Pope Francis: Untying the Knots by Paul Vallely, 2013
227 pages with Index
Table of Contents:
Dirty Tricks in the Vatican
The Common Touch
Jesuit Secrets
What Really Happened in the Dirty War
The Bishop of the Slums
What Changed Bergoglio?
Francis – A Man to Change History
A Pope of Surprises
Afterword, Timeline, Acknowledgements, Index
Paul Vallely has an international reputation as a commentator on religion, society and ethical issues. As a journalist he has produced award-winning reporting from 30 countries over three decades. He continues to write and is Visiting Professor of Public Ethics and Media at the University of Chester in Great Britain. He has been an adviser to the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales. He lives in Manchester, England with his wife and son.
As Pope Francis takes the world by compassionate storm and becomes Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 2013, I want to know more about him. Reading the interview he gave last summer to America magazine and other Jesuit publications, and then falling in love with him as I read Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), I am tempted to put him on some pedestal he does not seek.
This book sought to describe his life with both candor and sympathy. The world events that swirled around Jorge Bergoglio in Argentina, at a time when he was unready for the authority vested in him, seem to have the beginning of a Godly humiliation that over time have changed the man who is now Pope Francis.
Franciscan teacher Father Richard Rohr says that he has often prayed to be shown “one good humiliation a day” to slow down his ego and open his eyes to the self-inflicted sabotage of God’s good work in his life. Pope Francis seems to be cut from that same cloth.
Vallely’s book is a best-seller. On the cover is a quote from The Tablet: “Read this book – forget the rest.” I found it fascinating. Here is Valelly’s “Afterword” to whet your appetite …
Afterword
For someone so celebrated for his simplicity Jorge Mario Bergoglio turns out to be a man of considerable complexity. The story of the Swiss Guard offers a revealing paradigm. One night, not long after his election as the Catholic Church’s 266th pontiff, Pope Francis came out of his bedroom in the hostel of Casa Santa Marta. It was just before dawn and a young Swiss Guard was on duty by the door. Discovering he had been standing there all night the Pope went back into his rooms and brought out a chair. He told the young soldier to sit down. The guard said he could not. The rules did not allow it. Whose rules? asked the Pope. My captain’s orders, the soldier replied. Well, he is just a captain and I am the Pope and my orders are that you sit down. The soldier sat down. The story has a coda. A few minutes later Francis reappeared with a slice of bread and jam – panino con marmellata, to add a little Italian verisimilitude – which the leader of the world’s billion Catholics gave to the soldier with the words: “Buon appetito, brother.”
The tale went viral in the Catholic blogosphere, despite the fact that there appeared to be no serious news source from which it could be verified. To the re-tellers of the story that did not matter. It worked as parable or poetic truth to illustrate the authenticity of the humble Pope, a man whose greatness lay in his mastery of the smallest things. And yet, even as a myth, it contains some of the ambiguity which surrounds the real man, as was pointed out to me by one of his close aides, Guillermo Marco, who was for eight years the public spokesman for Bergoglio as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. ‘The story demonstrates a man with the common touch, true’, said Marco. ‘But it also reveals him as a man with a strong sense of power. It shows him saying: “I am the Pope, I will decide. You do what I tell you”‘.
What verdict, then, are we finally to reach? Our journey from Argentina to Rome, from Bergoglio to Francis, has uncovered a pope of paradox – a man who is a radical but not a liberal, an enabler with an authoritarian streak, a self-confident man in constant need of forgiveness, and a churchman who combines religious humility and political wiles. It is also the story of a man who has undergone, if not a religious conversion, then at any rate a deep inner transformation which has wrought a profound and long-lasting change in both his personal and political vision.
Consider again the key points. The Pope who has shaken up the complacencies and self-certainties of the Vatican – desconstructing the monarchical model of papacy, stripping away its rococo affectations and accretions, and declaring his desire for “a poor Church for poor people” — began as a religious and political conservative. In his 15 years in key leadership positions among the Jesuits of Argentina, from 1971 to 1986, he initially resisted the radical changes with which the revolutionary Second Vatican Council sought to revitalise an introspective Catholic Church. And, though he always had a deep love for the popular piety of the poor, until he was in his mid-forties he studiously avoided addressing the economic and social circumstances which made, and kept, people poor. Rather he was the hammer of Liberation Theology, that movement which sought to combine the spiritual and material improvement of the poorest. He was a charismatic leader, but one who was unyielding and domineering with the Jesuits in his charge. His clarity of purpose and autocratic demeanour – combined with his associations with the right-wing Peronist Iron Guard – divided Argentina’s Jesuits into two camps – those who loved and those who loathed Bergoglio. So bitter was his legacy that when Bergoglio left, and was sent by his superiors into exile 400 miles away in Cordoba, eventually the Jesuit Curia in Rome had to send in an outsider, from Colombia, as Provincial. That came after three successive Argentinean provincials failed to end the Bergogliano personality cult and heal the wounds.
