The Great Reformer Read online

  They arrived in the River Plate within a generation of Ignatius’s death, going among both conquered and unassimilated native peoples. There were no great sedentary civilizations in the region, only scattered clusters of seminomads, the largest of which were the Guaraní, who lived in the rain forests between the rivers on the border of today’s Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.

  When the Jesuits arrived in Tucumán from Peru in 1585, the heart of the River Plate province was not the Atlantic coast as it later became, but the mountains in what is today northwest Argentina, then part of Upper Peru, centered on the great silver mine at Potosí in today’s Bolivia. Buenos Aires had just then come into existence as an entrepôt for contraband, through which silver was smuggled out and foreign goods smuggled in, bypassing the royal monopoly.

  Spanish colonial policy prohibited the enslavement of natives; they were to be subjugated, gathered into a “Reduction” (from the Latin reducere, “to group together”), offered baptism, and assigned to a settler who could demand work from them. But the system quickly broke down. The settler, anxious to get rich, exploited his charges in brutal conditions, leading the natives to flee to the rain forest, where they were captured and sold as slaves; and the church mission, unfunded, quickly collapsed.

  Shocked at the greed of the colonists, the wretchedness of the Indians, and the corruption of the Church, the Jesuits arriving in the 1580s sought to create a new kind of Reduction that would protect the baptized natives from the colonial population. Having won the trust of the Guaraní—who had escaped the worst of the settlers by living in the thick vast forests above the Iguazú Falls—they created in 1604 a new Jesuit province of Paraguay, separate from Peru, which would “take the missions to the Indians who were found on the periphery of the cities and at the edge of the conquered districts,” wrote its first provincial, Father Diego de Torres.6

  The Jesuits arrived in Guayrá, the land of the Guaraní, just as the Portuguese settlers in Brazil were making incursions into the area in search of slaves to work on their plantations. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1594 demarcating Spanish and Portuguese boundaries was, at best, an arbitrary line that ran through today’s southern Brazil and northern Argentina. Anxious about Portuguese incursions, the Spanish Crown saw the advantages of a buffer zone and agreed to the Jesuits’ request for natives to be exempt from labor and taxes—and to be able to carry firearms to keep out intruders, whether Portuguese slavers or Spanish colonists. For their part the Indian chiefs, aware that they were surrounded by enemies, and impressed by the intelligence and understanding shown by the Jesuits, agreed to be “reduced” and to accept the authority and protection of the Spanish Crown. On the basis of this fragile balance of alliances and interests, expanding from the first one, at San Ignacio Guazú, a remarkable enterprise was born.

  At their peak between 1640 and 1720, there were around 150,000 Guaraní in more than forty Reductions, served by around two hundred Jesuits. Most were in what is today northern Argentina. Each Reduction had just a handful of Jesuits, one of whom was the parish priest, who oversaw, in collaboration with the cacique, villages that varied from two thousand to ten thousand inhabitants. William Bangert describes a typical village in its heyday:

  From a central plaza, pointing north, south, east and west and built of the material of the area, even stone and adobe, spread the homes of the people, who sometimes numbered up to 10,000. Close by stood the assembly of workshops with tools for carpentry, masonry, metal work. Behind the homes stretched the fruit orchards, the pasture land for cattle, and the farms which provided wheat, rice, sugar cane and cotton. In the church, the noblest edifice of all and the center of community life, the Indians, instructed in the dignity of the liturgy and inspired by the beauty of the altar, sang their hymns and played musical instruments.… To establish such centers of faith … the Jesuits brought, in addition to the sacraments and the rewards of God, their skills as metallurgists, cattle raisers, architects, farmers and masons.7

  The Jesuits didn’t only evangelize the Guaraní, but formed them into a modern nation. The missionaries’ respect for their language and culture was real: the Guaraní grammar books, catechisms, and other records they compiled show it. Where the native peoples’ habits contradicted the Gospel, the Jesuits sought to change them, but they did so by first grasping the rationale for their behavior: the Guaraní custom of killing disabled children at birth, for example, was an imperative of the nomadic way of life, which the stable existence of the Reductions made unnecessary. In order to combat the destructiveness of alcoholism—the Guaraní were attached to a lethal fermented brew called chicha—the Jesuits encouraged the habit of drinking the smoky green tea called mate from a gourd through a straw, as Pope Francis does each morning.

