Reflections from the “end of the world”

The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on March 5 and the election eight days later of Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the bishop of Rome put Latin America back in the spotlight. One Latin American leader disappeared from the stage just as another was preparing to make his big appearance. What might the new pope mean for Latin America? For Nicaragua? There are so many expectations, hopes… and challenges.

Envío team

The Latin American Left has come up with two widely opposing interpretations of the meaning of an Argentine cardinal of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s stripe being elected the top authority of the Catholic Church. For some, the “Francis plan” (concern for the poor and the environment and a struggle for social justice) resembles the “Homeland plan” Chávez bequeathed his followers. In a moment of excess in the political project of mysifying Chávez, his heir apparent Nicolás Maduro went so far as to state the following: “As our Comandante is in the heavens before Christ, something influenced the choosing of a South American as pope. It seems to us that Christ said to him: ‘South America’s time has come.’” At the opposite extreme, others explain Cardinal Bergoglio’s selection precisely as a geopolitical move to halt the advances of popular governments such as Chávez’s in Latin America. Other views in between these two contradictory “Latin American reflections” are also worth considering.

Benedict XVI opted to
“hit the reset button”

Chilean journalist Álvaro Ramis interpreted Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation as the simplest option open to him. Joseph Ratzinger was overwhelmed by the challenges posed by a Church subjected to so many crises at once: a credibility crisis over the pedophilia scandals, a financial crisis in the Vatican Bank with suggestions of money laundering, crises due to power struggles in the Roman Curia… Feeling himself powerless, he opted to “hit the reset button for an automatic rebooting of the Holy See,” passing all these problems on to someone with more freedom to deal with them.

Ratzinger may not have had in mind that the person who would take the stage next would be a Latin American, a Jesuit, a man like Bergoglio. Or did he? While it is said that what happens in the conclave in which the new bishop of Rome is selected is a sealed secret, a lot always ends up being known about the correlaion of forces within the Sistine Chapel’s beautiful walls.

Several Vatican-watchers have told how Cardinal Bergoglio came in second behind Ratzinger in the 2005 conclave. They have also told that Italian Jesuit Cardinal Carlo María Martini, then bishop of Milan and a progressive, had an important majority of votes in that same conclave but declined the post due to illness and threw his support behind Bergoglio.

“Francis, our American”

For the very first time in two millennia of Catholic history, the Church went to the “end of the world” to find the new bishop of Rome, as Pope Francis himself referred to Latin America in his first appearance. All previous popes had been Italian or at least European. Our continent has always been the “end of the world” due to its distance from the centers of ecclesiastical power and its condition as an ecclesial territory protected by Rome.

Prior to any analysis, much less any study of his personal or ideological profile, Cardinal Bergoglio’s geographic origins triggered knee-jerk nationalist fervor in all our rulers, and Nicaragua was no exemption. Our country had barely emerged from seven days of mourning for the death of President Chávez when, just minutes after the “Habemus Papam,” First Lady and government spokesperson Rosario Murillo spoke via the official media, brimming with Catholic jubilation: “Nicaragua, a country that defines itself as Christian, Socialist and Solidary and defends family and community values, is celebrating the election of Pope Francis I, Our American…. I am sure we all feel moved and recognized because a Latin American pope makes us see the importance that our continent, our peoples, are taking on throughout the world…. We are elated because this election re-launches Our America through the Catholic Church.…”

“I did what I could
with few possibilities”

But the shadows of Latin America’s recent tragic past also emerged alongside the natural and understandable enthusiasm. So many wounds are still open and so many political injustices remain unpunished, with the victimizers walking around free and the victims or their relatives deeply offended.

Only minutes after Bergoglio left the Vatican balcony, the social networks were saturated with posts quoting trustworthy Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky, who linked Bergoglio to the capture and torture of two young Jesuit priests when the future pope was still a priest and the superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina. Spokespeople of the Holy See called the information libelous, but provided no details to contradict it. One of the two Jesuits declared from Germany that he no longer points the finger at Bergoglio for what happened; the other died years ago. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, also an Argentine, tried to put this contradictory information to rest by traveling to Rome to state that while Father Bergoglio did not denounce the dictatorship, he was not an accomplice.

