Joseph Matthews
sketches a biography of the man who has
become the 265th successor to St Peter and outlines his stance on some key
issues.
Early life
Jorge Mario
Bergoglio was born on December 17, 1936 in the middle class district of Flores
in the centre part of Buenos Aires City. He was one of the five children of an
Argentinian born housewife and an immigrant railway worker from the Piedmont
region of Italy who according to María Elena – the Pope’s only living sibling –
left the country out of disaffection for Italy’s fascist dictatorship.
Jorge was a normal child, collected stamps,
was keen on basketball and fond of playing football at the Church school where
he studied as a child. The whole family would go to watch their favourite
football team – San Lorenzo – play. It was as Bergoglio put it, ‘the team of
our loves’ as his parents came from the Almagro suburb home to the San Lorenzo
team. (And he is still a card-carrying member of the San Lorenzo team, who are
nicknamed ‘The Saints’.) He enjoyed dancing the tango and the milonga (a more
rustic style of tango). He also had his childhood romances, which included in
once case at least, a marriage proposal as a childhood sweetheart Amalia
Damonte, now 76, revealed: ‘When we were twelve he wrote me a letter saying
that if he didn’t marry me, he’d become a priest.’ He had a girlfriend until he
discovered his vocation to the priesthood.
Vocation
Bergoglio has described a key event in the
discovery of his vocation to the priesthood as having taken place when he was
about seventeen years of age. It was the September 21, which in Argentina is a
day dedicated to students and the young Bergoglio was preparing to go out with
some friends to celebrate when he decided to kick off the day by paying a visit
to his parish church. On entering he encountered a priest whom he didn’t know
but who exuded a certain air of holiness which led the young man to decide to
go to confession with him.
During this confession something unusual
happened to me: I don’t know what it was but it changed my life. I would say
that it surprised me with my guard down.... It was the surprise, the amazement
of an encounter – I realised that I was being waited for. This is what a
religious experience is: the amazement of an encounter with someone who has
been waiting for you. From that moment on God was for me the one who
anticipates you. You look for him but He seeks you out first. You want to
find Him, but He finds you first.
Firstly I told my dad and he was happy with
it, but the reaction of my mum was different. The truth is that she got pretty
annoyed. (El Jesuita. Conversaciones con el cardenal Jorge Bergoglio, SJ.,
Sergio Rubín y Francesca Ambrogetti, Vergara editor, pp. 45-47).
Before joining the Jesuit order, he graduated
from the technical secondary school Escuela Nacional de Educación Técnica N° 27
Hipólito Yrigoyen with a chemical technician’s diploma. He worked for a few
years in that capacity in the foods section at Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory.
During this time he experienced the only known health crisis of his youth when
at the age of twenty-one he suffered from life-threatening pneumonia and cysts
and had part of a lung removed shortly afterwards.
Bergoglio himself described a certain
testing of his vocation which occured while he was studying for the
priesthood:
When I was a seminarian, I was dazzled by a
girl I met at an uncle’s wedding. I was surprised by her beauty, her
intellectual brilliance ... and, well, I was bowled over for quite a while. I
kept thinking and thinking about her. When I returned to the seminary after the
wedding, I could not pray for over a week because when I tried to do so, the
girl appeared in my head. I had to rethink what I was doing. I was still free
because I was a seminarian, so I could have gone back home and that was
it. I had to think about my choice again. I chose again – or let myself
be chosen by – the religious path. It would be abnormal for this kind of thing
not to happen.
Following his high school graduation, he enrolled
at the University of Buenos Aires, where he received a master's degree in
chemistry before beginning training at the Jesuit seminary of Villa Devoto. In
March 1958, he entered the Society of Jesus.