The most livid of those wounds concerned the two Jesuit priests, Fr. Orlando Yorio and Fr. Franz Jalics, who were kidnapped and tortured – and held, hooded and shackled for five months – by one of the military death squads responsible for murdering as many as 30,000 people regarded as ‘subversives’ during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War. Many unproven allegations have been made about Bergoglio’s involvement in their disappearance. Most of them seem untrue. But Bergoglio was guilty in one key respect.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was just 36 when he took over as Provincial in what amounted to a coup against his predecessor, Fr. Ricardo O’Farrell, who was perceived as too liberal and too political by the conservatives within the Society of Jesus in Argentina. Bergoglio was determined to curtail, or expunge from the order, those Jesuits who had embraced Liberation Theology to the point of working actively in the slums in alliance with overtly political groups. The problem was that the two most prominent Jesuit practitioners of Liberation Theology, Yorio and Jalics, had once been his teachers and were both older than him.
The young new provincial locked antlers with the older men. They refused to obey his order to leave the slum and began writing documents, to Bergoglio and his superiors in Rome, explaining why. Bergoglio was outraged. One of the key vows a Jesuit swears is obedience. Yorio and Jalies were in flagrant violation of that, particularly so when he informed them that his command had been reiterated by Rome. Bergoglio declared that they had expelled themselves from the order and informed Archbishop Aramburu of Buenos Aires who withdrew the licences of the two men to say Mass.
There is unresolved controversy about whether Bergoglio also blocked their move to the jurisdiction of another bishop, Miguel Raspanti, who was prepared to allow them to continue their work in his diocese of Moron. But it seems indisputable that he allowed his anger with the men to cloud his judgement. The withdrawal of the two men’s licences to say Mass was a sufficient signal to the military dictatorship that the Church had removed its protection from the priests. Bergoglio, who was both politically astute and well-informed about the tactics – and even the timing – of the military’s repressive behaviour, should have seen the danger in which he was placing his two priests. Bergoglio behaved recklessly and has been trying to atone for his behaviour ever since.
All the other evidence suggests that Bergoglio behaved with considerable courage over the six years which followed as the Dirty War – which the military euphemistically called the Proceso de Reorganization – grew ever dirtier. As Jesuit provincial and then Rector of the order’s Colegio Maximo he set up a clandestine network to smuggle out of the country fugitives from the military’s reign of terror. He was, said one of those he helped to freedom, both ‘personally and institutionally brave’. He did not speak out publicly against the military, but then most people did not, knowing that to do so was like signing your own death warrant.
But Bergoglio had done enough to trouble his conscience. When his term of office came to an end his Jesuit superiors in Rome decided he had to be removed from Argentina. He was sent to study in Germany, but came back sooner than expected. After an unhappy sojourn as an ordinary priest in various Jesuit communities in Buenos Aires he was exiled to Cordoba – a place for Bergoglio ‘of humility and humiliation,’ said Marco.
It was in that wilderness that Bergoglio, a prayerful man who spent at least two hours a day in the presence of God before the tabernacle, looked deep into his own heart and made a radical change. One of the standard techniques used in the fifteen-year Jesuit formation is a series of Spiritual Exercises devised by the order’s founder, St Ignatius of Loyola. At their heart is a process of discernment which helps the practitioner to strip away his layers of self-justification and self-delusion, and penetrate through to the inner core of his behaviour and motivation. Bergoglio had long years to reflect on his divisive leadership of the Jesuits in Argentina – and on what he had done wrong or inadequately during the Dirty War. He had to confront the fact that, in his inexperience as a young leader, he had allowed the breakdown of the pastoral relationship between himself and priests in his care. Years later, after Yorio was dead, Bergoglio and Jalics met in Germany, where Jalics had fled to the safety of a Jesuit retreat house. In 2013, after Francis became Pope, Jalics issued a statement to say that the two men had been reconciled and had concelebrated Mass together ending with what Jalics called a solemn embrace. What actually happened, an eyewitness said, was that the two men fell into each other’s arms and wept.