Also widely circulated was an interview Bergoglio himself gave in 2010, in which he talks with convincing detail about this concrete case and others in which he was involved. Bergoglio describes his role during the dictatorship as follows: “I did what I could considering my age [37] and the few contacts I could count on to advocate for kidnapped individuals…. I acted within my limited possibilities and scant weight.”

The wounds of the past

Will Pope Francis make some reference to this stage of his country’s history from his new investiture, now that he has many possibilities and such a lot of weight? Many voices are calling on him to do so, while more prudent voices are counseling silence, to avoid stirring up a debate that could become interminable.

In any event, one of the most important aspects of his being Latin American is that it could make open the way for a necessary reflection in our own region. The debate about his responsibilities in Argentina during those years is an expression of the need for both the Catholic hierarchies and the societies of many of our countries to rethink, recognize and rectify much if not all of what was said and not said, done and not done in those bloody stages that have so marked us all.

In Central America’s case, including Nicaragua’s, the desire to forgive, forget and turn the page prevails, including for religious reasons. The trial of retired General Efraín Ríos Montt, the coup-imposed head of state in Guatemala during the infamous early eighties, demonstrates the need to attend to the wounds of the past by re-opening them, recognizing them, talking about them and thus helping to heal them. Speaking about them returns dignity to the victims.

Times of change

In March 1976, when the military overthrew Isabel Perón and took power in Argentina, Bergoglio was a young priest. A decade had passed since the transcendental overturning of doctrine and pastoral practices resulting from the Second Vatican Council held in Rome between 1962 and 1965, followed by the resulting “preferential option for the poor” and other contents proclaimed in the Latin American Bishops’ Conference, held in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968. These changes seemingly translated into the “end of the world,” at least the traditional religious world, and Latin America became the stage for the advance of Liberation Theology.

Latin America was then—and still is—the world’s most inequitable, unequal region, with the greatest gap between the wealthy few and the many poor. It is also the region with the greatest number of Catholics, spanning both the wealthy and the poor. So it was logical that Liberation Theology should be born and develop here.

Bergoglio seems not to have viewed that theological current very fondly, perhaps because the changes were so radical and his traditional doctrine led him to fear brusque change. Priests, bishops and nuns all over Latin America went through a major polarization in those times, one unknown in Catholic Church structures. In those same years, another bishop, Oscar Romero, had fears similar to Bergoglio’s in his polarized El Salvador of “the 14 families” and tried to halt the necessary changes—and inevitable excesses—provoked by the new theology.

“By his fruits
we will know him”

In 1978, Pope John Paul II, who was in power 28 years, began rolling back almost all the pastoral, doctrinal, institutional, educational and other initiatives generated by Liberation Theology, with Cardinal Ratzinger as his right hand man. John Paul II always viewed Latin America and its struggle for desperately-needed social transformations and political changes through “Polish lenses.” All he saw in the armed and unarmed struggle that thousands of men and women of his Church got involved in was the ghost of the communism that had been so strongly rejected in his native Poland. We saw that in Nicaragua when he visited us in March 1983. For years his doctrinal texts and administrative decisions about Latin America revealed his Polish prejudices.

Today, the fertile ground in which Liberation Theology was cultivated is virtually “scorched earth,” much of which has now been occupied by the most conservative Evangelical denominations and Pentecostal and Neo-pentecostal groups. What will the Latin American who now heads the Catholic Church government sow on it?

This is the historical and ideological context behind his Latin American origin and his reiterated expressions of concern for the poor. It is a context that allows us to open—and keep open—important questions that have only one answer for the moment: “By his fruits we will know him.”

Wojtyla against
20th-century socialism

John Paul II’s active commitment to the Solidarity union in Poland and his agreement—and even complicity—with US President Reagan’s policies in the international conflicts of those years turned Karol Wojtyla, not without reason, into one of the decisive symbolic factors in ending the socialist experiences of Eastern Europe. He is recognized as one of the contributors to the end of the 20th-century socialisms.

