An avalanche of insta-biographies follows every papal conclave. Catholics and outsiders alike are eager to understand the man who is, in effect, the only monarch with meaningful power remaining in the Western world. But almost two years after Pope Francis’ election, many are keen for deeper analysis of this “pope for the poor” known for holding freewheeling news conferences and driving his own 30-year-old Renault.
Austen Ivereigh’s “The Great Reformer” is no insta-book, but a gracefully written and meticulously researched account of Francis’ life. It aims to exonerate the pope once and for all from the charges of his critics, and to correct both liberals and conservatives who misunderstand his “radicalism.” It succeeds almost entirely. His defense of Francis sometimes shades into hagiography, but it is the best English-language biography of the pope to date, and — more important — raises provocative questions about the future of the church and the relationship between religion and secular modernity.
Like most good biographies, “The Great Reformer” argues that context is everything. Any understanding of the pope must begin with a tour through Argentine history — particularly the tumultuous politics of the 20th century and the Catholic Church’s minuet with the dictators and demagogues of Buenos Aires.
Jorge Bergoglio came of age during the regime of Col. Juan Domingo Perón, who seized power in 1943 and persuaded many citizens that he (and his charismatic wife, Evita) embodied the soul of the Argentine people. Initially Perón courted the church. But when the bishops refused to do his bidding, he reversed course, and many Catholic activists became enemies of the state.
The military junta that overthrew Perón in 1955 proved just as fond of authoritarianism. Bergoglio grew up in a church that alternately defied state power and struggled with the temptations of corruption, while elites who claimed to represent the will of the people manipulated (and, later, murdered) them in order to consolidate authority. He avoided party politics and, after joining the Jesuits in 1958, never voted. But a priest in postwar Argentina could not help developing a political philosophy.
The roots of Bergoglio’s politics stretch back to the Jesuits’ crusading founder, Ignatius of Loyola, and to the first Jesuit missionaries to Latin America, who “stood for a radical immersion in the life of the people.” Compared with other missionaries, the Jesuits tried to accommodate indigenous culture and protect native people from colonists’ predations. But Ivereigh embroiders history when he writes that “the Jesuits acted, in this way, as 17th-century community organizers among the poor.” His romantic account collapses the chasm between the missionaries’ less coercive evangelism and the liberal activism of our own day. One can admire the early Jesuits without forgetting that their multiculturalism was a means to a very monocultural end.
Many secular liberals make the same mistake. They take Francis to be an exhilaratingly “modern” pope who seeks a truce in the culture wars. In fact, Francis’ brand of pluralism is distinctly anti-modern, even premodern. In his view, the Enlightenment cast a dark shadow over the West, expanding the power of secular authorities (who began expelling the Jesuits from their lands in the 1750s) and dethroning theology in favor of secular reason. “The worst that can happen to a human being is to allow oneself to be swept along by the ‘lights’ of reason,” Bergoglio said in the 1970s.
But “the Enlightenment” in general is always shorthand for many different Enlightenments in particular. Bergoglio feared the specific mix of secular ideology and terror that racked his country while he led the Jesuits’ Argentine province. In 1976 another coup deposed an unpopular Peronist government. Fearful of international condemnation, the army tried to keep its violent campaign against domestic enemies a secret. Between 1969 and 1983 over 8,000 Argentines were “disappeared” or otherwise killed by the state, and countless others kidnapped and tortured.
The “Dirty War” remains the most controversial period in Bergoglio’s career. When he was elected pope, journalists dredged up old accusations that he abandoned two activist Jesuits to the hands of the junta. Ivereigh’s rebuttal, based on exhaustive interviews and research in Spanish and English, is convincing.
Bergoglio did worry about some Jesuits’ infatuation with Marxist politics, but he worked hard to protect even those radical priests who opposed him. He hid a steady stream of left-wing activists at the Jesuit college in Buenos Aires — as soldiers drilled at an army base nearby and priests sympathetic to the junta walked the halls.
In Ivereigh’s telling, human rights activists who preferred a simplistic demonization of all church leaders propelled the false accusations against Bergoglio. He also attracted criticism from fellow Jesuits, who called him an anti-intellectual reactionary for neglecting the society’s cutting-edge scholarship and sending more priests into the poorest barrios. Sure, he cared for the poor, but in the wrong way: Critics called him “acritical and assistentialist” for praising folk religion while failing to denounce the regime that kept so many Argentines destitute.