Three years before he became Pope, when Bergoglio was still Archbishop of Buenos Aires, in a rare interview with two Argentinean journalists, Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, he looked back on those years and said:
I don’t want to mislead anyone – the truth is that I’m a sinner who God in His mercy has chosen to love in a privileged manner. From a young age, life pushed me into leadership roles – as soon as I was ordained as a priest, I was designated as the master of novices, and two and a half years later, leader of the province – and I had to learn from my errors along the way, because, to tell you the truth, I made hundreds of errors. Errors and sins. It would be wrong for me to say that these days I ask forgiveness for the sins and offences that I might have committed. Today I ask forgiveness for the sins and offences that I did indeed commit.
Bergoglio’s soul was touched profoundly in all this. To understand how deep the examination of his conscience went it is only necessary to look at his preaching. The need for forgiveness and for God’s mercy have been his dominant theological refrains, both before and after he became Pope. ‘Guilt, without atonement, does not allow us to grow’, he has said. ‘There’s no clean slate. We have to bless the past with remorse, forgiveness, and atonement’. The final Lenten letter he left for the people of Buenos Aires before he left for Rome said: ‘Morality is not never falling down but always getting up again. And that is a response to God’s mercy.’ In his first Sunday homily after his election as Pope he said: ‘Mercy is the Lord’s most powerful message’. From Jesus, he said, we will ‘not hear words of contempt, we do not hear words of condemnation, but only words of love, of mercy, that invite us to conversion: “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more!”’ In his first Angelus message he told a packed St Peter’s Square: ‘Mercy, this word changes everything. It is the best word we can hear: it changes the world. A little mercy makes the world less cold and more just… The Lord never gets tired of forgiving, it is we that get tired of asking forgiveness’.
Inside the Sistine Chapel when a cardinal is elected Pope he is asked: Acceptasne electionem de te canonice factam in Summum Pontificem – do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff? The normal response is: Accepto – I accept. But Jorge Mario Bergoglio replied: “I am a great sinner, trusting in the mercy and patience of God in suffering, I accept.” Even at that special moment – or perhaps because of it – contrition for his past filled his mind. As the world has learned, he never fails to miss an opportunity to ask those around him to pray for him.
Bergoglio’s exile in Cordoba ended when he was made one of six assistant bishops in Buenos Aires. But he arrived in the city of his birth a different man. He returned to the capital with a new perspective. In his years of retrospection, in those long hours of prayer, he had discerned a new model of leadership, one which involved consultation, participation, collegiality and listening. There was, it turned out after all, a clean slate.
From the outset he focused his attention on the slums. There the process of change within him was deepened by his increasing contact with the poorest of the poor. As the years passed he began to create a new generation of priests dedicated to working in the slums. The numbers of these curas villeros – slum priests – quadrupled under his watch. He began to encourage the foundation of cooperatives and unions and other mechanisms by which the poor could empower themselves as well as challenging the dominance of the drug dealers who ran the slums. Working in shantytowns where large parts of the church congregations were single mothers or divorced altered his attitude to Church rules like forbidding the remarried to take Communion. He did not veer from orthodox Church teaching but did not allow it to overrule the priority of caring for individuals. ‘He was never rigid about the small and stupid stuff’, said Fr. Juan Isasmendi, the parish priest in Villa 21 slum, ‘because he was interested in something deeper’. But the poor reshaped his politics too. He repeatedly denounced the political and economic system, warning that oppressing the poor and defrauding workers of their wages were two sins ‘that cry out to God for vengeance’. Extreme poverty and unjust economic structures were ‘violations of human rights’ which called for solutions of justice not just philanthropy.
The irony was that, 40 years on, he had arrived at a similar understanding of social justice to that of Yorio and Jalics, the two Jesuits he had cut off because of their work in the slums. The Cold War was over and with it the need to see Liberation Theology as some kind of stalking horse for secularised anti-Church Communism supplanting Catholicism along with capitalism in Latin America. Liberation Theology had been more right than wrong, he began to conclude. Bergoglio started to honour the martyrs of Liberation Theology. As Pope he has unblocked the process to make a saint of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. And, under Francis, the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Muller, declared that the war between the Liberation Theology movement and Rome was over. Liberation Theology should henceforth be recognised, he pronounced, as ‘among the most important currents in 20th century Catholic theology’.