That much has been written into our memory, which is surely why so many leftists today fear that if a Polish pope fulfilled that wily mission, it could now fall to an Argentine one to put an end to the experiences of so-called 21st-century socialism. Does that hypothesis make realistic sense or is it a wildly exaggerated extrapolation?

The Cuban case

One of the few surviving 20th-century socialisms is found in our region. It is in Cuba, the Latin American country where Catholicism has perhaps been the weakest historically. The many good collaborative relations that Raúl Castro has been maintaining for years with the Cuban Catholic hierarchy headed by Cardinal Jaime Ortega doesn’t suggest future Vatican-orchestrated conflicts aimed at destroying the Cuban system. They rather speak of a convenient understanding between the two powers.

Samuel Farber, Cuban-born Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, has shown how Cuba’s Catholic Church has been transformed into a reformist mediating agent between the government and the opposition and a kind of conservative moral bulwark. He underscores the fact that it has mediated the release of political prisoners and the even more unprecedented fact that it is the only non-state institution with authorized communication media. By his count the government has permitted the Church to open 12 web sites and publish 7 e-bulletins, dozens of small group and parish publications, and 46 bulletins and magazines to which some 250,000 people on the island have direct or indirect access. These publications, says Farber, are the only significant exception to the State’s media monopoly.

As to what this means for Cuban socialism, Farber concludes that although the Cuban Church has neither the profound nationalist roots nor the grassroots support the Polish Church had in the Solidarity era during the eighties, it does have the great advantage of being the only institution in Cuba that is genuinely important without being part of the State.

Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI gave special importance to intervening in the Cuban case. What will Francis do? Farber says that the real proof will be if progressive Catholics join the Left in any movement to develop a genuinely democratic socialism on the island.

Is Bergoglio against the
21st-century socialisms?

In addition to Cuba’s historical socialism, other 21st-century socialisms have emerged recently in Latin America. Whether those of the ALBA countries, “people’s” governments, populist governments or leftist governments, they all demonstrate a special sensibility toward the poor and are starting to make the continuously postponed dream of Latin American unity something of a reality.

To a degree that’s hard to measure, both the impassioned, direct and popular way Hugo Chávez spoke to his people and the rest of the continent and his generous unifying initiatives—thanks to huge oil resources the likes of which no other leftist government has had access to—have gotten Latin America to see itself with new eyes, and to be viewed more respectfully, taken more into account, elsewhere. That has unquestionably been Chávez’s legacy, but is it really why an Argentine was elected bishop of Rome? It seems another exaggerated extrapolation.

No national or international conditions seem to exist at this time for the symbolic power of a Latin American pope to encourage or support 180-degree political changes or feed social discontent in that multicolored and complex set of Latin American governments self-defined—or labeled by others—as “leftist” (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, El Salvador and Nicaragua) beyond possible generic declarations from the Vatican.

Are there contradictions?

On the one hand, the proposals for a redistribution of wealth promoted by these governments seem perfectly compatible with the calls to prioritize the poor emphasized by Bishop Bergoglio both before becoming pope and the minute he assumed his new position. In Nicaragua’s case, for example, many of the social programs aimed at the poor very obviously recall traditional paternalistic Catholic aid: Christian “charity.”

These governments also share with Pope Francis a criticism of the exclusionary neoliberal model, which generates poverty and poor people. In the wide gamut of those excluded from the current system, Francis has particularly focused on the victims—women, young girls, workers, migrants—of “the 21st-century slavery of human trafficking.”

Moreover, there is no longer any anti-clericalism on these governments’ agenda. And in the majority of these countries, the strict sexual morality the Vatican has been prioritizing isn’t a likely breeding ground for in-depth political conflicts. In fact, some of the governments’ approaches even coincide with the Vatican agenda.

Following the Vatican “line,” both Nicaragua and El Salvador maintain the criminalization of therapeutic abortion independent of the circumstances and the Rafael Correa government in Ecuador is also pushing for restrictive legislation on the issue. Nicaragua’s FSLN even voted to criminalize it after it had been legally permitted for over a century. These three cases show the ambiguity of the supposedly 21st-century Left toward sexual and reproductive rights, which are also human rights. They bear a very disappointing similarity to the Left of the last century, using one excuse or another to always put women’s issues on the back burner.