Bergoglio has sometimes romanticized suffering, insisting that the slums can teach the middle classes to live out their faith with joy and a “great sense of solidarity.” On the contrary, impoverishment alienates more than it binds: No one can read Katherine Boo’s riveting account of life in a Mumbai slum, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” and still think there is anything humanizing about poverty. But Bergoglio always understood this; for decades he criticized neoliberal economic policies and supported workers’ rights.
The problem, to him, was that leftist “avant-gardism” had captured too many Jesuits. Like other elites, they thought they knew what was best for the Catholic populace — when in truth the pueblo, not the elites, modeled theology in action. “When you want to know what the Church teaches, you go to the Magisterium, . . . but when you want to know how the Church teaches, you go to the faithful people,” he said. He developed “this dichotomy into something close to a doctrine, in which the poor, the pueblo fiel, are a kind of vaccine against the destructive effect of ideology, of left or right,” Ivereigh writes.
This distinction between grass-roots Christianity and elitist ideology rings false. Totalitarian leaders transformed Marxist “scriptures” into plans for salvation in which human suffering is utopia’s price, but history tells us that no organized religion is a stranger to these crimes, and that the “faithful people” are a short step from the fuming mob. The difference between ideologies that empower and those that devour is, in part, a procedural one. Whereas totalitarian states seek to impose a single worldview, Western governments have mostly domesticated ideology because they have adopted political systems — democratic elections; the rule of law — that allow people with different worldviews to live side by side, as long as they respect the autonomy of the individual.
Similarly, Francis hopes to solve the problems that plague the Catholic Church today by changing its procedures, by bringing transparency to the Curia and bolstering the bishops. The recent synod in Rome on the family — which disappointed liberals when the bishops struck gay-friendly language from their final statement — is notable less for its hints of doctrinal shift than for its signals that church government may change in a momentous way.
This, ultimately, may be what Francis’ conservative critics find most disturbing: not his cooling on the culture wars but his self-demotion from Catholic monarch to something more like the chairman of a deliberative (if hardly democratic) body. To Francis, such reforms would not bring a premodern church into the modern age, but restore Catholicism’s oldest values: “The greatest revolution,” he has said, “is what goes to the roots, to recognize them and see what those roots have to say at this time.” If Ivereigh’s predictions about Francis’ mission are right, the market for papal biography may dwindle — for the future of the church will depend far less on the man at its helm.
Austen Ivereigh’s “The Great Reformer” is no insta-book, but a gracefully written and meticulously researched account of Francis’ life. It aims to exonerate the pope once and for all from the charges of his critics, and to correct both liberals and conservatives who misunderstand his “radicalism.” It succeeds almost entirely. His defense of Francis sometimes shades into hagiography, but it is the best English-language biography of the pope to date, and — more important — raises provocative questions about the future of the church and the relationship between religion and secular modernity.
Like most good biographies, “The Great Reformer” argues that context is everything. Any understanding of the pope must begin with a tour through Argentine history — particularly the tumultuous politics of the 20th century and the Catholic Church’s minuet with the dictators and demagogues of Buenos Aires.
Jorge Bergoglio came of age during the regime of Col. Juan Domingo Perón, who seized power in 1943 and persuaded many citizens that he (and his charismatic wife, Evita) embodied the soul of the Argentine people. Initially Perón courted the church. But when the bishops refused to do his bidding, he reversed course, and many Catholic activists became enemies of the state.
The military junta that overthrew Perón in 1955 proved just as fond of authoritarianism. Bergoglio grew up in a church that alternately defied state power and struggled with the temptations of corruption, while elites who claimed to represent the will of the people manipulated (and, later, murdered) them in order to consolidate authority. He avoided party politics and, after joining the Jesuits in 1958, never voted. But a priest in postwar Argentina could not help developing a political philosophy.
The roots of Bergoglio’s politics stretch back to the Jesuits’ crusading founder, Ignatius of Loyola, and to the first Jesuit missionaries to Latin America, who “stood for a radical immersion in the life of the people.” Compared with other missionaries, the Jesuits tried to accommodate indigenous culture and protect native people from colonists’ predations. But Ivereigh embroiders history when he writes that “the Jesuits acted, in this way, as 17th-century community organizers among the poor.” His romantic account collapses the chasm between the missionaries’ less coercive evangelism and the liberal activism of our own day. One can admire the early Jesuits without forgetting that their multiculturalism was a means to a very monocultural end.
