No Hope in this Pope

Pedro Casaldáliga.

In September 2011, two friends and I took a twenty-six hour bus ride through the dirt roads linking Brasília to São Félix do Araguaia, a small town bordering the Amazon region of northern Mato Grosso. We went there to meet Pedro Casaldáliga.

Casaldáliga was the former bishop of the São Félix dioceses. He was profoundly influenced by Liberation Theology, a leftist offshoot of Catholicism that became widespread among Latin America’s clergy in the sixties and seventies. In 1971 Casaldáliga became the bishop of São Félix, where he fully embraced the option for the poor. He spent the following years and decades fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples and landless peasants, openly criticizing the military dictatorship controlling Brazil since 1964. In return the local landowners, backed by the military authorities, threatened Casaldáliga constantly. In 1977 their gunmen murdered his vicar, João Bosco, whom they confused with the bishop himself. Casaldáliga never went back to his home in Spain: he believed his duty was in Brazil, and he was aware that the military would not allow him to come back if he ever left.

Knowing all of this, the prospect of meeting Casaldáliga awed me. He turned out to be a surprisingly warm man, who gave each of us an intense hug as soon as we entered his austere house. We spent the next five days talking with him, working on an article my friend and I were planning to write. Casaldáliga could link a discussion of Hugo Chávez to Saramago’s relationship with religion, to a stinging critique of neoliberalism and European austerity and this, in turn, to a jeremiad on the Church’s neglect of women and homosexuals. He would then crack a few self-deprecating jokes and switch back to literature –he writes poetry extensively.

Having grown up accustomed to the reactionary and hypocritical brand of Catholicism that is prevalent in Spain, and which has so far confined me to agnosticism, I found every one of Casaldáliga’s sentences a breath of fresh air. To me this was everything Christianity was meant to stand for. What are some of Jesus’ most powerful statements—on the camel and the needle, on “the lesser of these”—if not a straightforward defense of the wretched of the earth, of the many who are weak and poor against the few who are strong? Casaldáliga embodied that commitment. He had so much strength and resolve in him, but just as much warmth and humanity. He was full of compassion, in the original sense of the word. I was moved.

I thought of Casaldáliga a few days ago, as I read Pope Francis’ call for “a Church that is poor and for the poor.” It seems Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now the 266^th Pope of the Catholic Church, will put an end to Vatican opulence. He has elected a name that speaks to this goal, and led an austere lifestyle in his native Argentina that grants him further credibility. All of this has raised expectations that the Catholic Church may undergo a progressive shift under Bergoglio’s papacy.

The shift would be welcome, and long overdue. A number of pressing issues—from the child abuse and Vatileaks scandals, to the Vatican Bank’s notorious opacity—demand the Church’s immediate attention. Others, such as the institution’s stance on the ordination of women and gay marriage, must also be addressed sooner than later.

Each and every of these issues demands urgent reforms. Sadly, I believe few of them will take place under Bergoglio’s papacy.

The new Pope is doctrinally conservative. He opposes gay marriage, abortion, and addressing women’s role in the clergy. This is not surprising: the Casaldáligas and Martin Sheens of the Church have been left out in the cold for the past 35 years of reactionary leadership. Today’s cardinals are a product of the times and the overwhelming majority of them are conservative. No new Pope would emulate John XXIII and “throw open the windows of the Church, so that we can see out and the people can see in.” As the first Jesuit Pope, Francis may share his order’s dislike of extremist groups within the Church, such as Opus Dei, the Legion of Christ, and the Neocatecumenal Way. Hopefully these groups will now lose the privileged position they enjoyed under Benedict XVI and especially John Paul II. But this alone provides small comfort, given the scale of the challenges faced by the Church.

Far more interesting is Bergoglio’s stance on poverty. The new Pope’s commitment to the dispossessed seems genuine and commendable. It seems as if Bergoglio was attempting to resurrect the Church’s long-neglected social doctrine, much of which was developed in the sixties and seventies by Jesuits under the influence of Liberation Theology.

To a Latin American Jesuit deeply concerned with poverty, Liberation Theology would seem a natural fit. But the exact opposite is true of Bergoglio, whose track record is, in this regard, profoundly contradictory.

As one democracy after another collapsed throughout Latin America during the seventies, Bergoglio’s fellow Jesuits, like Casaldáliga and many other priests and bishops in the Church, took sides. They stood up against the military, from Salvador to Brazil. They often paid this decision with their lives. But Bergoglio did not join them. The highest-ranking Jesuit in Argentina when the junta took over, he not only failed to denounce the dictatorship, but tacitly collaborated with the military authorities in their Dirty War against leftists.

The issue at stake is Bergoglio’s silence when the junta kidnapped children from arrested and murdered leftists, and his role in the imprisonment of two dissenting Jesuits, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics. It remains unclear whether Bergoglio attempted to negotiate their release with the junta behind close doors or whether he simply washed his hands off the matter, as journalist Horacio Verbitsky has claimed. What is beyond doubt is that the Argentine dictatorship was among the most savage of the region. Over the span of seven years it murdered 30,000 Argentines. It practiced state terrorism upon thousands of its own citizens, throwing them into the sea from planes, in a drugged stupor, after torturing them at the Navy School of Mechanics.

Bergoglio did not raise his voice even once.

This decision can seem understandable given the terrible circumstances. But what were those circumstances, exactly? Can Bergoglio’s commitment to the poor be isolated from politics? Jalics and Yorio were leftists, but they were also socially aware priests working in the slums of Buenos Aires. A high-ranking Jesuit as Bergoglio could have spoken up for them. He could have criticized the junta without risking his life. Up to Paul VI’s death in 1978, when the Dirty War was well under way, Bergoglio would have received the Pope’s backing had he truly opposed the dictatorship. He simply chose not to.

I recently learnt that Casaldáliga was forced to leave São Félix for two weeks. He had received several death threats after supporting an indigenous tribe whose lands had been stolen by Brazilian settlers. Casaldáliga is now 85, he suffers from Parkinson’s disease and diabetes. When we visited him he was aware that he would not live for much longer, but this did not trouble him. For a brief moment, however, it seemed as if Casaldáliga would spend his last days away from the place to which he consecrated his life, while men like Bergoglio will keep rising through the ranks of the Church. The thought made me very sad.

So did reading about the new Pope, about his stance on poverty and his lack of a stance against power. These goals are not mutually exclusive. Casaldáliga was by no means the only one to embrace both. Of the ones who did, those who were not murdered lived to see John Paul II turn his back on them, and remain ostracized to this day. None of them became Popes, but every one of them acted as a true Christian.

A Latin American Jesuit who is committed to the poor but has a past like Bergoglio’s is a particularly cruel and ironic choice for the papacy. I do not question his commitment to the dispossessed. But measured against the likes of Pedro Casaldáliga, Evaristo Arns, or Óscar Romero, Jorge Bergoglio is ersatz. My conversion will have to wait.