Greg Daly
The Pope in Ireland
A two-year exile helped make the future Pope the man he is, writes Greg Daly
“I’m very pleased with the way things have gone,” Fr James Kelly SJ told The Irish Catholic in 2015, two years into Pope Francis’ papacy. “He has surprised me. He’s a changed man.”
Fr Kelly, who spent half of each year between 1979 and 1983 at Buenos Aires’ Jesuit-run Colegio Máximo, where the then Fr Jorge Bergoglio was rector, said he had been wary in 2013 when he heard the outcome of the papal conclave; while he believed the new Pontiff was “a pastoral man”, he feared he might prove rigid and authoritarian, as he had been in his days as seminary rector.
His fears, he was glad to report, had proved groundless, with his former boss – who he still characterised as essentially a conservative who would not shift Church teaching even if he gave it a more tolerant tone – proving more inclined to dialogue than in previous years. “He seems to have changed,” he says, adding: “He seems less authoritarian than he was. I feel myself that as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, when he got away from the Jesuits, he more or less found himself again – he got what he wanted: he wanted to be out with the people.”
Looking at the life of Pope Francis before he became Pope, it seems that while being archbishop surely had changed him, an even more transformative episode may have been his time spent in a kind of exile in Córdoba between June 1990 and May 1992, a period he described to the Jesuit Fr Antonio Spadaro in 2013 as “a time of great interior crisis”.
Appointed to lead Argentina’s Jesuit province in 1973, then aged just 36, Pope Francis was by his own admission an authoritarian leader in his early days, with this contributing to division in the province. His subsequent time as rector of the Colegio Máximo, which he headed from 1980 to 1986, was hardly less polarising, and over the next few years Fr Bergoglio was seen by some in Argentina and among the Jesuit leadership in Rome as a cause of conflict among the Argentine Jesuits.
Residence
In April 1990, he was removed from his teaching post at the Colegio Máximo, where he had lived for most of the previous 25 years, and was sent 650km away to the Jesuit residence in Córdoba in central Argentina, with Jesuits seen as his close followers being sent abroad to study and told not to contact him.
The future Pope spent two years in the pretty mountain city, where he was tasked primarily with hearing Confessions, listening to university students and professors and to people from the poorer outskirts of the town who came to the city centre because their own local priests were too busy.
“Bergoglio had never before given so much time to being a channel of forgiveness and mercy,” writes Austen Ivereigh in The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope. “It softened him, kept him close to the pueblo fiel (faithful people), and put his own troubles in perspective.”
Troubles he nonetheless had, and as he would tell Fr Spadaro many years later, his exile in Córdoba was a time of great interior crisis.
In a 2015 article ‘The Pope’s Dark Night of the Soul’, Fr Rafael Velasco told CNN’s Daniel Burke how badly the future Pope seemed to be taking his exile in its early months.
“Velasco said he visited Bergoglio in 1990, not long after the exile began,” wrote Burke. “They talked about the Society of Jesus, and Bergoglio tried not to be critical but couldn’t help himself. He fumed at being pushed aside like an old piece of furniture and accused Argentina’s Jesuit leaders of uprooting the society from its traditional missions. But he saw no way out of exile.”
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Fr Ángel Rossi, a Jesuit who Pope Francis has described as his “spiritual son”, has called Córdoba a “double desert experience” for the Pope, first as a novice and then many years later as “a desert of exile” which the Pope himself describes as “a time of darkness, of shadows” and “a moment of interior purification”.
Stressing that deserts are not places in which one stays, Fr Rossi says that by passing through the desert an exile can become an exodus, a kind of pruning that allows us to become more who we are meant to be – indeed, in 2003 the then Archbishop Bergoglio told a politician who feared standing down, “you’ve got to live your own exile. I did. And afterward you’ll be back. And when you do come back, you’ll be merciful, kinder, and you’re going to want to serve your people more”.
Unjust
The exiling of the future Pope to Córdoba was “humanly unjust”, Fr Rossi told Daniel Burke, but it nonetheless served him well.
“I would say that many things that he is living through today got their start here in Córdoba,” he said, likening the situation to seeds being planted in hard winter soil that bear fruit long afterwards. “They are hidden from the outside, but one is pleasantly surprised to see where these great people have gone in these moments of silence.”