The religiosity these governments promote also predominates among their constituencies. It is often closer to Bergoglio’s traditional religiosity than to the postulates of the struggle for justice, permanently accompanied by a critique of abuses of power, which is a central idea in Liberation Theology.

A tense and
conflictive relationship

Very conservative expressions about interrupting a pregnancy were heard from Bergoglio in Argentina both as bishop and as cardinal and we’re now seeing them reproduced in his new role as pope. He believes “it is never a solution,” implying that “never” includes even when the life of the woman hangs in the balance or the pregnancy is the result of rape, including of young girls.

The new pope has also spoken out in very archaic terms about “egalitarian” marriage, as same sex marriage is called in Argentina, describing it as “not a mere legislative issue but rather a ‘ploy’ by the father of lies [the devil] to confuse and deceive God’s children.”

The vision of Catholic doctrine and morality toward human sexuality and its dilemmas, most specifically female sexuality, has been very conflictive and tense over nearly two millennia. Even today the official sexual morality has remained closed to the advances of science, psychology, anthropology and medicine, not to mention of theology, spirituality and feminism. And it is precisely regarding aspects of sexual morality and the vision of sexuality that the Catholic Church’s grassroots base, particularly women, are most urging changes.

How much longer?

The traditional Catholic vision of women is incompatible with a modern vision, updated in line with a human rights-based perspective. At the time of the conclave that elected Bergoglio, the prestigious Brazilian nun and theologian Ivone Gebara expressed her concern that it would once more be an “aged, minority and male elite” that would elect the new pope. “How much longer,” she wondered, “would the male gerontocracy mirror the image of an ancient, white-bearded God?”

Referring to the “medieval privileges” of the Catholic Church’s government structure, she stated that “they maintain the papacy and the Vatican as a separate male State. But it is a male State with influential diplomatic representation served by thousands of women all over the world, in the different entities of its organizational structure. This fact also invites us to reflect on the type of social gender relations this State continues to maintain.”

Will Pope Francis be open to such reflection? Will he make changes and take measures based on the results of that reflection? Will there be a favorable correlation of forces in the Church that enables spaces to be opened in that terrain, which by Catholic tradition is particularly impenetrable?

“Served by
thousands of women”

The “thousands of women” serving the Church mentioned by Gebara are nuns. According to the latest official Vatican statistics, the 720,000 nuns in the church almost doubles the 400,000 priests and monks.. Given the “type of social gender relations” in the Church, they are one of the sectors of women most subordinated and subjected to male power, in the form of bishops in dioceses or priests in parishes. This subordination is far greater in the countries of the “end of the world,” where the damaging sexist culture is more rooted in society and therefore reflected in more ominous forms in the Church as well.

Throughout the world, nuns are everywhere and in all expressions of service, but not of power. We find them in that “periphery” to which Pope Francis has invited all Catholic faithful to go. More than the vast majority of priests, their habits or lay clothes have that “smell of sheep” that Pope Francis has called on male priests to attain as a sign of their pastoral proximity to the poorest of the poor.

Such women are a familiar sight in all corners of Nicaragua and the rest of Central and Latin America. They have been teachers, confessors, preachers, advisers, wise women and of course martyrs. They are in the outlying rural districts, marginal barrios and schools; and they accompany prostitutes, malnourished children and little girls who are the victims of rape… And yet little is heard of their voices, given how much they have to tell. They are a silent and silenced majority on the Catholic Church’s pastoral team.

One of the simplest, fairest and most positive results of Ivone Gebara’s necessary reflection would be to guarantee full autonomy to the female religious congregations, and in many cases to also allow them to run their own community, just as priests do.

“Let’s discuss all issues”

Women priests? The end of obligatory celibacy for diocesan priests? Those are two of the most frequently mentioned challenges the Catholic Church is facing today. Both have influenced the drop in priestly vocations—often due to the weighty yoke of celibacy—and in the number of communities where there are “sheep without shepherds” that could be led by shepherdesses.

