IL PAPA’S HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
His grandparents moved to Buenos Aires with nothing before they and his parents built a solid family life. Then Jorge Mario Bergoglio shocked them all when he announced he was considering a future in the priesthood...
WHEN he was a young man, Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s mother was certain that he was destined to become a doctor. The eldest of her five children, Regina had worked hard to instil in him the importance of a good education and how it could help transform your life.
She encouraged his studies in chemistry and was delighted when he got work as a student in a laboratory. While far from destitute, the Bergoglio family, Italian immigrants who lived in Flores, a solidly working class neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, had fairly modest means.
There was no car or holidays and much of their clothing was second-hand, but all five children were educated and Regina and her husband Mario were determined that their lives would be easier than theirs had been.
Jorge, however, had a different idea of what his destiny was to be. One spring day in 1953, just before he turned 17 years old, he went to confession. He left the Church that day convinced he was supposed to become a priest.
‘It was like being thrown from a horse,’ he later wrote of realising his vocation.
He told no one of his decision and continued his chemistry studies while also immersing himself in theology. It took a further three years before he finally told his mother of his plans to enter a seminary. She was deeply unhappy with his decision and for years afterwards refused to give him her blessing.
It seems an unlikely start to a religious path that would one day lead to the highest role in the Catholic Church, but Pope Francis, as Bergoglio would come to be known, was unwavering in his vocation. Perhaps he had a sense, even back when he was a teenager, of what was in store for him.
Although his origins were humble, his family had always been
‘My father sold goods from a basket’
well-read. His father’s parents, Giovanni and Rosa, left their home in the Piedmont region of Italy in 1929 to escape Mussolini’s Fascist regime. They sailed from Italy to Argentina with their only child, Mario, who was a 20-year-old bank clerk, and settled first in the city of Parana, where Giovanni’s brothers were running a successful paving company. After a recession saw the business close, the small family then moved to Buenos Aires.
‘They were out on the street, with nothing,’ Pope Francis has explained. ‘My grandfather bought a warehouse with 2,000 pesos which he borrowed, and my father, who was an accountant, sold goods out of a basket.’
In 1935, Mario married Regina S’Vori, the daughter of another Italian immigrant family, and a year later their first child Jorge was born. They went on to have four more children, sons Oscar and Alberto, and daughters Marta and Maria Elena.
They were a typically close-knit Italian immigrant family — life revolved around the dinner table, the Church and the local football team, San Lorenzo, who Pope still avidly follows.
Devout and committed to their Catholic faith, the Bergoglio family were regulars at the Basilica of St Joseph and local priest, Fr Enrico Pozzoli, was often invited over.
But the person to have most influence on the young Jorge was his grandmother Rosa. Well-read and politically aware, she was also described as devout and compassionate. Although born into a poor family, it was noted at a young age that she was very bright and she was sent to Turin to be educated.
As a younger woman, she was politically active and a member of the group Catholic Action, who regularly clashed with the Fascists in their fight for better conditions for Italian workers. After their move to Argentina, Rosa and her husband, Giovanni, lived around the corner from their son Mario and his family.
Mario worked in the finance department of a railway company, while his wife Regina stayed at home to take care of their five children. Jorge, however, spent a lot of time with his grandparents.
‘My strongest childhood memory is that life shared between my parents’ house and my grandparents’ house,’ Pope Francis has said.
Rosa would read poetry to him in her native dialect and introduced him to the classics in Italian literature. Pope Francis has spoken before about the importance of grandparents in the lives of young people. ‘Profit from the lives, the stories and the wisdom of your elders, of your grandparents,’ he said. ‘Waste lots of time listening to all the good things they have to teach you. They are the guardians of that spiritual legacy of faith and values that define a people and light its path.’
As a teenager Jorge was described as being ‘tall, lanky, bookish and gentle.’ He also loved football and dancing ‘milongas’, a fast-paced tango. ‘Jorge would come out sometimes, but he spent a lot of time in the house studying,’ explained childhood pal Rafael Musolino, who used to play football on the streets with him as a youngster. ‘He was a very serious child, friendly but hard working.
‘There were a lot of wild boys around, but he was never like that. He was very straightforward and not the talkative type, a boy of few words.’
