PAUL VALLELY How life in the slums changed the Pope As leader of Argentina’s Jesuits, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a staunch conservative. Now, as Pope Francis, he has put caring for the poor at the heart of his ministry. Here, in a second extract from a new book, the writer traces Bergoglio’s spiritual transformation There are books on liberation theology on sale in the foyer of the Colegio Máximo Seminary, in Buenos Aires, which Jorge Mario Bergoglio forbade students to read when he was leader of Argentina’s Jesuits in the 1970s and 1980s. To the side of the grand entrance, with its stone arches and heavy smell of polish on the dark mahogany, is a glass-fronted case containing titles like Labour and Capital and The Theology of Liberation and the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church. But if the Colegio Máximo has changed, so has Bergoglio, who was an authoritarian conservative as Jesuit provincial and seminary rector but has been transformed from the scourge of liberation theology to a Pope for the poor. Those who know Bergoglio well testify to the extent of that change. One of his former Jesuit pupils, Fr Rafael Velasco, now rector of the Catholic University of Córdoba, said: “Bergoglio was so very conservative that I was rather shocked years later when he started talking about the poor. It wasn’t something that seemed at the top of his agenda at the time but clearly became so as a bishop. Something changed.” The Pope’s old friend, Rabbi Abraham Skorka, insists that “he has changed according to his life’s experience”. Fr Miguel Yáñez, who was received into the Jesuits by Bergoglio – and is now head of moral theology at the Gregorian University in Rome – said: “He did change. It was mostly when he was a bishop and an archbishop. Being outside the tensions and complex atmosphere of the Society [of Jesus], he possibly became more open to dialogue and more open generally.” What transformed Bergoglio? External events played their part. The end of the Cold War and the restoration of democracy in Argentina in 1983 after the fall of the military junta made working with the poor seem less threatening. But regular contact with the poorest of the poor in the Buenos Aires slums played a part. There, Bergoglio learned to see the world differently, said Fr Augusto Zampini, a diocesan priest from Greater Buenos Aires who has taught at the Colegio Máximo. “When you’re working in a shanty town, 90 per cent of your congregation are single or divorced. You have to learn to deal with that. Communion for the divorced and remarried is not an issue. Everyone takes Communion.” Bergoglio never altered his doctrinal orthodoxy on such matters, but he did not allow dogma to overrule the priority of pastoral concern. “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.” Bergoglio’s visits to the slums brought him into contact with a huge number of ordinary people. One slum priest estimated that over his 18 years as bishop and archbishop, he must have personally talked to at least half the people in the slum. He would just turn up, wander the alleyways, chat to the locals and drink mate herbal tea with them. Fr Guillermo Marcó, his aide for eight years, said: “He doesn’t see the poor as people he can help but rather as people from whom he can learn.” A new openness developed in Bergoglio. The man who once saw the poor as objects of philanthropy began, over his 15 years as “bishop of the slums”, to make use of the insights of liberation theology with regard to economic structures which were so corrupt that they constituted structures of oppression which were sinful. By the 2001 economic crisis, which forced Argentina to default on its US$94 billion [£60.7bn] debt to foreign banks, he had developed an understanding that what the poor need is not charity but justice. The “unjust distribution of goods” creates “a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers”, he lamented. “Unjust economic structures” were violations of human rights. Throughout the slum parishes, Bergoglio and his priests put that into action. He worked to support the cartoneros – some of the poorest people in Buenos Aires, who make a living sorting through the city’s garbage to find and buried next to the first Hogar de Cristo in the parish church of Jesus, the Worker, which he had founded. He was canonised, as St Alberto Hurtado, in 2005. Six years after his death, the 21-year-old Jorge Mario Bergoglio entered the Jesuit novitiate in Cordoba, where Alberto had completed his novitiate in 1925. There is no straight line which shows a clear influence of Hurtado on Bergoglio, but in 1960, after the novitiate, he went to the Chilean city of Padre Hurtado in 1954, to study humanities before beginning philosophy studies. His later ministry, particularly as a bishop and now as Pope, has been characterised by going out to the margins on behalf of those in need. Both these Jesuits have highlighted Christ’s personal love for each of us, which we are called to reflect to those who need our help. Like the Good Shepherd, we are sent to look for those who are wounded, rather than waiting for them to ask for help. St Alberto and Pope Francis concentrate on personal acts of charity made flesh rather than the theory of how to resolve