It is a strange autobiography, the latest one packaged by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, with a big publicity launch all over the world. An autobiography that in the first half of its almost 400 pages tells more about his relatives than about him as a child and then as a teenager, and in the remaining pages keeps quiet about precisely what one would most expect to read, about his adult life before and after his election as pope.
“Every time a pope is unwell, there’s a little gust of conclave wind,” he writes. But he immediately adds that “I’m fine,” “I can eat anything,” and it’s just that “I’m old” (as in the photo above, from January 18, with an arm in a sling after a tumble, but without changing anything on his schedule).
For his burial he has already opted for the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, “in the room where they now keep the candelabra.” And as for the choice of his successor, let them sort it out. He recounts his election as pope in 2013 in about twenty pages, to say that everything happened without the slightest prearranged plan, and the votes rained down on him only from the penultimate ballot, who knows from where, and he too improvised everything in the moment, including the name of Francis, including the first words from the loggia of blessings, and he did not go to live in Santa Marta for love of poverty, but for “psychiatric reasons,” because “without people around I cannot live.”
With the field cleared of conjectures about the next conclave, on which the book does not give the slightest indication, it is however useful to take note of some words and not a few silences.
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The reason, for example, for his constant evocation and exaltation of the role of grandparents in transmitting the faith to their grandchildren, ignoring the dads and moms, is explained well by the account of his extraordinary emotional bond with his paternal grandma, Rosa, “the cornerstone of my existence,” and by the difficult relationship with his mom, Regina Maria, who did indeed, when he was a child, get him to listen to and love opera, but also made him “cry my heart out with an anguish that assailed me deep inside,” due to her frequent arguments with his dad. And she did not take it well at all when her son entered the seminary, where for years she did not so much as set foot until the day he entered the Society of Jesus, “maintaining a certain reserve” even after that.
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Another youthful episode that Pope Francis sets forth clearly in the book is his affiliation with Peronism. Not his family members, he writes; they were all anti-Peronists and even “radicals.” His acknowledged political mentor, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, was a staunch Marxist. And yet from his adolescence, he says, he had a “liking” for “the social reforms that Perón was implementing,” to the point of almost coming to blows with an uncle of his who “talked, badmouthed, talked” against Perón and Evita, and that brawl “was a bit like the public baptism of my political passion.”
Nothing new. This Peronism of the young Bergoglio has been known about for some time, including through his own repeated admissions in books and interviews. But a couple of years ago, surprisingly, in yet another authorized biography of him signed by Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, entitled “El Pastor,” he denied having been so much as a “sympathizer” of that political movement, disputing with those who continued to define him as such.
An astonishing denial, this one. Which flew in the face, among other things, of his handover of the Universidad del Salvador, when he was provincial of the Jesuits, to the ultra-Peronists of the “Guardia de Hierro,” reported on chapter and verse in previous authorized biographies of him, and also of what was revealed by the biographer who may be the most congenial to him, the Englishman Austen Ivereigh: that “not only was Bergoglio close to the ‘Guardia de Hierro,’ but in February and March of 1974, through his friend Vicente Damasco, a colonel and close collaborator of Perón, he was one of the ten or twelve experts invited to write their thoughts into the draft of the ‘Modelo nacional,’ the political testament that Perón considered the means to unite the Argentines after his death.”
Well then, in the autobiography now out for sale Francis denies the previous denial and puts back into circulation what has always been known. He dedicates little more than a page to Peronism, but enough to reaffirm that he saw in it “a link with the social doctrine of the Church,” proven by the fact that “Perón sent his speeches to Bishop Nicolás De Carlo, in those years the bishop of Resistencia, in Chaco, so that he could read them and tell him if they were in accord with that doctrine.”
The political vision of Pope Francis, his affiliation with what he calls the “popular movements,” his elevation of the people to a “myth,” have their roots in Peronism. As does his invincible aversion to “killer capitalism,” repeatedly and emphatically condemned in the book.
And then there are the invectives against war, which “is always a defeat, always,” and against the manufacture and trade of weapons, “madness,” which occupy dozens and dozens of pages in the book.
Except for those two solitary lines in which one suddenly reads that “we are not to confuse attacker and attacked, and we are not to deny the right to defense.” So what about weapons? And war? Logic, as is known, is not at the forefront of Bergoglio’s thinking.
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He says little about his ministry as pope. Of the titles attributed to pontiffs in history, he accepts only one, that of bishop of Rome. Better for the pope, he writes, to return to the “role of the first millennium,” but without explaining how and why. As for the cardinals, they too should know that they are not “eminences” but “servants.”
