I was in Paraguay when Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope, and I watched his balcony appearance with great excitement on my neighbor’s television. Paraguayans feel he is very much one of us, and I say “us” because I lived in Paraguay for more than twenty years. He comes of course from our neighboring country, and within a few days of his election we were sharing a film of him praising the Paraguayan woman, whom he called “the most glorious woman in America.” This video sealed the determination of Paraguayans to make him the exception to the normal rule of seeing our neighboring Argentinians as stuck up.
More locally to my area, we also felt that he was one of us because he was a Jesuit, for we live in a former Jesuit mission proud of its history and its museum, and we still have a Jesuit parish today. As I am the widow of a former Jesuit, Peter Hebblethwaite, I had even stronger grounds to feel that the Jesuit connection made him part of my extended family.
I had been at the two previous conclaves as a journalist—the one in 1978 that elected John Paul II, and (more relevantly) the one in 2005 that elected Benedict XVI. When I arrived in Rome in 2005, I was asked by an American television team who I thought would be pope. “Bergoglio,” I replied, and they said, “Who’s he?” I was wrong then, and twelve years later I was wrong again, for I thought in 2013 that the seventy-six-year-old Bergoglio was now too old to be elected.
It had been daring of me to settle on his name in 2005—despite the fact that he was an exceptionally talented cardinal from a major archdiocese and nurtured in an Italian family—as the Jesuits themselves had told me he would be a disaster. I heard that from a South American Jesuit provincial, and from a South American Jesuit bishop, and from my friend in the Jesuit Curia in Rome—all of them part of what you might call the progressive wing of the Church. The fact is that he had been a disaster when he was provincial of the Argentinian Jesuit Province. He had been appointed in 1973 to establish some harmony between the opposing factions of left and right in a dangerous political context. But he only succeeded in making the split worse, and after his term he was virtually sent into internal exile. Eventually, in 1992, the diocesan system took him off the hands of the Jesuits by making him a bishop. Pope Francis later said of that disastrous period, “I was never a conservative, but I was authoritarian.”
But in the meantime I had heard a very different story from another friend in Buenos Aires, who was an ardent Catholic feminist. Her late husband had been the leading light of post-conciliar reform as a bishop before he caused scandal by marrying her. Bergoglio was no conservative, she told me, but on the contrary the most open-minded of all the Argentinian hierarchy—the only one who had continued to revere her husband’s outstanding qualities after the scandal. Bergoglio visited him in the hospital and anointed him, and he had the cathedral bells rung as his funeral procession passed. Now in widowhood she was in regular contact with Bergoglio. She would write to him every week, and he would always reply with a phone call; she found him to be a kindred spirit.
It was thanks to her that I met Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 2004, at the Sunday Mass he was celebrating in one of his parishes. At the end he told me he did not give press interviews but was happy to sit down and converse. We talked about the rewards of working with the poor. A year later, in Rome, I wrote him a letter saying I knew he could not meet me but I would appreciate it if he had any good Latin American contacts he could give me. He replied in typical fashion with a phone call giving two excellent contacts: an Argentinian journalist and his own press secretary, who initially laughed at my suggestion that his boss might be papabile and told me that the world of the Vatican court was so fundamentally alien to their style of being Christian that he would never fit in. A few days later, I bumped into the press secretary in the Piazza San Pietro looking desperately worried, for a television company had told him they were sending a crew to Buenos Aires to film the crowd when the announcement was made. He realized the threat was real and said, “I am going into the basilica to pray.”
My next contact with Bergoglio was in Aparecida, Brazil, during the 2007 conference of Latin American bishops. He had been appointed as “relator,” which meant turning the conference discussions into a document. It was a task that required much skill and time, and he told me he could not meet me until the text was approved, but at the end of the three-week conference all I wanted to do was to go home, and I am sure that he did too. The Bergoglio I saw in Aparecida appeared austere and somewhat gaunt, and did not smile.
When he became pope, he changed. He put on weight and looked happy, and he seemed to be at last in his element, as though his whole life had been a mistake up to that moment. He knew what was essential to being successor to Peter and what were the barnacles of history. My favorite photo of him as pope was taken on the day he was elected, going back to the Casa Santa Marta in the bus with the other cardinals instead of traveling in the limousine that was provided or staying in the palatial pontifical apartment. Someone took a photo from inside the bus at the back: All the passengers ahead were in black and red except for one on the aisle in white.
It puzzles me when people say they want a pope to “restore unity” in the Church after Francis. For me he was the pope who brought unity because he put an end to condemnations and gave the relief of freedom to those who were only trying to explore what faith means in today’s world. Francis is criticized for his lack of legalism in the same way as Jesus was, by religious authorities who wanted him to keep his distance from sinners and tried to convict him of being at odds with the line of Moses. If anything is a test of orthodoxy, it is allegiance to the line of Jesus, and that is what Francis manifested so impressively to the world, with his “smell of the sheep,” his love and compassion, and his refusal to condemn.
This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.