Bergoglio and the 1970s military regime
Recently the Holy See has had to clarify
that claims made by some ex-priests in Argentina that the then Cardinal
Bergoglio colluded with the regime that governed Argentina in the 1970s are
simply slanderous. Bergoglio has rarely spoken about this troubled time in Argentina’s
history, he did mention in a 2010 interview that he had often sheltered people
from the dictatorship on Church property, and once gave his own identity papers
to a man who looked like him, so he could flee Argentina.
Bergoglio and poverty
As is now well known, Jorge Bergoglio’s
lifestyle has been noted for its austerity: he lived in a small apartment,
rather than in the elegant bishop’s residence in the suburb of Olivos; he
preferred public transport over using a personal car, and often cooked his own
meals. As a rule he did not eat out in restaurants. At a certain point in his
life as a priest he promised Our Lady never to watch television again – this
happened after he was watching television one evening with some of his brother
Jesuits and something indecent came on the screen. His journeys to Rome were
always kept extremely brief.
As Cardinal of Buenos Aires he was not
afraid to criticise to their face the politicians for their apathy to the
plight of those affected by the economic crisis affecting the country during
2001-2002: ‘Let’s not tolerate the sad spectacle of those who no longer know
how not to lie and contradict themselves to hold onto their privileges, their
rapaciousness, and their ill-earned wealth.’ The then President Eduardo Duhalde
sat stoney-faced throughout the televised sermon.
During a May 2010 speech in Argentina
regarding the poor, he directed his message to the wealthy by saying:
You avoid taking into account the poor. We
have no right to duck down, to lower the arms carried by those in despair. We
must reclaim the memory of our country who has a mother, recover the memory of
our Mother.
The unborn
Cardinal Bergoglio was consistently
outspoken in his defence of the right to life of the unborn, and in this, as in
other moral questions, has clashed with the governing class in Argentina.
Under his tutelage the bishops of Latin
America issued a joint statement regarding the situation of the Church in their
countries, the ‘Aparecida Document’. On the question of abortion it could not
have been clearer:
We hope that legislators, heads of government,
and health professionals, conscious of the dignity of human life and of the
rootedness of the family in our peoples, will defend and protect it from the
abominable crimes of abortion and euthanasia; that is their responsibility....
We should commit ourselves to ‘eucharistic coherence’, that is, we should be
conscious that people cannot receive Holy Communion and at the same time act or
speak against the commandments, in particular when abortion, euthanasia, and
other serious crimes against life and family are facilitated. This
responsibility applies particularly to legislators, governors, and health
professionals (paragraph 436).
In August 2005, as activists urged
Argentina to legalize abortion, the future pontiff urged Catholics to defend
the right to life even if they ‘deliver you to the courts’ or ‘have you
killed.’ He was speaking in a homily during a Mass in honor of St Raymond
Nonnatus (Raymond ‘the unborn’), who is revered as the holy protector of
pregnant women. the then-Cardinal said that promoting life is ‘a road that is
full of wolves.’
Perhaps for that reason they might bring us to
the courts. Perhaps, for that reason, for caring for life, they might kill
us.... We should think about the Christian martyrs. They killed them for
preaching this Gospel of life, this Gospel that Jesus brought. But Jesus gives
us the strength.
The future pontiff also urged the faithful
to ‘be astute’ in promoting the Gospel of life. ‘Go forth! Don’t be fools,’ he
said.
Remember, a Christian doesn’t have the luxury
of being foolish.… He can’t give himself the luxury. He has to be clever, he
has to be astute, to carry this out.
In October 2007 the Cardinal launched a
blistering criticism of a clandestine
abortion performed on a retarded woman with the help of the nation’s health
minister, saying in a public speech:
We aren’t in agreement with the death penalty
but ... in Argentina we have the death penalty. A child conceived by the
rape of a mentally ill or retarded woman can be condemned to death.
Cardinal Bergoglio, when asked was
opposition to abortion not based on religion, replied:
Nonsense! A pregnant woman is not carrying a
toothbrush in her womb, nor a tumour. Science shows us that from the first
moment of conception the new being has a complete genetic composition. It
is impressive. It is not therefore a religious matter, but something clearly
moral and based on science, because we are in the presence of a human being.
