The Great Reformer Read online

  On paper, the visit looked familiar enough: the Alitalia Airbus A330 touching down on the airport tarmac, its cockpit flying the Vatican and local flags; the welcoming committee of politicians and bishops; the car drive to the city center, where he would board the popemobile to greet the multitudes. Yet in practice, almost everything was different. The first story of the trip was Francis carrying his own briefcase (it contained, he later told journalists, his prayer book or Breviary, a book in Italian on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and his diary), which was another nail in the coffin of papal monarchy: when had a pope ever carried anything himself? On the thirteen-hour flight, Francis seemed to be permanently active as he held meetings, revised texts, and spent what seemed like an eternity chatting with the pilots in the cockpit. “This pope has an extraordinary energy,” an exhausted Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s spokesman, told journalists the evening of their arrival.

  The real innovation of the flight was his handling of the vaticanisti, the Holy See–accredited journalists who accompany the pope on the papal plane. Rather than give scripted answers to pre-submitted reporters’ questions, as happened on Benedict XVI’s trips, Francis came back to greet them, ribbing them that journalists were not the saints to whom he had the strongest devotion. Meeting them one by one, he asked about their families and posed for selfies. The vaticanisti, who usually feel herded and neglected on such trips, were captivated. But they still needed a story, and he was careful to leave them with one—a five-minute reframing of WYD as inclusive of the elderly. “Many times, I think we do an injustice to the elderly by setting them aside,” Francis said, “as if they don’t have anything to give us. But they can give us the wisdom of life, the wisdom of the past, the wisdom of our country and our family. We need this.”

  On the return journey he would reward the press with a gift they were not expecting: a spontaneous, unfiltered, on-the-record question-and-answer session that lasted an astonishing hour and twenty minutes, during which Francis stood the whole time, thanking journalists for asking the kinds of questions—about gay people in the Curia, corruption at the Vatican’s bank—which it is assumed popes go to great effort to avoid answering. His responses were so frank that the journalists had a choice of lead stories. In the end, it was his response to a question about gay people—“Who am I to judge them if they’re seeking the Lord in good faith?”—that created the headlines and became the defining phrase of his early papacy.

  Arriving at Galeão airport, Francis asked permission of Brazilians to pass through “your great heart” to “come in and spend this week with you.” Quoting Saint Paul, he said, “I have neither silver nor gold, but I bring with me the most precious thing given to me: Jesus Christ.” After the greeting rituals with Brazil’s premier, Dilma Rousseff, she got into a helicopter, while he sat in the back of a Fiat hatchback with its window wound down, the papal arm hanging out. One of Ignatius of Loyola’s early companions, Jerónimo Nadal, once said that Jesuits have different kinds of houses or dwellings, but their most peaceful and pleasant house was the journey, “and by this last the whole world becomes our house.”

  It wasn’t long before Francis was stuck in a Rio traffic jam—his driver managed to turn off the road the police had cleared—and found himself mobbed by well-wishers. Many of the vaticanisti, who had been bussed in to the press center in time to witness the scenes on television, were horrified: surely anyone could attack him? But while the pope’s secretary had his heart in his throat, Francis was delighted. He was there, after all, to meet people. “When I’m going down the street I wind the window down, so I can put out my hand and greet people,” he later explained to Brazilian TV. “It’s all or nothing. Either you make the journey as you have to make it, with human communication, or you shouldn’t make it at all.” He apologized to the Vatican and Brazilian security teams, who he knew didn’t like it, but “they both know it’s not because I wish to be an enfant terrible, but because I am coming to visit people and I want to treat them as people—touch them.” But didn’t it make him vulnerable? asked TV Globo. “I’m not aware,” smiled Francis, “of being afraid.”