How deep is the change? The most striking fruit of Bergoglio’s conversion was his humility. Humility, as a religious virtue, is not some kind of personality trait. It is a mode of behaviour which Bergoglio chose to adopt, after prayerful reflection that this was what God required of him. It was calculated. That is not to suggest that it was fake but it was thought-through – as has been his arrival in the papacy. ‘Make no mistake about it Francis came to the job with a plan, as the Vatican watcher Alessandro Speciale put it. Bergoglio knew that calling himself Francis was a gesture of some audacity. What he wanted, he proclaimed, was a Church which practices what it preaches. It is the philosophy encapsulated in the words attributed to St Francis of Assisi – the inspiration for Bergoglio’s papal name: You must preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words. ‘That’s what he’s doing’, said Speciale. ‘His simplicity is a way of looking at reality from the point of view of the poor’.
But audacious humility is a high-risk strategy. When Bergoglio refused to appear as a witness before an Argentinean ‘crimes against humanity’ trial in 2010 – claiming that bishops were exempt under Argentine law – the families of those who had been murdered by the junta were scathing. The court was forced to decamp to Bergoglio’s own office to take evidence from him. ‘What kind of humility is that?’ asked Estela de la Cuadra whose pregnant sister was one of the disappeared. Bergoglio told the court he had no knowledge of the stealing of babies from women like Estela’s sister who gave birth in detention. But many in Argentina did not believe him. Being humble on his own terms was clearly not the same as being humbled in a court room. Yet all that underscored was that Bergoglio’s humility was not some natural modesty, bashfulness or self-effacement. It was certainly far from the same thing as meekness. In Pope Francis humility is an intellectual stance and a religious decision. It is a virtue which his will must seek to impose on a personality which has its share of pride and a propensity to dogmatic and domineering behaviour. Humility is a consciousness which wrestles against the unconsciousness of the human ego.
That battle was on show in the 2010 court hearing where Bergoglio – who, on sex abuse by priests, insisted strongly that the Church must not put its institutional reputation before a search for the truth and the care of victims – was decidedly uncooperative in doing the same on the Dirty War. Perhaps that was because he knew that collusion between the Church and the military in that era was so widespread that he feared uncovering the whole sordid enterprise could do more harm than good to the fabric of Argentinean society. There has been one sign that he may yet change his view on this. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires he repeatedly refused to meet with the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group dedicated to tracing the babies stolen from mothers killed during the Dirty War. Within his first few weeks of becoming Pope he had a brief meeting with representatives of the group who want him to order the opening of Church archives. They hoped to be able to trace the children if they could identify those priests and nuns involved in the scandal by finding ‘good Catholic families,’ sympathetic to the military junta, to adopt the babies.
But if there is a paradox in the way that humility and power come together in Pope Francis it is far from the only one. Or, as one cardinal put it, rather more colourfully: ‘The new Pope plays for the same team but kicks the ball in an entirely different direction’. So while Francis does not demur from the Church’s official teaching against abortion he is, on his track record, far more likely to focus on child trafficking and sex slavery. Though he opposed the government’s distribution of free contraceptives in Argentina he is just as likely to talk publicly about the fact that condoms can be morally acceptable where they are used primarily to prevent the spread of disease; and on family issues he is more likely to ask parents whether they make the time to play with their children properly. He has opposed same-sex marriage and gay adoption but spoken out strongly in favour of civil unions and equal rights for homosexuals. On euthanasia his public pronouncements have chiefly been about how contemporary society’s neglect of the elderly, and poor care in hospital, constitutes a form of ‘covert euthanasia’ – with frequent references to the shame of a society where old people are hidden away in care homes, discarded like old overcoats shoved into closets with a couple of mothballs in their pockets. On the place of women in the Church, though he has long insisted that women cannot become priests because Jesus was a man, he scandalised conservatives by washing women’s feet in his first papal Maundy Thursday service – and emphasised that women, not men, were chosen by God to be the first witnesses of the Resurrection.
Doing something to raise the profile and the status of women is one of the touchstones by which the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio will be judged. Early indications were that this was a priority for Pope Francis. After Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga was appointed coordinator of the Pope’s ground-breaking new group of cardinal advisers, one of his first public statements was about women and the Church. He said that getting more women into key posts would be a central part of the reform of the Vatican with which his group was charged by Francis. Other benchmarks for Francis will include his openness to cooperating with the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo – and allowing them to access Church records in their search for their missing relatives. And Bergoglio’s old friend Rabbi Abraham Skorka is hoping Pope Francis will act upon his previous conviction that the Vatican should open its secret archives to lay bare the truth about whether Pope Pius XII did more to help or to hinder the Jews of Europe during the Nazi persecutions in the run up to the Holocaust.