And then when asked was not the grade of
moral culpability of a woman who aborts the same as that of the doctor carrying
out the abortion, he responded:
I wouldn’t speak of gradation. But as far as
I’m concerned I experience a greater compassion, in the biblical sense of the
word (that is to say to feel sorrow for and to accompany), for the woman who
has an abortion – experiencing who knows what pressures – rather than for those
professional (or not professional) medics who act for money with singular
coldness.... This coldness contrasts with the problems of conscience, the sense
of remorse which after some years, many women who have had abortions
experience. You just have to sit in a confessional box and listen to these
terrible dramas, because they know that they have killed a child (El
Jesuita. Conversaciones con el cardenal Jorge Bergoglio, SJ., Sergio Rubín
y Francesca Ambrogetti, Vergara editor, p. 91).
Same sex unions
In 2009 the government of Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner – widow and successor of Néstor Kirchner, president of
Argentina from 2003 to 2007, pressed for the introduction of same sex marriage,
and in July of 2010 the Homosexual Marriage Law was enacted in Argentina.
A few weeks earlier Cardinal Bergoglio sent
a letter to the Carmelite nuns of the province requesting their prayers. In
this letter he wrote:
In the coming weeks, the Argentine people will
face a situation whose outcome can seriously harm the family…. At stake is the
identity and survival of the family: father, mother and children. At stake are
the lives of many children who will be discriminated against in advance, and
deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed
by God. At stake is the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts.
Let’s not be naive: This is not a simple
political fight; it is a destructive proposal to God’s plan. This is not a mere
legislative proposal (that’s just its form), but a move by the father of lies
that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God…. Let’s look to St
Joseph, Mary, and the Child Jesus to ask fervently that they defend the
Argentine family in this moment.... May they support, defend, and accompany us
in this war of God.
At the same time he expressed support for
civil unions for homosexual couples in Argentina, but only because he believed
civil unions were ‘the lesser of two evils’ and acceptance would head off
pressure in the country to allow homosexual couples to marry.
Relationship with the Jews
Argentina is home to around 250,000 Jews,
making it the sixth largest Jewish community in the world, and the biggest in
Latin America. The vast majority of Argentina’s Jewish population lives in
Buenos Aires. Bergoglio has always maintained close relations with the Jewish
community of the city. Over the years, Bergoglio has not hid his love and
closeness to the Jewish people and many Jews there jokingly refer to him as
‘Rabbi Bergoglio’. The archbishop of Buenos Aires welcomed Jews for a joint
service on the 74th anniversary of the Nazi’s 1938 ‘Kristallnacht’.
Rabbi Abraham Skorka, the rector of the
Latin-American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires, and the archbishop were
engaged in a series of friendly debates over religion, politics and social
issues deciding eventually to record their debates. Their dialogues were published
in 2010 as Sobre el Cielo y la Tierra (On Heaven and Earth). The two men
kept up their dialogues in program broadcast each Friday on the Archdiocesan TV
channel.
In July 1994, a truck loaded with
explosives drove into the seven-story AMIA building (Argentine Israelite Mutual
Association), a focal point of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires.
Eighty-five, mostly Jewish people died and around 300 were injured.
Bergoglio was the first public personality
to sign a petition condemning the attack and calling for justice. Jewish
community leaders around the world noted that his words and actions ‘showed
solidarity with the Jewish community’ in the aftermath of this attack.
Ecumenism
According to the rector of the Russian
Orthodox Church of Saint Catherine the Great Martyr in Rome, Bergoglio ‘often
visited Orthodox services in the Russian Orthodox Annunciation Cathedral in
Buenos Aires’ and is known as an advocate on behalf the Orthodox Church in
dealing with Argentina’s government.
