Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (71 page)

Despite an official media black-out on their pre-conclave deliberations, the cardinals’ fiercely critical mood was an open secret, with some heavyweights among them vehemently demanding access to the secret Vatileaks report. This was refused, but it was abundantly clear that no Curial cardinal now had any hope of election. With no obvious front-runner among the rest of the Sacred College, there was widespread speculation that the cardinals might turn to a relatively youthful candidate from one of the Church’s growth-points in the developing world. Pundits canvassed the prospects of a wide range of ‘papabili’ from Africa,
Asia and the Americas. The weight of media speculation, however, settled on a tough—minded Italian. Angelo Scola, the sixty-three year old son of a socialist truck-driver, Archbishop of Milan, and a former Patriarch of Venice, combined impressive theological credentials with a vigorous and innovative approach to pastoral ministry. He shared Benedict XVI’s theological concerns and many of his opinions, had enough prior experience of the Curia to be thought able to tackle its reform, and enough distance to be thought willing to do so. A Scola pontificate would combine doctrinal continuity with institutional reform, a prospect which it was thought might meet the mood of the Conclave.

The Conclave opened on 12 March to widespread expectation that it would be a long-drawn-out process, expectations confounded next afternoon by the news that white smoke was billowing from the Sistine Chapel chimney after only five ballots. In the one-hour delay between the first smoke and the announcement of the identity of the new pope, speculation rose to frenzy, with most commentators agreeing that so swift an outcome must mean that the Cardinal of Milan had indeed been elected. Exultant and eager to be first past the tape, the Italian bishops’ conference sent Scola a fulsome congratulatory telegram. Their enthusiasm proved as premature as it was unfortunate. The diffident, bespectacled figure in white who stepped awkwardly on to the balcony of St Peter’s, hands by his sides, and greeted the crowds with the words, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, good evening’, was in fact a seventy-six year old Argentinian of Turinese parentage, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the Jesuit who had been runner up in the previous conclave. The first non-European pope for more than a millennium, the first pope from the Americas, and the first Jesuit pope, Bergoglio’s choice of papal title was hardly less startling: he would be called Francis, a name never before adopted by any pope.

