Pope Francis’ passing on Easter Monday comes as a shock, as yesterday, although looking frail, he blessed those gathered in St. Peter’s Square from a balcony, and he even drove around the square to greet the faithful in the popemobil. The legacy of Pope Francis, the first non-European, first Jesuit pontiff, is complex and for many, controversial. But who was Pope Bergoglio, and how did he become the leader of the Roman Catholic Church?
Francis was born as Jorge Maria Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on December 17th, 1936. His surname marked his Italian ancestry, like that of many Argentinians.
The future pope grew up in a very Europeanised and very religious family. Initially engaged to be married, he chose to break off his engagement to enter the priesthood. He studied at Jesuit seminaries in Argentina and Chile, and was later ordained as a priest at the age of thirty-three.
His ordination took place after the Second Vatican Council and the liturgical reform, and this obviously radically set him apart from his two predecessors. Within the Society of Jesus, he rose quickly through the ranks, becoming provincial of the Jesuits of Argentina at the age of thirty-six. At the time, Argentinian society was shaken by strong tensions due to teachings of the liberation theology movement. Shortly afterwards, the country experienced the Peronist dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. The Perón regime would leave an indelible mark on the future pope, who for a few years was a member of a Peronist organisation, the Organización Única del Trasvasamiento Generacional (Unique Organization for Generational Transfer). His exact role during the Peronist period is still the subject of controversy: Jorge Bergoglio clearly had a problematic relationship with the junta, with rumours ranging from culpable abstention to collaboration.
It was not until the 1990s that he rose through the Church hierarchy, after spending many years as a simple priest. John Paul II appointed him auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires in 1992 at the request of the city’s archbishop, and, according to the Italian journalist Aldo Maria Valli, despite the negative assessment of him that the pope had allegedly received from the Superior General of the Jesuits. In 1998, he became archbishop of the archdiocese of Buenos Aires, with full jurisdiction, and was created cardinal three years later.
On reaching high office, he was noted for his simple tastes and refusal of the ostentatious protocols associated with his functions—an attitude that he would also keep as a pope. In 2005, the German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope to succeed John Paul II under the name of Benedict XVI. Vatican rumours maintain that Bergoglio was the favourite against Ratzinger, supported in particular by what is known as the ‘St Gallen Mafia,’ a group of cardinals defending progressive positions on the reform of the Church. However, his lack of enthusiasm for the role, among other things, hindered his election at that time. But the second attempt was the charm: he was elected pope after the resignation of Benedict XVI in 2013.
Upon his accession to the throne of Peter, Francis embodied many ‘firsts’: the first Jesuit pope; the first non-European pope; the first pope from the American continent; and finally, the first to take the name Francis, in memory of St. Francis of Assisi.
From the very beginning of his pontificate, he adopted a deliberately iconoclastic stance that presaged a reign of turbulence. For example, he refused to move into the traditional papal apartments, choosing instead to occupy the Casa Santa Marta, normally reserved for the Pope’s visitors.
Bergoglio quickly emerged as a character fond of shock tactics and explosive slogans: he distrusted “Christians from the living room,” called on young people to “make a mess,” and described the Church as “a field hospital after a battle.” His statements, often blunt, provoked reactions—on both the Right and the Left. His ardent defenders thought that was a positive, but many feel it was not.
In 2017, a scathing book entitled The Dictator Pope was published, written by the Franco-English historian Henry Sire, who attempted to lift the veil on the contradictions and shortcomings of the pontiff’s character. According to the author, the Peronist experience is a fundamental framework for attempting to define the contours of the pope’s elusive method: playing on contradiction and surprise, and sometimes contradicting himself, to stay in the game.
The first non-European pope, Pope Francis, with his eyes fixed on the Argentina of his youth, never understood that, despite the loss of momentum of the Churches of Europe, the matrix of Catholicism remains in Rome. Consequently, it was an illusion to hope to write off old Europe, with his passion for the Third World boomeranging on him: the non-European clergy is proving to be much more conservative than the Pope, as the debates on the blessing of homosexual couples have proven.
Under the guise of shaking things up and ‘waking up the Church’, Pope Francis played a dangerous game of destabilisation. Many wounds opened during his pontificate will take time to heal, if they ever will.
For instance, how can we understand his silence on the martyrdom experienced by Eastern Christians? In 2016, at the height of the war in Syria, he chose to bring Syrian refugee families—of the Muslim faith— to the Vatican on his way back from the Greek island of Lesbos.
He was obsessed with the issue of migration, and stepped up his political interventions stigmatising, contrary to all common sense and the teachings of his predecessors, the necessary regulation of human flows and the desire to preserve host societies overwhelmed and destabilised by migration.
As a sort of jack of all trades, he set about reforming the internal workings of the Church under the guise of “synodality,” favouring a gigantic institutional project that has remained totally unfinished, but has diluted the authority of the Holy See. This of course favoured alternative discourses increasingly at odds with the traditional teaching of the Church: the blessing of homosexual couples; the place of women in the Church; access to the sacraments for those who have been divorced and remarried, and so forth.
Many also remember his questionable handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he deprived millions of Catholics of their sacraments in the name of ‘sacrosanct’ and incomprehensible health imperatives.
His name will also be associated with moral scandals involving priests and/or dignitaries of the Church, whose crimes were swept under the carpet, in contradiction with the pope’s stated intentions of benevolence and transparency.
Finally, he will also be remembered for the systematic persecution of the faithful attached to the traditional Latin liturgy, with the encyclical Traditionis Custodes, published in July 2021. The encyclical banishes thousands of believers from the Church throughout the world for the sole reason that their faith is expressed according to sacred rites preserved by the Catholic Church over the centuries. Over the years, Pope Francis had become the unconditional advocate of ‘diversity,’ ‘respect for sensitivities,’ ‘openness,’ and intercultural ‘dialogue’ for all—except for those who ask for nothing more than to continue doing what the Church has always done.
May he rest in peace.
