The Education of Pope Francis

I have nothing to add to what has already been written about the legacy of Pope Francis. Instead I write to draw the attention of readers—and, who knows, perhaps future biographers or even hagiographers—to certain aspects of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s personality which during his lifetime attracted less attention than they deserved.

The first is his education, such as it was. Unusually for a member of the Society of Jesus, Bergoglio had no advanced degree. His only diploma was a kind of certificate—comparable to the American “associate’s” degree—in industrial chemistry. Later it is said that he made notes for doctoral studies in Germany but did not enroll at any university. Yet one gets the sense that Francis’s reading was wide and, in certain areas, deep, but never systematic. This is easy to understand. Buenos Aires is a great city of readers: at cafés, in bars and theaters, to say nothing of bookshops and public libraries. A moderately curious teenager of his generation would have acquired a better literary education than I suspect is now available to most American undergraduates. In any case, it always seemed to me obvious that Francis had read many things that one might not expect him to have been familiar with—all thirty-seven volumes of Pastor’s History, for example, or Tissier’s life of Archbishop Lefebvre—and heard about more things than he had read. With this, one imagines, all autodidacts will sympathize.

The second point that people seem to have missed about Francis is that there was no analytic dimension to his thinking. His was a world of patterns, of motifs and crude symbols; when he applied his mind to a question, he tended to hit upon a series of antitheses—often somewhat hazily defined—which he was personally uninterested in resolving. He saw the Church dialectically, but he did not see himself as responsible—even by virtue of his office—as the propagator of anything resembling a final post-conciliar synthesis.

One final thought: While there was something essentially grim and humorless about Francis’s personality, he had a marvelous talent for invective. I for one would welcome a printed collection of his insults, as a kind of sequel to John Paul I’s Illustrissimi.

This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.