  Jesuits and natives shared an indifference to what obsessed the settlers—gold and silver—but they were not afraid of technology. The Jesuits introduced iron tools that led to a revolution in productivity that over time produced surpluses and wealth that were used for the benefit of the Reductions. As the taste for mate spread throughout the colony, the tea leaves, known as yerba, became their principal export.

  Life was disciplined, a balance of work and prayer, punctuated by festivals combining Jesuit theatrical religiosity and local natural and tribal customs. The Guaraní were great musicians and craftspeople; from their schools and workshops came famous carved wood instruments and in time the most stunning churches in the region, incorporating native motifs and styles. The Reductions had large choirs and composers of a distinctive genre of sacred music, such as the Guaraní-composed “Ave María” that had entranced Pope Francis on Copacabana Beach.

  In a talk Bergoglio gave in 1985 in Mendoza to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the Jesuits arriving in Argentina, he praised this “inculturation” as a model for missionaries and pastors, who need to recognize the inherent dignity of every culture and to become enmeshed with it, renouncing their own culture as far as possible and taking on the other. This degree of inculturation, he added, was costly, especially when a Jesuit is called to another mission and must go through the process again. “When he is moved, he feels pain,” said Bergoglio. “If it doesn’t hurt he’s not a Jesuit.”8

  The Paraguay Reductions were the most famous and emblematic, but by no means the only, Jesuit missions in the River Plate. Across the colony the Jesuits became the advocates of subjugated natives, demanding they be remunerated for their labor, a stance that won the Jesuits few friends. In a 1977 talk in Santa Fe, Bergoglio recalled how the Abipone and Mocobi would gather in the Jesuit college in that city to discuss with its rector the advantages of being “reduced” with the help and protection of the Jesuits. Because of their bad experience with the colonists, the older natives preferred to remain nomads, but their chief or cacique, who trusted the rector, was persuaded that it was in their interests. The Jesuits acted, in this way, as seventeenth-century community organizers among the poor.9

  Yet they also ran highly successful chains of ranches and plantations that became trade and manufacturing hubs, linked by a kind of parallel trade network, not unlike the monasteries of medieval Europe. Fewer than five hundred Jesuits in the eighteenth century ran these estancias as managers, deploying African slaves in common with other estancias of the time—a practice that the Jesuits seem not to have questioned.

  The Jesuits benefited from centralized administration, command of large capital, and the ability to avoid taxation. The wealth accrued from the efficient management of this parallel economy paid for the Jesuits’ formidable education network: by the mid-1750s there were Jesuit colleges in all the cities, of which those of Córdoba and Santa Fe were the oldest and most important. The point of Jesuit colleges in the colonial period was to form leaders for service to king and Church, with one of them—the collegium maximum, or Colegio Máximo—designated as the formation house for the Jesuits themselves. The Jesuit college was not just a set of classrooms: it was a community of scholars, a place of humanist r
esearch, and the heart of the cultural life of the creole elite. The Jesuits presided over the colleges as guardians of the colony’s know-how: they were astronomers, botanists, pharmacists, printers, zoologists, cartographers, and architects, as well as theologians and jurists, admired not just for their knowledge and accomplishments but also for their discipline and personal austerity.

  * * *

  THE Jesuits were deeply unpopular with mid-eighteenth-century European monarchs looking to extend their control over society. This was an era when the Catholic Church had become increasingly yoked to the national state; the Jesuits, with their wealth and their loyalty to the pope, were out of step, and their independence now looked like insolence. What was especially offensive to the new generation of enlightened absolutists in the courts of Madrid, Lisbon, and Paris were the writings of the Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez, whose theory of the democratic origin of authority was a standard text in Jesuit colleges of the time.