Bergoglio’s credentials as a papal candidate turned unequivocally on his manifest personal integrity, his passionate engagement with and on behalf of the poor, and his exemplary pastoral ministry as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Despite dwindling clergy recruitment there, he had quadrupled the number of hand-picked priests working in the rawest slums, and he had been open to pastoral experiments, suggesting that his priests might establish devout layman as church workers in disused warehouses and factories in the barrios, preaching and distributing communion where there were no clergy. He was an outspoken critic of both social injustice and ecclesiastical careerism. He had refused to live in the
Archbishop’s palace, preferring an austere bed-sit in the diocesan office-building. He worked from a drab office smaller than that of his secretary’s, kept his own diary, disposed of the Episcopal limousine, and travelled unaccompanied to pastoral engagements by bus or subway. On being made a cardinal he refused to spend money on the appropriate robes, and instead had those of his predecessor tailored to fit, but in any case went on wearing black like a simple priest. He declined social invitations, and usually ate alone. But he was no puritan – he was compassionate towards the women forced into prostitution by poverty, and ferocious to those clergy, ‘the new Pharisees’, who refused to baptise the women’s children. A strong and vocal upholder of the Church’s traditional teaching on pro-life issues, he nevertheless deplored those who harped obsessively on sexual morality, who ‘wanted to force the whole world into a condom’, when they should be denouncing social injustice and above all proclaiming the gospel of Christ and his message of love and mercy to sinners. He loved music (favourite conductor Furtwängler, as the best interpreter of Beethoven and Wagner), cinema (favourite movie
Babette’s Feast)
, literature (favourite poet Hölderlin in German, favourite prose-writer, his friend Jorge Luis Borges). His speeches and sermons were informal, folksy, larded with jokes and asides, often politically incorrect. And he was also an avid local soccer fan, had been a keen dancer in his youth, and, even as cardinal, took pride in being ‘quite knowledgeable on the two ages of
tango’.
For all the geniality, however, he was a fiercely outspoken critic of financial and political corruption, and of economic oppression, above all the exploitation of workers by sweated labour. ‘Political but not partisan’, he scourged unstintingly the failures of successive Argentinian governments to improve the conditions of the poor. As Archbishop he preferred not to dispense communion himself at major liturgical celebrations, in case the great and the good, whom he believed fattened off the poor, should use communion from the hands of the archbishop as an image-burnishing ‘photo-op’. The gentle and grandfatherly manner cloaked an austere and steely personality.
It was plain at once that all these emphases would be carried over into the new pontificate. The choice of name was itself a manifesto, an unfamiliar identification of the papal Church with the spirit of the ‘poverello’, the little poor man of Assisi, symbol of humility, renunciation of riches, and care for the creation. Bergoglio later claimed to have given no thought to a name till the balloting had passed the necessary seventy-seven, when his friend Cardinal Hummes of Brazil embraced
him and whispered ‘Don’t forget the poor’. He departed from his prepared speech at his first press conference to exclaim ‘How I long for a church that is poor, and that is for the poor’, and humility and poverty were evident priorities from the moment Papa Bergoglio stepped onto the balcony. Before blessing the crowds that first evening, he bowed low before them and asked for their prayers. He pointedly referred to himself not as pope, but as the city’s new bishop (a shift of emphasis which made its way awkwardly into the house style of Vatican press-releases in the weeks that followed). The evening of the election was cold and wet, and as he had robed in white for the first time, the papal master of ceremonies had offered him the ermine-lined shoulder-cape, the Mozetta, favoured by Benedict. Bergoglio declined both the ermine and an elaborate gold pectoral cross. The eagerly reported rumour that he had added ‘you wear it Monsignor, carnival time is over’, sadly turned out not to be true. But ‘si non é vero, é ben trovato’ as they say in Rome. It was clear that this pope would have no interest in styles of head-gear or hand-made red slippers. After his balcony appearance Pope Francis travelled in the bus with the rest of the cardinals back to the Casa Santa Marta, the hostel where they had stayed during the Conclave. At his inaugural Mass he was simply, almost shabbily, vested in plain white vestments, in contrast to the gold of those around him. When shown round the papal apartments by Archbishop Ganswein he exclaimed ‘there’s room for 300 people here. I don’t need all this space,’ and was as good as his word, opting to live instead in a modest set of rooms back at the Casa Santa Marta, where he fetched his own meals from the communal canteen and said mass each morning for the staff. On one of his first mornings as pope he discovered that a Swiss Guard had stood on duty outside his door all night: anarchically, Papa Bergoglio insisted on fetching the thunderstruck soldier a chair and making him a sandwich. On the day after his election he went to Santa Maria Maggiore to pray before the icon of the
Salus Populi Romani:
on the return journey to the Vatican he diverted the car to the Piazza Navona, so that he could collect his own luggage and pay his bill at the hostel where he’d stayed before the Conclave.

Such gestures filled media coverage in the days after his election: the humble pope, the people’s pope, the pope on the bus. But there were disturbing shadows from his past as well, above all the shadow of Argentina’s Dirty Wars, and questions about Bergoglio’s role in the Church’s cosy relationship with the military dictatorship there in the
1970s. Bergoglio, who was born in 1936, was the eldest son of a family of pious Turinese immigrants who had made a modest success in Peron’s Argentina. The biggest religious influence in his life was his grandmother Rosa, a devout Piedmontese peasant who embodied for him the wisdom of the folk, and whose spiritual testament, written for her children, he kept reverently in his breviary, along with the letter she had sent him on the day of his ordination. Entering a diocesan seminary at the age of nineteen, he had soon moved to the Jesuits because of their position ‘in the front lines of the church, grounded in obedience and discipline’.
⁵⁵
Bergoglio’s deepest conviction was to be that the most authentic place of human and divine encounter was always at the margins, the periphery. Even as a young man he saw mission as the Church’s overwhelming priority. He hoped to be sent as a missionary to the Far East, till a devastating illness when he was twenty-one left him with only one lung and put paid to those hopes. Ordained priest in 1969, he was rapidly identified as a high flier, and was appointed Master of Novices and professor in the local Jesuit seminary. While still only thirty-nine he was appointed head of the Jesuit order (Provincial) in Argentina in 1976, only three years after his own final solemn profession as a Jesuit.