problems. Liberation theology is one theoretical model for changing society in favour of the poor, but this saint and this Pope show it is not the only and brought back to the district where he had exercised his ministry. He celebrated Mass and expressed contrition for “the complicit silence” of the Church at the time. In 2005, he authorised a request for the beatification of six members of the Pallottine community murdered by a military death squad. In 2006, he travelled to La Rioja, in northern Argentina, to say Mass for the anniversary of the death of Bishop Enrique Angelelli, killed in a fake car crash in 1976. “History has its ironies,” Bergoglio said when he went to the Catholic University of Argentina theology faculty in Buenos Aires in 2012 to honour the memory of Rafael Tello, one of the founders of Argentinian liberation theology, who was in his day silenced by the Church. Tello, Bergoglio now confessed, had made “one of the most important contributions” to the Church in Argentina. “Nobody who has opened up new paths leaves without scars on his body,” he observed wryly. Most recently, not long after becoming Pope, Bergoglio privately contacted one of the liberation theologians most reviled by Rome – the former Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff, who had been condemned to “obsequious silence” and suspended from his duties by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for his theology. It is a measure of the extent of his turnaround that Pope Francis asked Boff to send him his writings on eco-theology in preparation for a major encyclical he is considering on environmental matters. What shines through all this change is that Bergoglio is a pragmatist rather than an ideologue. As provincial in the 1970s, he was severe in his instructions to his Jesuits that they must serve only in parishes and not in liberation theology’s smaller, bottom-up base communities, where laymen and -women took the place of priests and the poor learned to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Yet, as archbishop, he reversed this attitude, giving the exact opposite instructions. “If you can, rent a garage and find some willing layman, let him go there, do a little catechesis, and even give Communion,” he told his priests. “He was also concerned with getting the laity active,” said his aide Federico Wals, “and letting them take charge.” He wanted it to become a permanent feature of the Church that its mission should not depend on whoever happened to be in charge at any given time. But there was something more profound at the core of the change in Bergoglio’s politics and personality. His key decisions are all made during his long sessions of daily prayer. It is difficult to overstate the importance of prayer in his life, said his former close aide, Guillermo Marcó. “He liked to wake at 4.30 a.m. to 5 a.m. every morning to pray. He makes decisions while he prays.” In Buenos Aires, he often prayed for two hours before the start of his day. Prayer was so important to him, said Marcó, that as archbishop he would rarely accept invitations to dinner. “He knew that if he did, he wouldn’t get up early. And he did not want to miss that prayer time. He has a very strong relationship with God.” In prayer, Bergoglio struggled against his earlier authoritarian personality to become the person he believes God wants him to be. Over the years, the Ignatian exercises at the heart of Jesuit spirituality have honed and refined his instincts. It is this which most opened Bergoglio’s capacity to change. If it is impossible for us to see into another’s soul, those exercises have made Bergoglio see further into his own. That has been evident in what he has said as well as done. In his rare interview with the Argentinan journalists Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, he admitted to “hundreds of errors” when life pushed him early into leadership roles. In his conversations with Rabbi Skorka, he opined that “guilt, without atonement, does not allow us to grow”. Regret is not sufficient; there has to be change. By changing his style of spiritual leadership so radically, Bergoglio is saying to the world that he has made a change of heart – and that a change of behaviour is its fruit. Just before he left for Rome and the conclave, he penned what turned out to be his last Lenten message to the people of Buenos Aires. Morality, he said, is not a “never falling down” but an “always getting up again”. And that is a response to God’s mercy. Mercy has been the greatest of Bergoglio’s themes as Pope. “Mercy is the Lord’s most powerful message,” he has said. “It is not easy to trust oneself to the mercy of God – but we must do it.” From Jesus, he said, we will “not hear words of contempt [or] condemnation, but only words of love, of mercy, that invite us to conversion. ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more ...’ The problem is that we get tired of asking forgiveness.” Bergoglio has changed, is the message, but changes will continue for Francis, too. The man who is now Pope remains, he is telling us, a work in progress. ■Extracted from Pope Francis: untying the knots by Paul Vallely, published by Bloomsbury at £12.99.
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 15:05:01 +0000