It is noteworthy too that Patriarch
Bartholomew I of Constantinople attended Bergoglio’s papal installation – this
may be the first time in history that the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch of
Constantinople has attended a papal installation.
Other Catholic rites
When Bergoglio was named Archbishop of
Buenos Aires in 1998, he was
concurrently named ordinary for those Eastern Catholics in Argentina who lacked
a prelate of their own rite.
It appears that Bergoglio was mentored by
Salesian Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest Stefan Czmil and while at the Salesian
school, often woke up hours before his classmates so that he could concelebrate
Mass with Czmil.
In 2007, just two days after Benedict XVI
issued new rules for using the liturgical forms that preceded the Second
Vatican Council, Cardinal Bergoglio was one of the first bishops in the world
to respond by instituting a Tridentine Mass in Buenos Aires. It was celebrated
weekly.
On Pedophilia
Bergoglio has spoken out strongly on
pedophilia, clarifying that
More than seventy percent of cases of
pedophilia occur in the family and neighborhood: grandparents, uncles,
stepfathers, neighbors. The problem is not linked to celibacy. If a priest is a
pedophile, he is so before he is a priest.
He advocated, as Archbishop of Buenos
Aires, a zero tolerance approach to pedophilia, saying that a blind eye could
never be turned to cases of pedophile actions on the part of a priest, because
‘You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person.’
He recounts that
In the diocese it never happened to me, but a
bishop once called me to ask me by phone what to do in a situation like that
and I told him to take away the priests’ licenses, not to allow them to
exercise the priesthood any more, and to begin a canonical trial in that diocese’s
court.
He simply said of the approach of simply
moving priests around, as adopted in some dioceses in the United States, that
this was ‘a stupid idea’ and also that he admired Pope Benedict’s zero
tolerance approach to the cases which had surfaced in Ireland.
Clericalism
Bergoglio is slightly unusual as an
ecclesiastic in that he spent time exercising a profession before entering the
priesthood. Following his high school
graduation, he enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires, where he received a
master's degree in chemistry before beginning training at the Jesuit seminary.
He has spoken of his experience working
with gratitude:
I am so grateful to my father who made me
work. This work was one of the best things that ever happened to me, and in
particular in my time in the laboratory I learnt the good side and the bad side of all human
tasks (El Jesuita. Conversaciones con el cardenal Jorge Bergoglio, SJ.,
Sergio Rubín y Francesca Ambrogetti, Vergara editor, p. 34).
He is particularly grateful to a boss he
had there, Esther Balestrino de Careaga, who ‘taught me the seriousness of
work’.
Perhaps this early experience of work gave
Bergoglio a strong sense of the evil of clericalism whereby the laity fail –
often through the fault of the clergy – to fully assume the responsibility of the baptismal call to
holiness. Of the laity he has said:
Their clericalisation is a problem. The
priests clericalise the laity and the laity beg us to be clericalised… It
really is sinful abetment. And to think that baptism alone could suffice. I’m
thinking of those Christian communities in Japan that remained without priests
for more than two hundred years. When the missionaries returned they found them
all baptized, all validly married for the Church and all their dead had had a
Catholic funeral. The faith had remained intact through the gifts of grace that
had gladdened the life of a laity who had received only baptism and had also
lived their apostolic mission in virtue of baptism alone. One must not be
afraid of depending only on His tenderness.… Do you know the biblical episode
of the prophet Jonah? (30 Days,
issue no. 11, 2007).
He has also spoken of the phenomenon of
clericalism in even stronger terms in an interview with an Argentinian
newspaper:
I don’t like to generalise; there are lay
people who really take their faith seriously, they put it into
practice.... But there is a problem;
I’ve said it elsewhere: the temptation of clericalism. We priests tend to
clericalise the laity. We don’t realise what we are doing but we are spreading
our own disease. And the laity – not all of them but many of them – beg us on
bended knees that we would clericalise them because it is more comfortable to
be an altar-boy than a protagonist of the lay vocation. We shouldn’t fall into
this trip which is a sinful complicity. Neither clericalise nor ask to be
clericalised. The lay person is a lay person and has to live as a lay person by
virtue of their baptism, which equips them to be the ferment of the love of God
within society itself, to create and sow hope, to proclaim the faith, not from
a pulpit but from everyday life (Pilar (Buenos Aires), Nov. 9, 2011).