  Suárez’s theory can be summarized in four principles: no ruler has civil authority directly from God; those who rule receive their authority through the intermediation of the people; the people grant authority, and this is the source of a governor’s legitimacy; the power, being transferred, can be withdrawn, and therefore power is circumscribed. Although these principles were little more than a restatement of the classic Catholic understanding of power, they appeared dangerously subversive in the era of absolutist rulers such as Carlos III of Spain, who claimed to govern by divine right and accepted no limits on his sovereignty.

  The Reductions had been created in an era underpinned by those Suarezian ideas. The Guaraní had been melded into a nation; they were a people, a culture, with dignity and autonomy that the Crown should by rights protect and defend. But the new political ideology of absolutism had no time for such medieval niceties. The Reductions would be crushed by the stroke of distant royal pens on a 1750 treaty drawing new Spanish and Portuguese boundaries in South America.

  In exchange for the port of Sacramento, Spain handed over to the Portuguese seven of the Reductions east of the new frontier, together with their inhabitants. It took eighteen years for the Spanish and Portuguese royal forces to dismember the Guaraní missions. The natives fought hard to protect their villages. More than ten thousand were killed in appalling massacres; thousands of others were captured as slaves or fled back to the forests. The Jesuit general in Rome ordered the missionaries to abide by the treaty and leave, but some refused and even took up arms in their defense—stances dramatized by Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) and Rodrigo (Robert De Niro) in The Mission’s tragic finale.

  The next step was not long in coming. The Crowns of Portugal, France, and Spain expelled the Jesuits from their territories and seized their assets. A few years later, in 1773, harassed and threatened by those same monarchs, and politically captive to Madrid, Pope Clement XIV ordered the suppression and abolition of the Society of Jesus.

  The departure of the Jesuits from the Spanish colonies was traumatic. On April 2, 1767, some 5,350 Jesuits across the world were surrounded, arrested, and put on boats bound for the papal states following a decree of Spain’s Carlos III “for reasons he reserves to himself.” From the River Plate sailed 457 Jesuits, of whom 162 were Spanish, 81 local, and the rest Europeans of different nations. Soon after, a royal decree ordered the suppression of all the teaching chairs associated with the Jesuits, as well as books by Jesuit authors. Carlos III was trying to eliminate not only a religious order but its seditious ideas.10

  The Jesuit expulsion was Latin America’s Boston Tea Party, a blow to the economy and well-being of colonial society from which it never recovered, and the cause of deep resentment in the creole population. It was followed by Carlos III’s Bourbon Reforms, which sought to bring the American territories more tightly under Madrid’s control, and which only heightened the resentment, severing the bonds of affection and loyalty between Spain and its territories. Within decades the territories had become independent nations. The architects of the new Argentine nation had been trained in Jesuit colleges—specifically, that of Córdoba—and when they declared self-rule in 1810 they did so appealing to those same ideas of Suárez that the colonial authorities had tried so hard to suppress.

  In his 1988 speech on the Jesuit martyrs of Paraguay, Bergoglio saw in the Reductions an embodiment of the Suárez ideal—the Gospel, brought by the Jesuits, uniting the people, forming a Guaraní nation—and the 1750 treaty that ended them as the consequence of a brutal, detached, rationalist ideology. In Carlos III he saw a prince forgetting and betraying his people, and imposing an enlightened ideology that was divorced from the people themselves. Where the Jesuit Reductions were a project of the heart, paternalistic in the best sense of the word—caring, tender, seeking the freedom and well-being of their charges, incarnate in the cultural reality of the natives—their annihilation was the product of an ideology imposed from above: a project of the mind, coercing reality to fit an idea, which turns people into its instruments.

