life-and-death decisions for the Jesuit leader, of judgment calls that might send one of his flock into exile or another—to his horror and despite his protests—to the torture chamber. Such images must live in him still, such as when he strategically celebrated mass in the home of General Videla, hoping to speak with the tyrant about two captured Jesuits, but still placing a Holy Communion wafer on the outthrust tongue of the very man implicated in ordering Esther Ballestrino into a sea-transport plane, legs and hands bound for her final terrible ride. The conscience does not easily sleep with such facts, so it is natural that these days should haunt him, bear down on him, demanding atonement and a full reckoning while also teaching him much of lasting value about the true nature of sin, and how sin must be confronted and dealt with if it is to be turned finally to the good.
A TIME OF UNCERTAINTY
By the time the junta finally fell in 1983, following a humiliating defeat in the Falklands War against Great Britain in 1982, Bergoglio was two years into another stint serving as rector of the Colegio Máximo in San Miguel, having resigned his role as Jesuit superior in 1979. The position suited him well, for he was always commended on his ability to inspire candidates training in Jesuit formation.
Bergoglio busied himself with building new churches; hosting international conferences at the university; reforming the syllabus of education; and even building a Jesuit-run community farm on a spare twenty-five-acre plot on the grounds of the college, which helped to feed the poor families of the parish. One student recalled just how busy he was: “He went from giving spiritual direction to speaking on the phone with a bishop to washing clothes in the laundry before going to the kitchen and the pigsty and then back to the classroom. He was involved in every detail with us.” But Bergoglio began to grow restless.
At this point John Paul II, now four years into his papacy, decided it was time for a shake-up of the Jesuits, including in Argentina. When a new superior general was appointed to lead the order in 1983, he was approached by powerful Argentine Jesuits who lobbied “against the rector [Bergoglio] and his followers, arguing that Bergoglio’s model of formation was backward and out of step with the Society of Jesus in Latin America.” The campaigning worked, and in 1986 a more conservative candidate, Father Víctor Zorzín, was appointed as head of the Argentine Jesuits.
Weary at the thought of political infighting, in May 1986 Bergoglio requested permission from Zorzín to take a sabbatical in Germany to complete his doctorate in theology. There are some who believe he was ordered to leave by his superior, which, when considering this was a man who hated travel, perhaps holds some truth—especially when, after just seven months, fifty-year-old Bergoglio abandoned his studies and returned to Argentina. He has never spoken in any detail about the reasons for this change of course, saying only, “I remember that when I was in Frankfurt, working on my thesis, I’d take strolls in the evenings to the cemetery. You could see the airport from there. One time I bumped into a friend who asked me what I was doing, and I replied, ‘Waving to the planes. I’m waving to the planes bound for Argentina.’”
It is a revealing comment. Bergoglio clearly longed for home and was pained by the knowledge there was no place for him there. Unexpectedly, he found an answer to his dilemma painted on the wood-paneled wall of a small church in Bavaria. Gazing down at him was Mary Untier of Knots, an eighteenth-century depiction of the Virgin Mary as she unties the knots in a piece of thread passed to her by one of the many angels that surround her. She is bathed in a Heavenly glow, with the Christ child in her arms and her foot crushing a serpent. It spoke to Bergoglio at a time when he himself had many knots to untie and seems to have given him the confidence to return to Argentina by the end of 1986, accompanied by pocketfuls of prayer cards depicting Mary Untier of Knots.
He was not welcomed home with open arms. Nonetheless, he still had some friends in the society and, through their support, was appointed in March 1987 to the advisory position of procurator general, much to the annoyance of more conservative Jesuits. Unfortunately for Bergoglio, the ill feeling against him continued, and those determined to be rid of him finally succeeded. In April 1990, they removed him from his teaching post and two months later exiled him to Córdoba.
RETURN FROM THE WILDERNESS
The exile forced upon Bergoglio gave rise to an intense period of spiritual reflection as he listened daily to the confessions of parishioners and immersed himself in the daily life of a parish priest. It was a humbling existence that came to an end two years later with the offer of a new and very different position within the church.
On May 20, 1992, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, confessor, teacher, and outcast Jesuit, was ordained an auxiliary bishop to the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Antonio Quarracino, to whom he would act, alongside four other auxiliaries, in an assistant capacity—the role is most commonly requested to support either an aili
ng archbishop or one whose diocese has a large population. Having developed a relationship with Quarracino at a series of spiritual retreats when he was provincial superior, Bergoglio had so impressed the archbishop with his “spirituality and his cleverness” that upon hearing of his “penance in Córdoba [Quarracino] decided to rescue him” by personally requesting approval for his appointment to the role of auxiliary from Pope John Paul II himself.
Bergoglio was stunned. Recalling the moment in an interview many years later, he said, “My mind went blank. As I said before, my mind always goes blank after a shock, good or bad. And my initial reaction is also always wrong.” He had never considered the possibility of becoming a bishop, partly on account of his Jesuit vows but also due to his recent fall from grace within the society. But the years spent in Córdoba had been formative, and it was clear from his first day in high office that he was not about to let the trappings of power go to his head. He politely refused the more exclusive bishops’ accommodation in favor of a simple apartment in his home parish of Flores, where he was to be based. He also declined the offer of a driver and a priest, acting as personal secretary, to help him with administrative matters, preferring instead to answer his own telephone, keep his own diary, and take the bus wherever he needed to go.
When a Jesuit becomes a bishop, he is automatically released from his vows and is no longer accountable to the superior general of the society. Despite this change in his circumstances, Bergoglio remained true to his commitment to a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience, as he would do throughout the rest of his career in the church.
Perhaps the most pleasing part of his new role was that it allowed him to return once more to working with the people of the villas miserias. It had been a source of great disappointment when, during the struggle for authority within the Jesuits, those opposed to his efforts had removed the community outreach work that Bergoglio had so treasured. Now his dedication, loyalty, and undeniable talents made a deep impression on the archbishop, who began accelerating Bergoglio’s rise through the ranks over a very short period of time. In December 1993 he was made vicar general in charge of the archdiocese, and then, in May 1997, Quarracino invited his auxiliary bishop to lunch.
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