The New Evangelisation
As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio
has been insistent – and lead the way through his own personal example – that
priests must be proactive evangelists. Last year addressing Argentina’s
priests he said:
Jesus teaches us another way: Go out. Go out
and share your testimony. Go out and interact with your brothers. Go out and
share. Go out and ask. Become the Word in body as well as spirit.
Where before the Church followed a
‘clientalist’ model of action ‘offered opportunities for people to come to seek
us out ’ something that worked in a community which had already been
evangelised. But things are different now, and the Church must adapt its
structures to become missionary, he holds.
We cannot remain in the clientalist model of
action, which passively waits for the ‘client’ , the faithful, to come along;
rather we must have structures to enable us to go to where they need us.... The
internal life of the Church has to be reorganised to go out to the faithful
people of God. Pastoral conversion calls us to move from being a Church which
‘regulates the Faith’ to a Church which ‘transmits and facilitates the Faith’
(From 'Orientations for the promotion of Baptism in the Archdiocese of Buenos
Aires', in El Jesuita. Conversaciones con el cardenal Jorge Bergoglio, SJ.,
Sergio Rubín y Francesca Ambrogetti, Vergara editor, pp. 77-78)
He fears a Church that has become
self-referential (something incidentally that Joseph Ratzinger likewise greatly
feared, a Church that celebrated itself, and was obsessed with ‘internal
problems’ while people were lost in the ‘deserts of alienation’) Speaking in
another interview Bergoglio has given an example of pushing his own priests out
of their passivity.
I have
told my priests: ‘Do everything you should, you know your duties as ministers,
take your responsibilities and then leave the door open.’ Our sociologists of
religion tell us that the influence of a parish has a radius of six hundred
meters. In Buenos Aires there are about two thousand meters between one parish
and the next. So I then told the priests: ‘If you can, rent a garage and, if
you find some willing layman, let him go there! Let him be with those people a
bit, do a little catechesis and even give communion if they ask him.’ A parish
priest said to me: ‘But Father, if we do this the people then won’t come to
church.’ ‘But why?’ I asked him: ‘Do they come to mass now?’ ‘No’, he answered.
And so! Coming out of oneself is also coming out from the fenced garden of
one’s own convictions, considered irremovable, if they risk becoming an
obstacle, if they close the horizon that is also of God (30 Days, issue
no. 11, 2007).
Books
What books does
Bergoglio enjoy? He loves the poetry of Hölderlin, much Italian literature, in
particular Manzoni’s The Betrothed which he has read four times, and
Dante. He also enjoys Dostoyevsky and Marechal.
And what works has he written? He has
written works on the Social teaching of the Church, an area of keen interest for him (incidentally he made a
gift of several books on the Church’s social doctrine to President Cristina
Fernandez de Kirchner when she visited him after his election to the Papacy).
Here is a complete list of his publications (none of them have yet been
translated into English:
Meditaciones para religiosos [Meditations for Religious] (1982)
Buenos Aires: Diego de Torres. OCLC 644781822.
Reflexiones en esperanza [Reflections of Hope] (1992), Buenos Aires: Ediciones Universidad
del Salvador. OCLC 36380521.
Educar: exigencia y pasión: desafíos
para educadores cristianos [To Educate:
Exactingness and Passion: Challenges for Christian Educators] (2003) Buenos
Aires: Editorial Claretiana. ISBN 9789505124572.
Ponerse la patria al hombro: memoria y
camino de esperanza [Putting the Motherland on
One's Shoulders: Memoir and Path of Hope]. Buenos Aires: Editorial Claretiana.
