How can we explain the “Bergoglio phenomenon?” We have to go back to the beginning of this century, because the Argentine cardinal was little-known among the world’s top ecclesiastic dignitaries until a special circumstance in 2001 put him at the center of their gaze.
It was 9/11, to be more precise.
The then-archbishop of New York, Edward Cardinal Egan, was at the Vatican participating in an assembly of bishops from around the world.
He had to fly to his home city to attend to the victims of that terrible attack on the twin towers.
His place as the assembly’s general rapporteur — a key position — was filled instead by Cardinal Bergoglio, who made an excellent impression with his performance.
All of the observers agreed that this was the starting point of his international trajectory.
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Bergoglio’s prestige was reconfirmed six years later at the fifth general conference of Caribbean and Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil.
There he was elected president, by an ample majority, of the commission writing a declaration summing up the conference.
This responsibility was even more relevant when you consider that similar conferences, like those held in 1969 in Medellin, Colombia, and in 1979 in Puebla, Mexico, ended up producing declarations of enormous significance to Catholicism in the region.
This wasn’t the only recognition Bergoglio garnered during the encounter: The day he was chosen to give Mass, his homily provoked applause. No other celebrant got applause in a similar circumstance during the three weeks of the conference. Witnesses said that many participants took advantage of their breaks to talk with the Argentine cardinal and even take photos with him as if he were a famous actor or a well-known sports star.
Despite this, anyone who has seen Bergoglio knows that he is not a glamorous telegenic figure.
Nor is he a grandiloquent orator, with histrionic skills. Rather, he speaks in a low tone about profound things.
Besides, until he was designated Buenos Aires’ auxiliary bishop in 1992, when he was 55, he was a perfect outsider in the church, not a priest who was making a career out of climbing the ecclesiastic pyramid.
In those times, he served as confessor at the residence of the Church of the Society of Jesus in Cordoba, where he had been for nearly two years. It was the then-Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Antonio Cardinal Quarracino, who — drawn to Bergoglio’s circumstances — picked him as one of his auxiliary bishops. And one year later, he made him his principal, anointing him vicar general.
When his health began to fail, Quarracino promoted Bergoglio as his successor. When Quarracino died in 1998, Bergoglio became the first Jesuit to head Buenos Aires’ curia.
By then, Bergoglio already was making a great ascendancy among the city’s clergy — among the youngest above all.
They liked his affable closeness, his simplicity, his sage advice.
Nothing of this would change with his arrival to the main throne of the archdiocese, the cardinal residence.
He set up a direct telephone so that priests could call him at any hour with a problem. He would stay overnight in a parish, helping a sick priest, if it was needed.
He kept on taking the bus and riding the subway — setting aside a car and driver. He turned down moving to the elegant archbishop’s residence in Olivos, close to the presidential estate, and instead stayed on in his austere room in Buenos Aires.
Finally, he kept personally responding to calls, accepting visits from everyone and keeping track of all his audiences and activities in a little, rustic pocket notebook.
And he would dodge social events, preferring his simple dark clergyman’s suit to the cardinal’s cassock.
Speaking of his austerity, they say that when it was announced he would be made cardinal, in 2001, he didn’t want to buy new attire but wanted to merely tailor the clothes of his predecessor.
And that, as soon as he learned some of the faithful were planning to travel to Rome in order to be there for the ceremony where Pope John Paul II would make him cardinal, he pleaded with them not to do it and to give the money for the trip to the poor.
They also say he would make frequent trips to Buenos Aires’ shantytowns, where during a chat with hundreds of men from the parish of Our Lady of Caacupé, in a slum in the Barracas neighborhood, a bricklayer stood up and said, clearly moved, “I am proud of you, because when I came here with my companions in a bus I saw you sitting in one of the last seats, like one more of us. I told them it was you, but no one believed me.”
Since then, Bergoglio gained a permanent place in the heart of those humble, suffering people. “It’s that we feel like he is one of us,” they explained.
Many also remember from that time his move to stop the repression happening in the Plaza de Mayo, during the protests of December 2001. When he saw, from the window of his archbishop’s residence, police beating a woman, he picked up the telephone and called the Ministry of the Interior. The security secretary took his call, and Bergoglio asked him to differentiate among activists creating a disturbance and folks who simply were upset and wanted to withdraw their savings from the bank.
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The cardinal was the target — above all during the 2005 conclave where he was one of the biggest papal candidates — of persistent journalistic accusations. Writers accused him of virtually turning over two priests from his order who worked at a slum to a Marine command during the military dictatorship. The author of the report said that Bergoglio, who then led Argentina’s Jesuits, was also trying to push out all of the progressive members of The Church of the Society of Jesus.
However, other observers considered it to be the opposite — he managed to save the lives of the two priests and to circumvent an extreme crisis in his religious community, the product of the time’s fierce ideologies.
“It was a very difficult time for The Church of the Society of Jesus, but if he hadn’t been at the forefront, the difficulties would have been much greater,” said the order’s two-time secretary, Angel Centeno.
With Francesca Ambrogetti
This essay was excerpted from the authors’ official biography of Jorge Mario Bergoglio “El Jesuita.” It was translated by Erica Pearson.