  After a rest day and the visit to Aparecida, Francis began wowing Rio. At the favela of Varginha—which used to be known locally as the Gaza Strip on account of its shoot-outs between rival drug gangs—Francis blessed the altar of the tiny breeze-block chapel of São Jerónimo Emiliani, which, with its eighteen simple wooden benches and brightly painted walls, its street dogs padding in and out, might have been Nuestra Señora de Caacupé in Buenos Aires, or indeed any chapel in any slum in any city of Latin America. Normally, a pope in such a place would have seemed a visitor from another planet, but with Francis it was the other way around. He was at home here, and if anything was out of place, it was the posse of journalists and the hundreds of flashing smartphones.

  After some time spent hugging, handshaking, kissing, teasing, hair ruffling, laughing, blessing, and playing with those waiting to touch him—including an elderly lady so excited she needed a defibrillator—he entered a one-room, newly bricked house festooned in yellow and white balloons whose occupants had been chosen to represent all the other families in Varginha. The cameras couldn’t follow, and inside Francis was able, for the first time since his election, to do what he spent much of his life doing, first as a Jesuit, and then as a bishop and archbishop—sitting with a family, listening to their stories, playing with their children, and leaving behind a little hope in warmed-up hearts.

  Then he made his way to the favela’s soccer field and called for the world to learn from the poor and change. “The culture of selfishness and individualism that often prevails in our society is not what builds up and leads to a more habitable world,” he said. “It is the culture of solidarity that does so, seeing others not as rivals or statistics, but brothers and sisters.”

  The pope as missionary was something new.

  Paul VI had traveled, a little, mostly for bridge-building meetings with political and religious leaders. John Paul II, until his infirmity, traveled constantly, like a great emperor organizing his populace, addressing great crowds in every place he visited. Benedict XVI, a regular but reluctant traveler, was shy and quiet-voiced, and liked to meet people in small groups. Francis was different again. He had neither the swagger of John Paul II nor the erudition of Benedict XVI. But what was fascinating was how, in meeting the crowds, he shifted the focus. With Paul VI, the attention was on the dignitaries he met; with John Paul II, it was inevitably on himself; with Benedict XVI, it was on the text he read. But with Francis the attention went to those he called God’s holy faithful people. Here was a pope who, when he was among them, made ordinary people the protagonists.

  At a meeting with Argentine pilgrims at Rio’s cathedral, which he at the last minute added to the schedule, he was among his own again and visibly relaxed. He could lapse into the sonorous Spanish of Buenos Aires after days of effortful attempts at Portuguese and be intimate with his countrymen, to whom he confessed that in the Vatican he felt, at times, caged. “I want to tell you something,” he told them, his voice slowing. “Do you want to know what I want to happen as a result of World Youth Day? Quiero lío. I want havoc.”

  Sure, here inside there’s going to be havoc, and here in Rio, too, but I want havoc in the dioceses, I want us out there, I want the Church to get out into the street, I want us to avoid everything that speaks of worldliness, of comfort, of clericalism, of being closed in on ourselves. The parishes, the schools, the institutions—these are all places to go out from, and if we don’t get out from them we become an NGO, and the Church cannot be an NGO!

  Hacer lío has a particular meaning in Argentina, where going out into the streets to bang saucepans and shout at the top of your voice indicates exuberant passion for a cause. But what did “create havoc” mean in Los Angeles or London? The confusion was even greater when a church news agency mistranslated the expression as “I want to create a mess,” leaving Catholics in English-speaking count
ries perplexed as to what their pope was asking them to do.

  But the address to Argentines showed, in close-up, the extraordinary bond Francis created with people. He demonstrated it even at the massive events on Copacabana Beach, when he was evangelizer-in-chief, rousing the young pilgrims with challenging questions and stark choices, inviting them to become missionary disciples “poised toward the peripheries … in the encounter with Jesus Christ.” But even there, his quiet, firm voice created a different dynamic; he roused, not by matching the energy of the crowd but by achieving a strange kind of intimacy, as if dialoging with each person present.