The experience, he said, did not so much change the future Pope as help him to become more fully himself. “It is not a different Bergoglio,” he said. “It is a fully blossomed Bergoglio, one who has amplified his reach and found his mission.”
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After six months in Córdoba, Fr Bergoglio began working on an essay that would see light as ‘Silencio y palabra’ (Silence and word), written to help religious communities discern what to do in difficult circumstances. It had, perhaps unavoidably, a personal tone, drawing as it could not but do on his own experiences in Argentina’s polarised Jesuit province.
“When we find ourselves in a difficult situation, sometimes silence is not an act of virtue,” he wrote, continuing, “it is simply imposed upon us without any choice.” Self-pity is a natural temptation in that situation, he observed – “It could happen that one falls into a kind of spiritual victimisation, considering that ‘they hurt me without any reason’” – but even imposed silences can be channels for God’s grace, and it is important to stay humble, keep praying, and allow God the time to work.
Sometimes, after all, human solutions aren’t an option, and in another essay published while in Córdoba, ‘El exilio de toda carne’ (the exile of all flesh), he wrote that “the man or woman who consciously takes charge of his exile suffers a double loneliness”, not merely being strangers in a strange land but suffering “the bitterness of solitude before God”.
The isolation, he wrote, is felt most acutely in prayer, not merely as one may pray separately from one’s fellows but because one can feel a yawning gap between one’s desires and God’s plans. This kind of pain, he wrote, was felt by the Hebrew prophets, with Jeremiah especially having struggled to carry out his great mission and who was remembered only for the infighting and contradictions he left behind.
Unsure even how to return home, in the end he was left with no other option but to resort to prayer. “It is the prayer of a man who gave everything, and would like – at least – that God would be on his side,” Fr Bergoglio wrote. “But in life, sometimes it seems as though God puts himself on the other side.”
Plans
In ‘Silencio y palabra’ Fr Bergoglio noted how Jesuit founder St Ignatius of Loyola had centuries earlier highlighted the dangers of the temptation of trying to force God’s plans through one’s own predetermined plans and towards one’s own predetermined goals. Ambition and greed, he wrote, could in turn lead to mistrust, suspicion, triumphalism and a kind of spiritual worldliness.
The latter, he said, was an especially insidious temptation for religious people who can wish to place themselves at the centre of things: the Pope’s focus today on the margins and peripheries, and on those who can be found there, is surely intended in no small part as an antidote to this.
The article went on to consider how to respond to temptations that present themselves as though they are virtues – bad spirits who present themselves as angels. Only Jesus can reveal this truth, he wrote, and allowing him to do this entails “keeping silence, praying and humbling ourselves”.
This can be a painful experience, of course, and in reflecting on this Fr Bergoglio was drawing on the Third Week of the Jesuit Exercises, the spiritual manual composed by St Ignatius, which considers how in Christ’s Passion the divine nature goes into hiding: “Christ as divine does not destroy his enemies, although he could do so, but allows himself in his sacred human nature to suffer most cruelly.”
The devil, Fr Bergoglio wrote, must eventually reveal himself in the light of the Cross, mistaking as he does gentleness for weakness.
“In moments of darkness and great tribulation, when the ‘tangles’ and the ‘knots’ cannot be untied and nothing is clear, then we must say nothing: the gentleness of the silence will make us look even weaker, and it will be the same devil who, emboldened, will show himself and his true intentions, no longer disguised as an angel of light but boldly and shamelessly.”
When God finally goes into battle against the enemy of humankind, he then wrote, it was important to avoid interfering or engaging in factionalism or to divide into good and bad, but to focus on living the holy tension between the memory of Cross and the hope of the Resurrection. In such situations, he wrote, God “asks us only to protect the wheat, and not to try to weed out the darnel”.
Reflecting further on the Third Week in December 1991, Fr Bergoglio noted the dangers of taking spiritual refuge in what might have been, demanding instant resurrections, or denying that sometimes things really are finished, and corpses really are corpses.
“That is how, throughout history, the Church’s true reforms, those that bring life to parts of it that are dead, and born from within the entrails of the Church itself, and not from outside,” he wrote. “God’s reforms happen right there, where there is no other solution but to hope against all hope.”
The lessons the future Pope seems ultimately to have learned in Córdoba are to never lose hope, and never stop trusting.