Many secular liberals make the same mistake. They take Francis to be an exhilaratingly “modern” pope who seeks a truce in the culture wars. In fact, Francis’ brand of pluralism is distinctly anti-modern, even premodern. In his view, the Enlightenment cast a dark shadow over the West, expanding the power of secular authorities (who began expelling the Jesuits from their lands in the 1750s) and dethroning theology in favor of secular reason. “The worst that can happen to a human being is to allow oneself to be swept along by the ‘lights’ of reason,” Bergoglio said in the 1970s.
But “the Enlightenment” in general is always shorthand for many different Enlightenments in particular. Bergoglio feared the specific mix of secular ideology and terror that racked his country while he led the Jesuits’ Argentine province. In 1976 another coup deposed an unpopular Peronist government. Fearful of international condemnation, the army tried to keep its violent campaign against domestic enemies a secret. Between 1969 and 1983 over 8,000 Argentines were “disappeared” or otherwise killed by the state, and countless others kidnapped and tortured.
The “Dirty War” remains the most controversial period in Bergoglio’s career. When he was elected pope, journalists dredged up old accusations that he abandoned two activist Jesuits to the hands of the junta. Ivereigh’s rebuttal, based on exhaustive interviews and research in Spanish and English, is convincing.
Bergoglio did worry about some Jesuits’ infatuation with Marxist politics, but he worked hard to protect even those radical priests who opposed him. He hid a steady stream of left-wing activists at the Jesuit college in Buenos Aires — as soldiers drilled at an army base nearby and priests sympathetic to the junta walked the halls.
In Ivereigh’s telling, human rights activists who preferred a simplistic demonization of all church leaders propelled the false accusations against Bergoglio. He also attracted criticism from fellow Jesuits, who called him an anti-intellectual reactionary for neglecting the society’s cutting-edge scholarship and sending more priests into the poorest barrios. Sure, he cared for the poor, but in the wrong way: Critics called him “acritical and assistentialist” for praising folk religion while failing to denounce the regime that kept so many Argentines destitute.
Bergoglio has sometimes romanticized suffering, insisting that the slums can teach the middle classes to live out their faith with joy and a “great sense of solidarity.” On the contrary, impoverishment alienates more than it binds: No one can read Katherine Boo’s riveting account of life in a Mumbai slum, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” and still think there is anything humanizing about poverty. But Bergoglio always understood this; for decades he criticized neoliberal economic policies and supported workers’ rights.
The problem, to him, was that leftist “avant-gardism” had captured too many Jesuits. Like other elites, they thought they knew what was best for the Catholic populace — when in truth the pueblo, not the elites, modeled theology in action. “When you want to know what the Church teaches, you go to the Magisterium, . . . but when you want to know how the Church teaches, you go to the faithful people,” he said. He developed “this dichotomy into something close to a doctrine, in which the poor, the pueblo fiel, are a kind of vaccine against the destructive effect of ideology, of left or right,” Ivereigh writes.
This distinction between grass-roots Christianity and elitist ideology rings false. Totalitarian leaders transformed Marxist “scriptures” into plans for salvation in which human suffering is utopia’s price, but history tells us that no organized religion is a stranger to these crimes, and that the “faithful people” are a short step from the fuming mob. The difference between ideologies that empower and those that devour is, in part, a procedural one. Whereas totalitarian states seek to impose a single worldview, Western governments have mostly domesticated ideology because they have adopted political systems — democratic elections; the rule of law — that allow people with different worldviews to live side by side, as long as they respect the autonomy of the individual.
Similarly, Francis hopes to solve the problems that plague the Catholic Church today by changing its procedures, by bringing transparency to the Curia and bolstering the bishops. The recent synod in Rome on the family — which disappointed liberals when the bishops struck gay-friendly language from their final statement — is notable less for its hints of doctrinal shift than for its signals that church government may change in a momentous way.
This, ultimately, may be what Francis’ conservative critics find most disturbing: not his cooling on the culture wars but his self-demotion from Catholic monarch to something more like the chairman of a deliberative (if hardly democratic) body. To Francis, such reforms would not bring a premodern church into the modern age, but restore Catholicism’s oldest values: “The greatest revolution,” he has said, “is what goes to the roots, to recognize them and see what those roots have to say at this time.” If Ivereigh’s predictions about Francis’ mission are right, the market for papal biography may dwindle — for the future of the church will depend far less on the man at its helm.
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