  This was never clearer than at the Stations of the Cross on Copacabana Beach on July 26. This traditional devotion imaginatively follows Jesus on the journey of humiliation and pain that ends with his death on the Cross; Catholic churches have the fourteen stations—stages—on their walls, traditionally in the form of white plaster images. Playing with this idea, the Brazilians hired an actor to play Jesus as a white plaster statue who came to life in scenes of modern suffering along the seafront. At the Tenth Station, Jesus, bruised and beaten, struggled up a bloodred ramp against a backdrop of neon signs of some of Rio’s leading beachside hotels—a powerful symbol of poverty and suffering amid wealth. When he gave a meditation at the conclusion, Francis addressed the millions of pilgrims as if he were leading a small group on a Jesuit retreat, inviting them to identify with a character in the Passion story—Pontius Pilate, Simon of Cyrene, Mary, or the women of Jerusalem—and asking a series of searching questions, followed by long pauses.

  At the following night’s prayer vigil, Francis invited young people to become missionary disciples at the service of the Church—“athletes of Christ” who are training for something “much bigger than the World Cup.” The training, he said, involved daily prayer, sacraments, and loving others (“learning to listen, to understand, to forgive, to be accepting and to help others, everybody, with no one excluded or ostracized”) in order to build a more just and fraternal society, starting with each person. He asked them, in the manner of evangelical preachers, to respond, to give their “yes.” But as the evening wore on, Francis calmed them, inviting them to kneel before what the Brazilian Church claimed to be history’s biggest eucharistic host. There he took three million pilgrims into a place of depth and stillness, framed by the crashing Atlantic waves.

  At the first service with the pilgrims, he watched a series of musical performances put on to welcome him. He shifted often in his chair; Francis is not a sedentary type and suffers from sciatica, which makes sitting down for long periods a chore. But there was one performance he appeared to enjoy the most: a choir of Guaraní people from the rain forests of Paraguay singing “Ave María” from Ennio Morricone’s score of The Mission.

  The 1986 film, directed by Roland Joffé, is a firm Jesuit favorite, not least for the Robert Bolt script, the Morricone theme music, and its actors—Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, and Liam Neeson playing priests and brothers in the Jesuit missions, known as “Reductions,” of eighteenth-century Paraguay. The Mission tells the inspiring, ultimately tragic story of the century-long civilization that emerged from the encounter between Jesuits and the Guaraní natives, and its destruction on the orders of far-off rulers in collusion with greedy colonists.

  The story of the Reductions taught Jorge Bergoglio important lessons, giving him a model for the evangelization he would promote as a Jesuit and bishop. They stood for a radical immersion in the life of the people, on the basis of an exchange of gifts—the Jesuits opening to the culture of the Guaraní, the culture of the Guaraní opening to receive the seed of the Gospel—while showing him how to inculturate the Gospel and to advocate for the poor. In pondering the Reductions’ tragic end, he also took valuable lessons that would shape his political and historical consciousness.

  * * *

  JORGE applied to the Society of Jesus while in his second year at the seminary in the barrio of Villa Devoto, where priests for Buenos Aires diocese are trained. Because the Jesuits before 1960 ran the seminary, he was in constant contact with them: the rector, his spiritual director, and many of the teachers were Jesuits.

  The archdiocesean seminary, with its thick walls and iron grilles, was the formidable occupant of an entire block on José Cubas Street. It took boys as young as twelve into the minor seminary, some of whom stayed on to train as priests. The older ones, like Jorge, were known informally as los viudos, the widowers, because they were between minor and major seminaries. Formally he was a Latinist, one of those who had finished secondary school but needed a solid basis of Latin and Greek to advance to philosophy and theology studies at a major seminary.

  His nickname at the seminary was El Gringo, perhaps because of his European features and tall frame. He is remembered as studious, low-profile, but approachable, well-mannered, and well-respected, a good conversationalist and (like everyone else at the seminary) a soccer player. Jorge González Manent (“Goma”), a friend from Flores Catholic Action circles, visited him on Sundays and found him “a normal guy, happy in life.” The seminarians went out on weekends to help in parishes; Jorge’s was San Francisco Solano in Villa Luro. The timetable was divided between communal prayer (Matins, Vespers, and Compline), Mass, study, meals in silence, and free time spent in organized sports, mainly soccer. Among those who taught there, and excelled on the pitch, was the handsome, upper-class Father Carlos Mugica, the reference point for a whole generation of activist slum priests who in the late 1960s would commit themselves to social revolution.