In choosing to be called Francis the new Pope also issued an invitation to be judged by an additional criterion. ‘Francis is more than a name – it’s a plan’, said Leonardo Boff, a founding father of Liberation Theology, who is Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion and Ecology at Rio de Janeiro State University. ‘It’s a plan for a poor Church, one that is close to the people, gospel-centred, loving and protective towards nature which is being devastated today. Saint Francis is the archetype of that type of Church’. A key moment in the conversion of the great saint from Assisi came when he heard a voice from the crucifix at San Damiano calling: ‘Francis, rebuild my house, which is falling into ruins’. The saint’s name became a byword for poverty, simplicity, and kindness but, according to Boff, it is a metaphor for much more. What is in ruins is not just the Church but the whole of Creation, for the modern world has ceased to see it as sacred. The planet has instead become a place that we master and abuse rather than our Sister, Mother Earth’, as St Francis called it, which instead ought to be cherished, preserved and healed. Understanding that is the most radical form of humility, grounded in the very humus of the earth, said Boff. In his first weeks in office the new Pope made several public references to the environment – most notably a condemnation of the developed world’s ‘culture of waste’. But he has also privately been in touch with Boff and asked the Brazilian theologian to send him what he has written on eco-theology. Francis told Boff that he wants to issue an encyclical on environmental matters.
Perhaps the foremost issue on the agenda for Pope Francis is, however, the question of how completely his papacy can answer the call for greater collegiality in the governance of the Catholic Church. The cardinals made it very clear in their discussions in the General Congregations before the conclave that this was vital. The Second Vatican Council almost half a century earlier had concluded that the way that the Church was run must be reoriented. It needed to move away from the paradigm of the Pope as monarch, which had developed in the Middle Ages. In its place should be restored the principle that the Pope and the bishops together should share the responsibility for the governance and pastoral care of the Catholic Church. But the changes which Vatican II set out on the role of bishops’ conferences had been undermined during the pontificates of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Speech after speech, by cardinal after cardinal, in the pre-conclave meetings, had insisted this trend needed reversing to restore the intentions of the Second Vatican Council.
Within the first month of his papacy Pope Francis took a major step towards addressing this by announcing the formation of an official group of cardinal advisers to the Pope. Drawn from every continent it was intended to provide a conduit which would enable the views of the local church across the world to reach the ears of the Pope. By appointing to the group individuals who had previously been sometimes trenchant critics of the Vatican bureaucracy Francis sought to ensure that the advice he received would be genuinely independent. Then Rome would serve the Church, rather than the other way round.
Part of the agenda for this council of advisers was the reform of the Curia. The Vatileaks scandal led the media to focus on this aspect of its brief. That focus was reinforced by a meeting that Pope Francis had in June 2013 with a group of nuns and priests from Latin America. In it he appeared to acknowledge that there was truth in earlier reports by the Italian media that a gay cabal within the Vatican was responsible for part of the infighting and intrigue which had bedevilled the workings of the Curia bureaucracy. Francis indicated that this was something on which he needed to take action. He reportedly told representatives from the Confederation of Latin American and Caribbean Religious (CLAR): ‘In the Curia there are also holy people, really, there are holy people. But there is also a stream of corruption, there is that as well, it is true the ‘gay lobby is mentioned, and it is true, it is there; we need to see what we can do’.
There was considerable controversy about these remarks, which were contained in notes on the meeting taken by the Latin American religious. They were posted on a Chilean Catholic website Reflexion y Liberacidn. The nuns and priests later apologised for the leak, and the notes were taken down from the website. But it was generally assumed that the Pope had been reported accurately – especially when the note-takers conceded that their report did not necessarily reflect his choice of words (las expressiones singulares) but did convey the general sense’ (su sentido general) of his comments. The Vatican pointedly did not deny them.
The media, in carrying reports of this encounter, followed the original translation and used the term gay lobby,’ though gay network may be a more accurate term for what the Pope intended. But his words appeared to confirm Italian newspaper reports from before the resignation of Benedict XVI. These had said that the confidential investigation into the Vatileaks scandal, conducted by three cardinals at Benedict’s behest, found actively gay networks, and a culture of blackmail and corruption, at work within the Vatican. Pope Francis, who had a hardline ‘zero-tolerance’ and no cover-up’ attitude to clerical sex abuse as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, indicated that the issue would be directly addressed by his new council of advisers, in particular three of its members: Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga, Cardinal Errazuriz and Cardinal Marx.
