Enigmatic leader at the moral frontier

Jorge Bergoglio’s election took the Vatican into uncharted territory. Continuing our series to mark the second anniversary of Francis’ election, a biographer traces his formative influences and examines how they will define his papacy

In August 2014, as he flew back from a tiring five-day trip to South Korea, Pope Francis was asked about his ­popular appeal. “I try to think of my sins, my mistakes, not to become proud, because I know it will only last a short time,” he said, before adding, “Two or three years and then I’ll be off to the Father’s House.” Less than a year on, there are few who believe his papacy will be a long one, while the jury is still out on Francis himself, with commentators divided on his achievements and what the future might hold in terms of reform.

Having spent the last two years taking a closer look at the life of Jorge Bergoglio, I believe that the key to unravelling at least in part what Argentinian Catholic journalist José María Poirier called in 2005 the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires’ “enigmatic profile” lies in the politics and culture he was brought up in, and the influence of his Jesuit formation. These are areas that define the idiosyncratic nature of his papacy.

Jorge Mario was born in 1936, during Argentina’s so-called decada infama, or ­“infamous decade”, marked by increasing political corruption and widening social divisions. The tango song “Cambalache” (Spanish for bazaar or junk shop) was popular with Italian immigrant families like the Bergoglios as a radical denunciation of Argentina as a failed society, squandering its huge potential, without accountable institutions or a moral compass: “That the world we live in was and is trash, I already know … It doesn’t matter these days if you are an upright man or a traitor ….” The lyrics read like a story foretold.

The only elected government to have stayed the course during the early years of Francis’ life, without being toppled by a coup, was that of General Juan Perón, who ruled from 1946 to 1955 and for nearly a year before his death in 1974. The notion Perón championed – that social justice can be reached by a balancing of the interests of capital and labour – touched the hearts of lower-middle-class immigrant Catholic families like the Bergoglios, echoing as it did the papal encyclicals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which defined official Catholic Social Teaching. But Perón also brought a claim to a distinct formula for the exercise of political power over the masses – the need for a measure of centralised control in the hands of a conductor, or charismatic leader. What set him apart from a tyrant or dictator was his pragmatism and the elasticity of his following, which cut across traditional ideologies and social sectors. No one who watched Perón perform in front of a mass audience could miss the symbiotic relationship between them.

No life of Jorge Bergoglio can make sense without an acknowledgement of Perón’s influence. Bergoglio chose to become a priest just at the time that the bishops and clergy broke with the Perón regime over the issue of divorce and the state’s intrusion into religious education, and were headed for confrontation.

By his own admission, Bergoglio was attracted to join the Jesuits because of their character as “an advance force of the Church, speaking military language, developed with obedience and discipline”, according to El Jesuita, the book of interviews by Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti. We do not know for sure what prompted him much later to enter the “dark night” of doubt and remorse after being replaced as head of the Jesuits and being sent, eventually, to semi-exile in Córdoba. But it seems likely that the criticism he received for not having done more to help those arrested and killed during the “dirty war” years from 1974 to 1983 may have weighed on his conscience. His outspoken defence of the poor and the victims of injustice became a key part of his narrative once he had been promoted to the hierarchy.

A lifeline was thrown to him in 1992 not by fellow Jesuits but by the papal nuncio and the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Antonio Quarracino, when they brought him out of obscurity and appointed him an auxiliary. Six years later, promotion as Quarracino’s successor gave Bergoglio not only power but a new, invigorated sense of mission. He showed courage in the face of a state he believed had lost its soul, speaking out against corruption and immorality; he also showed sincere modesty, dressing mostly as a simple cleric, travelling out to the shanty towns by public transport and telling his priests to “be out on the frontiers”, as he put it, just like the first Jesuit missionaries.

The cardinals who elected him Pope two years ago claimed to have God on their side, choosing a bishop they thought capable of facing up to the challenges of a world in desperate need of sound leadership and moral guidance – but a safe pair of hands, nonetheless, that would protect church teaching.

Despite examples in his years as bishop of showing sympathy towards those in vocational crisis, nothing in Bergoglio’s CV suggested a radical change of the Vatican’s position on women’s ordination or birth control, while his religious style and Christian outlook was evangelical with a huge respect for popular religion. Nevertheless, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires he gained a reputation as an able administrator and a deft political operator, sensitive to criticism, but making of his popularity a powerful weapon in taking on entrenched interests for a perceived greater good.

Yet his election in Rome took the Vatican and the world into uncharted territory. He took a new name in tribute to Francis of Assisi, the twelfth-century saint whose basic concerns had to do with paupertas (poverty), umilitas (humility) and simplicitas (simplicity). As the Catholic theologian Hans Küng remarked, if no previous pope had dared to take the name of Francis, it was probably because the expectation seemed to be too high.

While no Marxist, Pope Francis tended to see capitalism in terms of its effects on the Third World, and what he had experienced in Argentina was not liberal, but corrupt and crony-ridden. Thus did he write in his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel): “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.”

His interview with fellow Jesuit Antonio Spadaro in La Civiltà Cattolica, syndicated in Jesuit magazines around the world in August 2013, endures as a clear statement of Ignatian principles and a conscious act of ­reconciliation with the Jesuit order, several of whose members had been critical of his past leadership as too authoritarian. Francis held up as an example the mystical and missionary spirit of its founding fathers, and of Jesuits who had moved boldly into the modern age, “searching, creative, generous, going to the frontiers … looking at the horizon”. Few phrases seemed as applicable to the modern Church than the subsequently widely quoted – and so Ignatian – comparison the new Pope made between the Catholic Church and a “field hospital after a battle, in need of forgiveness and healing”.

If Francis remains enigmatic, it is because it remains far from clear to what extent his influences will shape and define his papacy. He inhabits a world made more complex by the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, the absence of clear-cut geopolitical divisions, and a crisis of leadership that has left the stability of the political class, even in long-established democracies, severely undermined. While doctrinally no radical, he appears to have set aside the authoritarianism he exercised as Jesuit provincial and embraced collegiality, a theme much emphasised during the Second Vatican Council, but a practice that had fallen by the wayside during the papacy of John Paul II, after he raised false expectations with his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint.

For now, this Pope continues to surprise and baffle, with his passionate pride in being Argentinian and Latin American, his impulsiveness in phrase and gesture, his Jesuit notion of breaking out of comfort zones and seeking new advice and friends. He is promising much that has yet to be delivered in his quest for justice in the world and unity within the Church, respecting its diversity as an ­integral part of its universality.

Jimmy Burns’ book, Francis, Pope of Good Promise, will be published in September by Constable/Little, Brown in Britain and St Martin’s Press in the US.