  Part of the reason Jorge had taken time to enter the seminary was his difficulty in giving up marriage. People “want their cake and to eat it, too,” he said in 2011; “they want what is good in the consecrated life and what is good in the life of a layperson, too. Before entering the seminary, I was on that path.” Now, in his first year at the seminary, he was forced to make that choice again, after meeting at an uncle’s wedding a young woman whose beauty and intellect sent him spinning. For days, whenever he tried to pray she would appear in his head. He was beset by doubts: was this a sign that he wasn’t suited to celibacy? Could he live without sexual love, the companionship of a woman, the joy of children? He had taken no vows and was free to leave; should he?

  Eventually he made his decision to stay, and found he could pray again. But he had been open to the alternative. When such moments occur, he would later say as cardinal, it may be a sign that a seminarian is unable to commit to celibacy and priesthood, in which case, “I help him to leave in peace, so he can be a good Christian and not a bad priest.”

  In his second year at Villa Devoto, Jorge began to discern in earnest the possibility of giving up training for diocesan priesthood to join the Jesuits. He admired their missionary spirit and discipline, their commitment to poverty, and, above all, their spirituality. As a Jesuit he would be a priest, but not one based in a parish; he would live in a community of other Jesuits and would be answerable to a Jesuit superior rather than to a bishop. It would also mean the longest period of training anywhere in the Catholic Church: at least a decade before he was ordained, and thirteen or fourteen years before he was a fully professed Jesuit.

  As he was discerning that decision, he was brought down by an illness that took him to the edge of death. It began in August of 1957 with a devastating pleurisy that resisted antibiotics. Barely able to breathe, his life in danger, he was rushed to the Syrian-Lebanese hospital close to the seminary, where surgeons removed three pulmonary cysts and a small part of his upper right lung. He spent five days in an oxygen tent followed by an extremely painful post-op month during which he was pumped with saline with a catheter in his chest to remove the dead pleura and scar tissue.

  For Jorge, then twenty-one, it was his first experience of intense physical suffering. At times delirious with pain, he begged his visitors to explain what was happening. His mother, among others, tried to comfort him by attempting to displace his thoughts: it will soon pass, she told him, it wi
ll all be okay, you’ll be home before you know it. But Jorge wasn’t reassured: the pain and danger of the moment were far more real than any future he was asked to imagine.

  As Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, would later show in his memories of the Nazi death camps, the secret to enduring great suffering is not to try to imagine its end but to find meaning in its present.1 That is what Sister Dolores, the nun who had prepared him for First Communion, helped him to do when she visited. Her simple words—“with your pain, you are imitating Christ”—revolved in his head and brought peace. What had been pointless was now redemptive; the pain was no less, but bearing it became possible.

  The meaning of pain, he would reflect years later, “can only be understood fully through the pain of God who became Christ.” Christ’s suffering on the Cross was intensely lonely. In any deep suffering, physical or spiritual, what a person needs is people who love them, who respect their silence, and who “pray that God may enter into this space which is pure solitude.” Two seminarians, José Bonet Alcón and José Barbich, took on that role, taking turns at his bedside, sometimes spending all night at the hospital. When Jorge needed it, they donated their blood—a liter and a half in a person-to-person transfusion.

  Among the other angels at that time was a ward sister who tripled his dose of penicillin and streptomycin because “she was daringly astute. She knew what to do because she was with ill people all day.” He believes he is alive today because of her. The doctor, a good man called Deal, “lived in a laboratory,” Francis told Father Spadaro, whereas the ward sister “lived on the frontier and was in dialogue with it every day.”

  Laboratory versus frontier: the choice was taking shape in his mind. As pope, Francis would challenge the Jesuits: “Are we consumed with zeal? Or are we mediocre, satisfied with our apostolic plans that come from a laboratory?” Where the laboratory for Jorge signified cerebral artifice, the frontier stood for immersion in human reality, alive with God’s surprises.