In a televised interview by journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro on March 19, Nicaraguan Jesuit priest Fernando Cardinal offered bold and timely opinions on this debate that John Paul II refused to permit in the Church. Asked whether any issues of sexual morality are “non-negotiable” for the Church, as Managua’s auxiliary bishop, Silvio Báez, had stated during the conclave, Cardenal responded that “we have to wait to see what the pope’s position will be on the ordination of women, the use of contraceptives, priestly celibacy... all these moral issues. These topics were not discussed during the papacies of John Paul II or Benedict XVI. Some have gone so far as to say senseless things, such as that the gospel makes it clear that women cannot be ordained priests. That’s simply not true. Where does it say that? Let’s discuss it; let’s discuss it. That issue couldn’t be discussed in previous papacies, and that’s not acceptable. Let’s discuss all issues. The issue of contraceptives is one that has been discussed in the Church ever since His Holiness Paul VI established their prohibition in the encyclical “Humanae Vitae.” So let’s discuss it once and for all to reach a decision.”

“Too far to the left”

In 1984 Fernando Cardenal was removed from the Society of Jesus on Pope Juan Pablo II’s order because he was serving in the revolutionary government of that decade, first directing the National Literacy Crusade and later as education minister. He was readmitted 12 years later. It is the only such case in that religious order’s history.

Pope John Paul II’s relationship with the Jesuits was always conflictive. At the time Wojtyla was elected, the Basque priest Pedro Arrupe had already been at the head of the Society of Jesus for 13 years. Under his rule, the Jesuit priests pledged in their 32nd General Congregation (1975) to express their Christian faith through a commitment to social justice.

In 1981, with Arrupe by then quite ill, the pope named a very conservative Jesuit as the Society’s “inspector.” A large number of Jesuits considered it a drastic and painful measure, as Fernando Cardenal recalls: “Father Arrupe was a very strong reformer with respect to the Jesuits’ official commitment to the poor. And that generated problems, serious problems with John Paul II. There were major contradictions because we were considered too far to the left on social issues.”

A change in sensibility
and the balance of power

Over the centuries the Society of Jesus has been the religious order with the greatest weight in the Catholic Church. The Jesuits’ traditional ability to move in arenas of power and their professional capacities in all areas of human knowledge have been the subject of both admiration and jealousy. “Jesuitism” is a concept associated both with conspiracy and hypocrisy, and with continual forward thinking behavior. Given their power and influence, the heirs of Ignatius of Loyola were expelled by different governments from Portugal, France and Spain and from the American colonies of both Spain and Portugal in the 18th century, as depicted in the movie “The Mission.” During that stage the pope even dissolved the order for 40 years.

More than a few Vatican analysts think that the choice of a Jesuit for the most important post in the Catholic Church also signals a shift in ecclesial sensibility at the highest level and a change in the balance of power. We can expect declining influence in the Vatican of neoconservative Catholic institutions that received privileges and relevance from the governments of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They even appointed diocesan bishops from those movements, among other reasons to neutralize the influence of Jesuit, Dominican and Franciscan congregations, which have a proven historical trajectory and an increasing commitment to social change.

The “losers”

The more than three decades of preeminence and expansion by these groups with the Vatican’s endorsement was one of the reasons few believed Bergoglio would be elected. In the end, according to Vatican watchers, the election of a Jesuit was pushed through by those who trusted that the Jesuits were strong enough to address the disproportionate power wielded by today’s Vatican Curia.

From that perspective, Opus Dei, Communion and Liberation, the Foco- lare Movement, the Legionnaires of Christ, the Heralds of the Gospel and the Neocatachumenal Way (whose followers are known as “kikos” for their founder’s name) can be considered the “losers” in this election. Two of these movements—the Legionnaires of Christ and the Heralds of the Gospel—originated in Latin America and have mainly expanded here.

Opus Dei, founded by Spanish priest José María Escrivá in 1928, gained ground among the clergy and business elites in Latin America during John Paul II’s long government. It’s less present in Nicaragua than in El Salvador, where Monsignor Romero’s originally conservative ideology led him to fall “into the hands of Opus Dei” at one point during his years as auxiliary bishop of San Salvador (1967-1974). In 1979 he admitted with relief to Jesuit César Jerez that he had nearly stayed with that order.