ISBN 9789505125111.
La nación por construir: utopía, pensamiento
y compromiso: VIII Jornada de Pastoral Social [The
Nation to Be Built: Utopia, Thought, and Commitment] (2005) Buenos Aires:
Editorial Claretiana. ISBN 9789505125463.
Corrupción y pecado: algunas reflexiones
en torno al tema de la corrupción [Corruption and
Sin: Some Thoughts on Corruption] (2006)
Buenos Aires: Editorial Claretiana. ISBN 9789505125722.
El verdadero poder es el servicio [True
Power Is Service] (2007) Buenos Aires:
Editorial Claretiana. OCLC 688511686.
Seminario: las deudas sociales de
nuestro tiempo: la deuda social según la doctrina de la iglesia [Seminar: the Social Debts of Our Time: Social Debt According to
Church Doctrine] (2009) Buenos Aires:
EPOCA-USAL. ISBN 9788493741235.
Bergoglio, Jorge; Skorka, Abraham Sobre
el cielo y la tierra [On Heaven and Earth]
(2010) Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. ISBN 9789500732932. Random
House Inc., has recently announced that its translation: On Heaven and Earth:
Pope Francis on Faith, Family and the Church in the 21st Century will come out
May 7.
Seminario Internacional: consenso para
el desarrollo: reflexiones sobre solidaridad y desarrollo [International seminar: Consensus about Development: Reflexions on
Solidarity and development] (2010)
Buenos Aires: EPOCA. ISBN 9789875073524.
Nosotros como ciudadanos, nosotros como
pueblo: hacia un bicentenario en justicia y solidaridad [Ourselves as Citizens, Ourselves as a People: towards a
Bicentenary in Justice and Solidarity]. Buenos Aires: Editorial Claretiana.
ISBN 9789505127443.
El Jesuita. Conversaciones con el
cardenal Jorge Bergoglio, SJ by Sergio Rubín and
Francesca Ambroguetti (Vergara, 2011) is a long interview with Cardinal
Bergoglio. El silencio. De Paulo VI a Bergoglio. Las relaciones secretas de
la Iglesia con la ESMA by Horacio Verbitsky (Editorial Sudamericana, 2005)
deals with Bergoglio and the Argentinian military dictatorship.
Mary
Bergoglio is
clearly greatly devoted to the Blessed Virgin. Father Fabian Garcia former
Salesian Provincial of Buenos Aires from 2005 to 2010, knew Cardinal Bergoglio
personally and recounts that
... of all my memories there is one that is
strongest, most significant, indelible: a man of faith, who, every 24th of the
month, early in the morning before the doors were opened, came to the Basilica
of Mary Help of Christians in the suburb of Almagro, celebrated Mass and stayed
a good hour praying before the image of the Blessed Virgin which had been
blessed by Don Bosco himself.
After the death of Pope John Paul II in
2005, the then Cardinal Bergoglio recounted how John Paul II’s example inspired
him to ‘recite the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary every day.’
If I remember well it was 1985. One evening I
went to recite the Holy Rosary that was being led by the Holy Father [John Paul
II]. He was in front of everybody, on his knees. The group was numerous; I saw
the Holy Father from the back and, little by little, I got lost in prayer. I
was not alone: I was praying in the middle of the people of God to which I and
all those there belonged, led by our Pastor.
I felt that this man [John Paul II], chosen
to lead the Church, was following a path up to his Mother in the sky, a path
set out on from his childhood. And I became aware of the density of the words
of the Mother of Guadalupe to Saint Juan Diego: ‘Don’t be afraid, am I not
perhaps your mother?’ I understood the presence of Mary in the life of the
Pope.
That testimony did not get forgotten in an
instant. From that time on I recite the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary every
day.♦
Joseph Matthews is a free-lance writer
who lives and works in Dublin.
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