It was a bad time to be in a position of leadership. Soon after the return of Juan Peron to Argentina from exile in Franco’s Spain the bizarre alliance of left-and right-wing forces which had constituted his power base fell apart into murderously warring factions. Acts of terrorism, guerrilla groups and death-squads multiplied on both sides, and in 1976, the year in which Bergoglio became Provincial, a military Junta ousted Peron’s widow and established a right-wing dictatorship, backed by Reagan’s America. The new regime ruthlessly targeted leftist activists and sympathisers: journalists, teachers, students, trades unionists and civil rights workers and organisations were suppressed or harried, and between 15,000 and 30,000 people disappeared at the hands of the regime’s death-squads, who sometimes dropped their manacled and tortured victims from helicopters into the sea.

These horrors reflected the political upheavals of the continent and the wider world in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Latin American Church had responded to them in complex ways. Shaped by a long tradition of colonial religious support for ‘legitimate’ authority, and by the over-riding anti-communist preoccupations inherited from the Pacelli era, many conservative clergy threw their weight behind the powers that be, however dubious their legitimacy. With a few shining exceptions, this was
overwhelmingly the response of the Argentinian bishops and clergy, who, even when they did not support the regime, often averted their eyes from its atrocities. But the ‘preferential option for the poor’ which had characterized Catholic social teaching since the Second Vatican Council, and the rise of ‘liberation theology’, which emphasized the prophetic denunciations of social injustice in the Old Testament as integral to Christian understanding of the meaning of salvation, tugged in the opposite direction. In 1975 the thirty-second Jesuit General Congregation had spoken of the special challenge of ‘apostolic mission in a world … divided by … injustice … built into economic, social, and political structures that dominate the life of nations and the international community.’

In the light of these institutionalised injustices, the Congregation called for a ‘thoroughgoing reassessment of our traditional apostolic methods, attitudes and institutions, with a view to adapting them to the new needs of the times and to a world in process of rapid change.’

For many both within and beyond the Jesuit order, this was a call to political involvement in social and economic struggle, precisely as a
religious
priority. A wave of radicalism spread among Bergoglio’s confreres, and in the 1970s in North America, the Jesuit Berrigan brothers, Dan and Philip, featured high on the FBI’s ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list. In Latin America, too, many Jesuits were radicalized, embracing Liberation Theology and seeing active resistance to political or economic oppression as part of their apostolic mission. Bergoglio had also been present at the thirty-second General Congregation, and everything in his subsequent career as priest and bishop suggests he internalised its fundamental call to the service of the poor. But he was unhappy with the radical tone of the Congregation, feared political extremism, favoured prayer and soup kitchens over social or political agitation. As Argentine Provincial, he was to play a key role in resisting the political radicalization of the Order. Under his steely rule, theologically adventurous Jesuits were removed from teaching posts and replaced, sometimes by conservative lay professors. Bright young Jesuit students were steered away from sociology or political science, towards more traditional theological and philosophical studies. In the age of flower-power, Bergoglio insisted that Jesuits wear clerical collars. They should engage with and help the poor, but their mission must remain spiritual, not political. The ethos of the Argentinian Province became notably different from that of Jesuit provinces elsewhere in the sub-continent. And the strain told on Bergoglio’s relations
with other Jesuits: he was fiercely disliked by many colleagues, an animosity which lingers. On his election to the papacy, another senior Latin American Jesuit declared ‘yes I know Bergoglio … as Provincial he generated divided loyalties: some groups almost worshipped him, while others would have nothing to do with him, and he would hardly speak to them … He has an aura of spirituality which he uses to obtain power. It will be a catastrophe for the Church to have someone like him in the Apostolic See. He left the Society of Jesus in Argentina destroyed with Jesuits divided and institutions destroyed and financially broken. We have spent two decades trying to fix the chaos that man left us.’
⁵⁶