Nor does he say a great deal about the “synodality” of the Church. Rather, he insists on the thesis that “the Church is woman, it is not male.” So woe to the “masculinizing” of women, “co-opting them all into the clergy,” or “making all the he’s and she’s deacons with holy orders.” Except to write, a few lines further on, that “the question of the admission of women to the diaconal ministry, discernment on which must continue, remains open to study.”
The references to his trips are also very selective. In recalling the one to Iraq in 2021, he slips in an item left out of the news coverage:
“They alerted me as soon as we landed in Baghdad. The police had notified the Vatican gendarmerie of a report from the English secret service: a woman packed with explosives, a young suicide bomber, was heading to Mosul to blow herself up during the papal visit. And a van had also set out at top speed with the same intent.”
And on from there:
“When I asked the gendarmerie the next day what was known about the two attackers, the commander answered me laconically, ‘They are no more.’ The Iraqi police had intercepted them and blown them up.”
Leaked a month before the book’s release, the story was declared false on December 18 by former Nineveh governor Najim al-Jubouri, then the region’s top security official.
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The biggest surprise in the book is in any case provided by the silence on his life as a Jesuit.
Ordained a priest in 1969 and shortly after promoted to novice master of the Society of Jesus, “in 1973,” he writes, “I became provincial superior of the order. I was thirty-six years old and the youngest to have held that position in Argentina. There was much I got wrong. And I would get plenty of chances to learn, the hard way, from my mistakes.”
But there is not a single line in the book about what these “mistakes” may have been. Perhaps his “authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions, abruptly and by myself,” which he spoke about in a 2013 interview with “La Civiltà Cattolica?” In the book the pope refers to his “lack of patience,” to his having been at times “disobedient and undisciplined.” But not a word more.
He acknowledges having had “dark times,” and mentions “the dark night in Córdoba between 1990 and 1992.” But here too with no further hints.
Yet on other occasions, in past years, Francis had been more explicit, for example at the meeting he had with the priests of Rome on February 15, 2018, at the beginning of Lent.
At that time he depicted the initial phase of his life as a Jesuit as a rapid and dazzling ascent, during which he confessed to having exercised a sort of “omnipotence.”
Bergoglio was provincial superior of the Jesuits for six years, until 1979, and then until 1985 rector of the Colegio Máximo in San Miguel.
But then his descending phase began, which he recounted to the priests of Rome as follows:
“And all this ended, so many years of management. And there began a process of ‘but now I don’t know what to do.’ Yes, to be a confessor, to finish my doctoral thesis – which was there, and which I never defended –. And then to start again to rethink things. The time of great desolation, for me. I lived this time with great desolation, a dark time. I believed that it was already the end of life; yes, I was a confessor, but with a spirit of defeat. Why? Because I believed that the fullness of my vocation was in doing things. I was a confessor and a spiritual director, at that time: it was my job. But I lived it in a very dark way, very dark and painful, and also with the infidelity of not finding the way, and [with the search for] compensation, to compensate for [the loss of] that world made of ‘omnipotence,’ to seek worldly compensations.”
In fact, starting in 1986, when Víctor Zorzín, his bitter enemy, became provincial of the Argentine Jesuits, Bergoglio was abruptly sidelined, sent against his will to study for a few months in Germany and finally forced into a sort of exile in the city of Córdoba, between 1990 and 1992, with no role at all anymore, in a never-resolved tension between a sense of defeat and a desire for revenge.
And among those who then held command in the Society of Jesus, both in Argentina and in Rome in the general curia, up to the superior general Peter Hans Kolvenbach, this lack of psychological balance and therefore this unreliability of his had become the common judgment. What was most concerning was the fact that Bergoglio, even deprived of authority, continued to lead a segment of the Argentine Jesuits, in constant war with the opposing segment, progressive and anti-Peronist.
Kolvenbach always avoided meeting with Bergoglio when he went to Argentina, nor did Bergoglio ever set foot in the Jesuit general curia on his trips to Rome. Even such a top-level Jesuit as Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini had formed a negative judgment of him, as reported by the Church historian Andrea Riccardi.
Then, suddenly, the miracle, brought about by the Vatican nuncio to Argentina at the time, Ubaldo Calabresi, who fished Bergoglio out of exile in Córdoba to make him first an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires and then the coadjutor of the same archdiocese, with the right of succession.
The sequel, as cardinal and then as pope, is well known. With an undoubted turnaround from before to after his election to the see of Peter, which was also seen in his face, always somber before – “so as not to make a mistake,” he writes – and more smiling after.
There is almost nothing in the book about this dizzying rise of his from bishop to pope. Except for the curious recollection of a lunch in Rome “at Lella’s house,” the sister of the late nuncio Calabresi, two days before the conclave. For a final thank you to his benefactor.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
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