UNITED KINGDOM
Independent Catholic News
Rebecca Tinsley
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
“The Great Reformer: Francis and the making of a radical Pope”
by Austen Ivereigh, publisher: Allen & Unwin, 2105
A recent profile of Pope Francis in Der Spiegel* reports a Vatican whispering campaign against the Argentine pontiff. When Francis highlighted the pomp and ostentation of the clergy, it was “an unspoken declaration of war, especially against the Vatican Curia.” By challenging corruption in the Vatican bank, and ex-communicating Mafia bosses, Francis also confronted Rome’s unsavoury vested interests, the article suggests. Those plotting against Francis accuse him of caring little for tradition or theology, wondering if his “confusion” will abate by the Synod of Bishops in October.
This whispering campaign makes Austen Ivereigh’s biography of Jorge Bergoglio all the more timely.
The story of Bergoglio, as Ivereigh tells it, is also the story of Argentina. The reader must therefore be prepared for his rendering of the junta’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, liberation theology, and the resulting splits within the Catholic Church. To this day Bergoglio is a divisive figure because of what he did, or did not do during the dirty war.
There is also much about Peronism, a political label that defies Anglo Saxon understanding of left and right. Hence it is too simple to label Pope Francis as a liberal or a conservative, when he should be viewed in the Argentine context.
Some commentators suggest the transformation of the authoritarian Bergoglio to the Francis who savages exploitative capitalism is due to a life-changing reassessment of his role during the dirty war. But Ivereigh carefully describes a more complex journey, where profound compassion has co-existed with a rejection of political extremes. Bergoglio was always more comfortable among the poor than the Church’s ideologues and intellectuals. He also preferred attending fiestas in the slums rather than cocktail parties because “the poor celebrate Christ, not themselves.”
Ivereigh conveys a wonderful sense of the keen, earnest, bright young Bergoglio, and the lower middle class Buenos Aires in which he grew up. He has surprised people all his life with his frugality, shunning the trappings of office, using public transportation, making his own phone calls, and cooking and cleaning for himself and colleagues who are unwell.
During the dirty war Bergoglio’s superiors instructed him to both protect Jesuits and assist the victims of the repression, which he did, at great risk to himself. “What he did not do was speak out publicly against the regime, but he could hardly have done so without sacrificing his objectives, for no obvious gain,” writes Ivereigh.
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