Legionnaires and Heralds

The Legionnaires of Christ began in 1941 in Mexico, dedicating itself to educating the elites. It became scandalously famous for the criminal conduct of its founder, priest Marcial Maciel, who committed dozens of sexual abuses against his own seminary students.

The Heralds of the Gospel, also known as the Knights of the Virgin, grew out of the ultraconservative anticommunist Brazilian organization called Tradition, Family and Property. It was founded by Joao Clá Días, who was ordained a priest by John Paul II in record time then named monsignor by Benedict XVI. The “knights” dressed in military boots and crusader tunics with large rosaries at their waist.

Two of the front-running candidates for pope during the conclave were Brazil’s Odilo Scherer, archbishop of São Paulo, close to the Heralds, and Italy’s Angelo Scola, a prominent member of Communion and Liberation. Many analysts believe Scola was the candidate favored by Ratzinger, who sympathizes with that movement. The four women who cooked for and served Ratzinger in the Vatican and will continue to do so even after he leaves his temporary retirement quarters in the apostolic palace in Castel Gandolfo are a form of lay nuns who are members of Communion and Liberation.

“A Jesuit to
reform the Church”

In the midst of bets of all sorts about the results of the conclave, only one specialist in Vatican affairs, Spanish journalist José Manuel Vidal, put his money on Bergoglio. Two days before the election, he wrote that “they are looking for a new Roncalli, a role many can see being played by Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, who resembles the Good Pope in many things other than his appearance. Angelo Roncalli, who was more corpulent than Bergoglio, was Pope John XXIII.

“If the conclave gets blocked between the ‘Roman party’ of the curials and the ‘reformist party’ of the foreigners, especially Americans and Germans, opting for the Argentine could reveal itself as providential,” forecasted Vidal in the hope that it would happen. And he added, “No one doubts that the Argentine cardinal has character. As the tranquil Augustinian Ricardo Corleto described him to me, ‘He is a man so honest and irreproachable that not even the Kirchner government could find any stain in his life, despite searching with great diligence.’ Bergoglio is a reliable, experienced, decided candidate, one of those with a steady pulse, ‘clean’ and with the gall to finish the cleaning up that Benedict XVI couldn’t or they wouldn’t let him do. A new Roncalli from the Southern Cone with roots in Turin. A Jesuit to reform the Church.”

Vidal confessed his enthusiasm upon learning that his hunch had been right. And in only ten days the first book on the new pope to hit the bookstores of Spain and Latin America was co-authored by Vidal and his colleague Jesús Bastante, audaciously (or perhaps hopefully?) titled Francisco: el nuevo Juan XXIII (Francis: The New John XXIII). The network of Opus Dei bookstores vetoed its sale.

“He represents the
unity of the diverse”

“Reforming the Church” will never be a short-term process. Nor will it be the work of a single man, however much power the bishop of Rome may have accumulated over time, however audacious a Jesuit invested with these powers may be, whatever gall Bergoglio may have. It will be a long-term process and will require a massive collective will.

Pope Francis has taken this post 50 years after the most renovating event in Catholic history: Vatican II. Yet virtually all the transformations proposed by that Council were forcibly or otherwise abandoned during the government of John Paul II, both in Europe and here in “the end of the world.”

Francis’ profound sense of being Latin American is expressed very accurately by the Jesuit provincial in Chile, Eugenio Valenzuela, when he writes: “He does not come from Europe, from the center, from the First World, but from Latin America, from the Third World, from the periphery. He comes from Latin America, which concentrates 40% of all Catholics, a significant part of the two-thirds found in the poor countries of the South. I think this novelty is related to the Second Vatican Council, which according to one in-depth interpretation invites us to move from a Western European Church to a Church that is for the first time global. A Church that recognizes the particular churches and values the difference between an African Christianity and a North American Catholicism as richness, that must learn both from the novelty of a minority Catholicism in India and Vietnam and from the majority Catholicism of Mexico and Colombia…. Electing an Argentine pope, which is something different, is another step in the reception of the Council…. He represents the unity not of equals but of the diverse.”

The increasingly diverse societies of the countries of the “end of the world” today expect changes in the Catholic Church. Will it be possible to deliver them?

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