  “The fruitful universality which integrates and respects differences was replaced by an absorbent metropolitan hegemony, of the most domineering kind,” Bergoglio said of the Bourbon Reforms. “These lands, which were ‘provinces’ of the Kingdom [of Spain], were turned into colonies. There was no longer room here for projects of the heart: now was the era of the enlightenment of the mind.” In the 1960s he would develop this dichotomy into something close to a doctrine, in which the poor, the pueblo fiel, are a kind of vaccine against the destructive effect of ideology, of left or right—whether the Bourbon Reforms, nineteenth-century economic liberalism, or twentieth-century Marxism.11

  It is hard to think of a more thorough rejection of the Enlightenment project than in a retreat Bergoglio gave in the 1970s. “The worst that can happen to a human being,” he said, “is to allow oneself to be swept along by the ‘lights’ of reason.… Our mission is instead to discover the seeds of the Word within humanity, the logo spermatakoi.”12 It is a theme Pope Francis returned to in his meeting in Rio with the bishops of Latin America, when he warned against making the Gospel an ideology—whether free-market liberalism, Marxism, or certain forms of “psychologizing.” Noting that Gnosticism—an early Christian heresy—was the “first deviation” in the Church that has reappeared throughout its history, he told the bishops: “Generally its adherents are known as ‘enlightened Catholics,’ since they are in fact rooted in the culture of the Enlightenment.”13

  In the “Declaration of Principles” Bergoglio wrote as Jesuit provincial for the Universidad del Salvador in 1974, he portrayed the Society of Jesus’s clash with the Bourbon state in Catholic nationalist terms, as defending an incarnate culture from a disembodied ideology. From the beginning, he said, the Society of Jesus has respected the diversity of cultures (“The truth of Christ is one, but many and unique are its human and historical manifestations”). Therefore

  it is unsurprising that the Society should find itself confronting the growing liberal-bourgeois claim to homogenize the historical and human reality of the world, by means of a centralizing statism and an enlightenment rationalism, to the detriment of the multifaceted richness of the created world.… In China as well as in the River Plate, the Society refused to act as the religious justification of European expansion, in endowing the people of their missions with the social and organizing elements that allowed them freely to develop their unique culture, integrating them into the universality of a Faith which they assimilated as their own. The Society is, from its foundation, universalist; and for that reason opposed to the homogenizing internationalisms which, either by “reason” or by force, deny peoples their right to be themselves.14

  Fifteen years after Pope Pius VII reestablished the Society in 1814, the Jesuits returned to the River Plate—now independent from Spain—at the invitation of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. It didn’t go well. When the Jesuits refused to put his portrait on their altars and preach against his political enemies, they were
again expelled, and would not return until after the dictator was deposed. In the 1850s some churches were returned to them, and by the 1870s the Jesuits had reestablished themselves as educators in different cities, founding or refounding prestigious schools such as the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción in Santa Fe and the Colegio del Salvador in the capital. They were also entrusted with the Metropolitan Seminary in Buenos Aires where in 1956 Jorge Bergoglio met them.

  By then the Jesuits were again one of the largest and most important of the religious orders in Argentina. In 1961, when the Uruguayan Jesuits split to create their own province, there were 407 members in the Argentine province—a number not far off what it had been before Carlos III expelled them. But compared to its earlier, eighteenth-century self, the Society of Jesus was in many ways an emasculated animal. Missions were geared less to the frontier than to manning the fortress that protected the Church from the modern world.

  Within that fortress, there was little room for uncertainty or innovation. The Exercises were given as group retreats, with talks and exhortations, rather than the personal individual encounter that Saint Ignatius had designed. The foundational texts were buried in a mound of commentaries. Contrary to the original spirit of the order, Jesuit trainees were infantilized by summaries and manuals that stipulated how many shirts a Jesuit should have and what he should eat for breakfast. In his interview with Father Spadaro in September 2013, Francis recalled the environment in which he was formed as one of “closed and rigid thought, more instructive-ascetic than mystical.”

  Bergoglio’s vocation survived the deficiencies of this formation because he was able to penetrate beneath the scholastic layers to the sixteenth-century “primitive charism” of the early Jesuits, which would be his model for reform. Sinking his roots deep into Ignatius’s sixteenth-century loam enabled him to survive the post–Vatican Council chaos within the Society of Jesus. Above all he learned the capacity for spiritual discernment that would become second nature to him.