But what many in the media missed was that there was much more to this council of advisors than the reform of the Curia. Francis clearly intended it to be part of a revolution to restore a more collegial vision to the Catholic Church in which the bishops of the local churches would influence decision-making in Rome as much, if not more than, vice versa. The new Pope gave an indication of the diminution of the central power of the Vatican in other remarks he made to the nuns and priests from Latin America, urging them not to take too much notice of the intrusive Vatican bureaucracy. He reportedly said: ‘Perhaps even a letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine (of the Faith) will arrive for you, telling you that you said such or such thing. But do not worry. Explain whatever you have to explain, but move forward. Open the doors, do something there where life calls for it. I would rather have a church that makes mistakes for doing something than one that gets sick for being closed up’.
Not long afterwards he announced he had established another five-person commission specifically to address the troubles of the secretive and scandal-hit Vatican Bank. Its members were Italian cardinal Raffaele Farina, French cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, a Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, a Spanish bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta Ochoa de Chinchetru and a US cleric Mgr. Peter Bryan Wells. They were given powers in a chirograph document hand-written by Francis, to summon any documents and data they deemed necessary and told to report directly to Pope Francis, bypassing the Vatican bureaucracy.
But such issues, serious though they were, were peripheral to the core problem. Reform of the Curia was a secondary task. The first task of the new group of cardinal counsellors was ‘to advise him in the government of the universal Church.’ That went to the heart of the main problem besetting the church – that a monarchical form of papacy had replaced the earlier model of collegial government in which the Pope was not an autocrat but only ‘first among equals’ in the company of bishops.
A truly collegial Church would better reflect the reality that the global make-up of the Church has changed dramatically since the Council. More than two-thirds of Catholics now live in the southern hemisphere, yet Italy had more cardinals in the last conclave than the whole of Latin America. All this had been a source of irritation to Bergoglio as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, according to his then-aide Guillermo Marco who said: ‘He didn’t see why a lot of Italians with emptying churches should be telling bishops in countries with growing congregations what they should and should not be doing’. Catholics in Africa, Asia and the Americas, said Boff, were ‘no longer mirror-churches of Europe but source-churches, with their own face and ways of organising themselves, generally in networks of communities’. Collegiality, by definition, has to come from the bottom not the top for the spirit blows where it wills. But Pope Francis had begun the business of finding a new structure to express that. What he had done, said Alberto Melloni, Professor of History of Christianity at the University of Modena, constituted the ‘most important step in the history of the Church for the past ten centuries’. With Pope Francis a Church of the third millennium is being inaugurated, said Leonardo Boff, ‘far from the palaces and in the midst of the peoples and their cultures’. A sense was abroad that, after the thin sunlight of a long dry Catholic winter, spring may at last be arriving.
Is Jorge Mario Bergoglio the man to usher it in? One of Spain’s most distinguished Jesuits, Fr Jose Ignacio Gonzalez Faus, has said that fears may come from Bergoglio’s time as a Jesuit but that hopes should come from his time as an archbishop. What our exploration of the story of Bergoglio’s life shows is that a man who has made mistakes has, through a difficult time of personal transformation, become aware of his own frailties and devised, through prolonged prayer, a strategy to handle them. Acutely conscious of the forgiveness and mercy of God he has determined that his future should atone for the mistakes of his past. It has made him both tender and strong. He is humble but steeled for the task.
Those who know him best said that as Pope he was, both psychologically and spiritually, in a good place. He is ‘easily tough enough’, said his 64-year-old sister Maria Elena Bergoglio, who has reverted to her maiden name since she divorced. ‘I get the impression he’s very happy, and it made me think that the Holy Spirit must be right there with him. Rabbi Abraham Skorka, who has known the new Pope for two decades said: ‘From his recent phone calls he is feeling very at peace with myself. He’s in a very good established spiritual moment. He’s listening and analysing and meditating deeply. When he’s arrived at a conclusion, he’s unlikely to change his mind’. The human rights lawyer Alicia Oliveira, who has been a close friend for 40 years, said: ‘He tells me he’s having a great time. Every time I speak to him I tell him ‘Be careful Jorge, because the Borgias are still there in the Vatican’. He laughs and says he knows. But he’s very, very, very happy. He’s having fun with all the people in the Vatican telling him he can’t do things – and then doing them’.
Those in Argentina who find it hard to forget the past might well be counselled by Leonardo Boff who concluded: ‘What matters isn’t Bergoglio and his past, but Francis and his future’.