It’s known he had at least one childhood sweetheart, a neighbour called Amalia Damonte, who has claimed the future pope declared he wanted to marry her. Given they were both just 12 years old at the time, naturally her parents did not approve. Ms Damonte has told how Jorge insisted to her: ‘If I can’t marry you, I’ll become a priest.’
The romance, however, went nowhere. ‘When we were young, he wrote me a letter and I didn’t reply to him,’ she revealed. ‘What I wanted was for him to disappear from the map.
‘My father had hit me because I had dared to write a note to a boy. He had drawn for me [in the letter] a house, which had a red roof and said that it was the house he was going to buy for me when we were married. I never saw him after that. My parents kept me away from him. I think he asked me to marry him because he wanted to follow the example he had seen at home.’
Jorge graduated from school with a chemical technician’s diploma and worked for a couple of years in the foods section at HickethierBachmann laboratory. His boss there was Esther Ballestrino, a well-known political activist who ‘disappeared’ in 1977 during the Argentinian military dictatorship that lasted from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s.
As well as working as a chemical technician, Jorge also worked as a bouncer at a bar and a janitor.
When he was 19 years old he entered the Inmaculada Concepción Seminary in Buenos Aires, shocking his mother who believed he would continue his studies and
‘I’m going to be a doctor of the soul’
become a doctor. ‘I didn’t lie to you, Mother,’ he told her. ‘I’m going to be a doctor of the soul.’
A year later, however, in 1956 he nearly died from a devastating bout of pleurisy, painful inflamed lung membranes, that led to the surgical removal of three pulmonary cysts and part of his right lung. To this day, the Pope speaks softly, gets breathless, and suffers often from chest conditions. Once he had fully recovered, he began the long path that it takes to become a Jesuit. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1958 and as a novice studied humanities in Santiago in Chile. Studying and education was clearly a passion, and he got a degree in philosophy in 1963 and taught literature and psychology at colleges in Santa Fe and Buenos Aires from 1964 to 1966. He then studied theology for three years, getting another degree. He was ordained a priest in 1969, before travelling to a university in Spain where he studied for another couple of years and made his final profession with the Jesuits in 1973.
Although just 36 years old, his deep spirituality and leadership skills were recognised and back in Argentina he was made a Provincial Superior of the Society of Jesus, where he led 450 men for the next six years.
He would later admit that he had been too young for the job and
made mistakes, and that he was too authoritarian.
But perhaps what was most striking about his term as Provincial Superior was that it happened during one of the more turbulent and bloody times in Argentina’s recent history. A period of horrific guerrilla violence that led to a military coup in 1976 and was followed by a military dictatorship that lasted until 1983.
Supporters say Bergoglio, in his role as leader of the Jesuit order, refused to sympathise with either the leftists or the military. It’s said his nickname was La Gioconda, the Italian name for Mona Lisa, because he played his cards so close to his chest and was inscrutable. But there are some who have claimed that during Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, as it was nicknamed, Bergoglio was complicit in the kidnapping of two liberal Jesuit Priests by the regime.
Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky claimed in his 2005 book, El Silencio (Silence), that Bergoglio withdrew the protection of the Jesuits over the two men after they refused to move out of the slums where they were attending to the poor. The book is based on statements by one of the priests, Orlando Yorio, before he died of natural causes in 2000. The kidnapped clergymen survived five months of imprisonment, during which they were tortured.
Supporters, however, say Bergoglio in fact managed to help dozens of people fleeing military repression, hiding them and helping them escape the country. And that the idea he was complicit in any kidnappings were false stories spread by his enemies.
Certainly he is known to have had a fraught relationship with former Argentinian president, Nestor Kirchner and his wife, Cristina Fernandez de Kircher, who served as president after her husband died until 2015.
‘You have to understand the context of these claims in Argentina today,’ explained lawyer and professor Nicolas Tato in 2013 when Bergoglio was made Pope. ‘The government does not like freethinkers and the Jesuits are open thinkers. They are trying to undermine him by branding him a collaborator.’ He also claimed that the author, Verbitsky, was simply a mouthpiece for the government.
‘Perhaps he didn’t have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated with the dictatorship,’ said Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for documenting the atrocities carried out during the Dirty War, when an estimated 30,000 leftists were ‘disappeared’.
‘Bergoglio was no accomplice of the dictatorship. He can’t be accused of that.’
Sergio Rubin, a religious affairs editor of a local newspaper and who wrote an authorised biography on the Pope, said it was wrong to single him out.
‘In some way many of us Argentinians ended up being accomplices,’ he explained while also claiming that Bergoglio had in fact gone to dangerous lengths to save the kidnapped Jesuits. He told how at one point he persuaded the personal priest of the then feared dictator, Jorge Videla, to call in sick so that he could say Mass for him instead and use the occasion to plead for their release.
Another story of him stepping in to help involved his old boss, Esther Ballestrino, a committed Marxist. In 1976 her two sons were kidnapped. She helped found the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women whose children had gone missing, who tried to persuade the government to give them information about their whereabouts. The following year, her remaining child, a daughter, was also kidnapped.
It was around this time she contacted Bergoglio and asked him to come and give the Last Rites to a relative of hers who had died. However, the meeting had been set up so she could ask him to smuggle her collection of communist books out of her house, in case her home was searched. He agreed to help.
It proved too late for Ballestrino, however. A short time later, she and two other women of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were kidnapped and tortured before being dropped into the sea from a plane.
Bergoglio served as leader of the Jesuits until 1979, he then returned to academia and was named the Rector of the Philosophical and Theological Faculty of San Miguel in 1980.
Just before he took up that new post he spent three months in Ireland learning English, where he stayed at the Jesuit Centre at the Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy in Dublin.
In 1986 he went to Germany to finish his doctoral thesis, followed by a stint in the Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires and then on to the Jesuit Church in the city of Córdoba where he served as spiritual director and confessor.
At the request of the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, who wanted him as a close collaborator, Pope John Paul II appointed him titular Bishop of Auca and Auxiliary of Buenos Aires in 1992. Five years later he was appointed Coadjutor Archbishop of Buenos Aires and the following year he became Metropolitan Archbishop of Buenos Aires. His rise up through the ranks of the Catholic Church hierarchy didn’t stop there.
In 2001 he was created a Cardinal by Pope John Paul II and travelled to Rome for the ceremony. He took the opportunity to head north with his youngest sister to visit the birthplace of their father and beloved grandmother.
His title was Cardinal Priest of San Roberto Bellarmino and he was appointed to five different administrative positions in the Roman Curia, basically the central government of the Catholic Church. He was also elected president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference in 2005.
During his time as head of the bishop’s conference he issued a collective apology for the Catholic Church’s failure to protect people from the military dictatorship during the Dirty War.
As a cardinal he became known for living a very simple life in Buenos Aires — famously he used to travel by public bus everywhere. And he insisted on living in a small apartment, where he cooked his own meals, instead of the elegant bishop’s residence, where he was expected to live.
He spent a limited amount of time in Rome, preferring to stay close to his local flock. Yet when Pope John Paul II died in 2005 Bergoglio was considered a serious contender as a successor. Indeed the Italian press later reported that he had been the runner-up and main challenger to Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI. When Pope Benedict resigned in 2013, Bergoglio once again emerged as an early favourite to take over. This time he was successful, he was voted in on March 13 and held his papal inauguration three days later.
Aged 76 when he took over, he chose the name Francis in honour of St Francis of Assisi, mainly because, he told journalists, he was especially concerned with the wellbeing of the poor.
He is a Pope of several firsts — the first Jesuit, the first from the Americas and the first from the Southern Hemisphere. And while many celebrated this break from tradition, members of his family candidly admitted they were unsure about his appointment.
His youngest sister, Maria Elena Bergoglio, his only remaining sibling, told a journalist that he ‘didn’t want to be Pope.’
‘When we chatted privately about it, we joked at the prospect and he would say: “No, please no,”’ she revealed. ‘I didn’t want him to become Pope because he’s going to be very far away and, second, because it is such a large responsibility.’
She said she also feared her brother now faced a lifetime of ‘infinite loneliness.’
‘But I am also totally proud that he is the new Pope, because he’s the first from outside Europe, because he’s Latin American, he’s Argentinian and he’s my brother... having a brother who is a Pope is a blessing from God.’