A decade of Latin American pontificate

On March 13, 2013, on the balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, until a few hours earlier, joked that his fellow cardinals had gone to look for the new Bishop of Rome “at the end of the world.” ”. Not quite, but almost. Argentina’s Ushuaia and Chile’s Punta Arenas are the southernmost cities that exist, almost on the edge of Antarctica, the last region on Earth to be discovered and first sighted in 1603 by the Palencian navigator Gabriel of Castile.

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At the very least, the first non-European pope since Gregory III – born in Syria and elected in 740 – has redirected the voice of the papacy towards the peripheries of the Catholic world. It seems no coincidence that the conclave handed over the keys to San Pedro just months after a Pew Research Center report revealed that most of the 1.3 billion Catholics already lived in the Global South.

The eccentric perspective from which the Vatican looks at the world today is that of Buenos Aires, a city that Gabriel García Márquez visited only once in his life despite the fact that it was first published there, in 1967, one hundred years of solitude. The capital of La Plata, he said, gave him “vertigo”: he felt that beyond its southern borders the land ended and plunged into the abyss.

A virtuous space

In an interview he gave Jorge Fontevecchia for the tenth anniversary of his election, Francisco reminded him that Amelia Podetti, a philosopher specializing in Hegel that he met in Buenos Aires and whom he admired, insisted on the importance of thinking from the New World: a “virtuous space” that allowed universality to be considered far from the Europeanist imperial background, as he wrote in The irruption of America in history (1981).

In it National Catholic Reporter Valentina Napolitano, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, points out that Latin American Creoles tend to oscillate between extreme conservatism and utopian radicalism, but they never escape Catholic culture, which permeates their passions, virtues and sins.

Massimo Faggioli, a Church historian at Villanova University, attributes the fierce criticism of his pontificate to the fact that his own figure embodies a future in which the Church’s center of gravity shifts increasingly to the Global South and away from the northern hemisphere and its supposed “liberal ecclesiology”.

A ‘decolonial’ papacy

In a recent interview, the first pope of the order founded by Ignatius of Loyola said that those who tried to “freeze time” obeyed “totalitarian” ideas and attitudes, alluding to sectors that see the Church as a refuge against everything. That sounds like “globalist” progressivism.

The problem for them is that this world no longer exists. The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) coincided with key moments in the demise of the former European colonial empires. According to the Congolese Jesuit Jacques Mwanga Nzumbu, the Argentine pope was the first to seriously confront the problems posed to the Catholic Church by the European colonialist past.

Among other gestures, he has apologized for the role of the Catholic clergy in the conquest and colonization of the Americas and has described as “unjust” the papal bulls that justified them theologically. And it’s not just the past. In Dear Amazon (2020), denounced activities that do not respect the rights of native peoples over their territories and ecosystems.

prophetic tradition

The contesting tradition of the Latin American church goes back a long way. On Christmas 1511, in a sermon on the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos questioned the right of Europeans to declare an “atrocious war” against people living peacefully in his country.

Hundreds of human rights organizations throughout the region, Catholic or not, bear the name of one of his supporters, Bartolomé de las Casas. Francisco often highlights the role played by the Jesuit missions along the Paraguay, Uruguay and Paraná rivers in integrating the Tupi-Guarani into colonial society and teaching them to defend themselves against the slave expeditions of the bandeirantes.

In 1747, Father Bernardo Nusdorffer, Provincial of the Company, ordered that the Guarani of the missions be trained in the use of rifles so that they could defend their lands and their wives and children. In New Worlds (2012), John Lynch writes that the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 by Carlos III caused disturbances from New Spain to the Chilean captaincy general.

In San Luis Potosí, the authorities approved 85 hangings to suppress the protests. The Crown’s attempt to exercise greater control over the Church in order to better control colonial society was counterproductive. In their European exile, the Creole Jesuits –Viscardo, Molina, Clavijero, Calvo…– became fervent supporters and propagandists for independence.

In the Peruvian viceroyalty, several priests supported the great rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in 1780. Hidalgo and Morelos, rural priests and guerrilla leaders, decreed the abolition of slavery and Indian tribute in New Spain, for which they were excommunicated for “heretics.” , apostates and schismatics”.

Since 1835, many years before Spain, the Holy See began to recognize the new independent States. The union “of the censer with the sword of the law” is the true Ark of Alliance, said Bolívar in a toast in 1827 to receive the new prelates of the episcopal sees of Bogotá, Caracas, Quito and Cuenca.

In 1856, Pius IX founded the Colegio Pío Latinoamericano in Rome, one of the first institutions in the world to use that name for the former colonies.

Freemasons and positivists

In the 19th century, partly due to the influence of the Masonic lodges among the liberal professions, the republican elites became deists and positivists. Although it was not unusual for in a family the father was a supporter of secularism and the mother a believer, as was the case in the family of Mexican President Francisco Madero.

Uruguay was an extreme case. In 1904, José Batllé y Ordoñez, anti-clerical like many other Uruguayan presidents, removed Christian symbols from buildings and public places, approved divorce, and replaced Easter with tourism week, Christmas with family day, the Immaculate for the day of the beaches…

During the Brazilian military regime (1962-1984), the Archdiocese of Sao Paulo led the ecumenical resistance against the abuses of the junta, a role similar to that played in Chile by the Solidarity Vicariate founded by Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez during the dictatorship ( 1973-1989). John Paul II ordered the Brazilian clergy to cut all ties to leftist politics.

The dark side

Parallel to the rebellious tradition, there was always the reactionary one, especially in Argentina. Around 1914, Buenos Aires was one of the great metropolises of the Atlantic. Among the Italian immigrants there were anarchists, Garibaldins, and Ultramontanes. Three of Bergoglio’s grandparents were Piedmontese and Genoese and the fourth, the maternal grandmother, was Argentine with an Italian father.

In the 1930s, the enemies of the nationalists were liberalism, political parties, British imperialism, communism, and Jewish or Protestant theorists, from Marx to Darwin and Freud. In September 1936, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Santiago Copello, launched a fundraising campaign for the Francoist side in the Spanish Civil War.

After 1945, many nationalists believed that Peronism would make that national and Catholic state a reality. In November 1954, however, Perón legalized divorce and abolished compulsory religious education. During the dictatorship (1976-1982) two bishops, Ángel Angelelli in 1976 and Carlos Ponce de León in 1977, died in two similar car “accidents”. The few complaints from the bishops were private. The military junta hardly worried.

Divorce in Managua

Nicaragua’s decision to suspend diplomatic relations with the Holy See after Francis described the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo as a “Hitlerian dictatorship” for their imprisonment of the Bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez, was something that had not happened since 1861. when Mexico broke with the Vatican. In that case, relations were restored after approving a constitutional amendment in 1992.

In Cuba, Fidel Castro always kept the nunciature open in Havana despite the fact that the Communist Party believed that one of its duties was to free the masses from religious beliefs. The nuncio in Managua, Senegalese Bishop Marcel Diouf, closed the nunciature and left the country. Nicaragua is today one of the only 13 that do not have diplomatic relations with the Holy See, others are Saudi Arabia, China or North Korea.

Gorbachev syndrome

Despite his occasional outspoken gestures, Bergoglio is far from a radical, as shown by his reluctance to make concessions on celibacy or the role of women in the Church. The pressure from the left wing comes above all from Germany, whose bishops want to give more participation to laymen and women to stop the bleeding of the faithful due to clergy pedophilia scandals.

In 2022, Francis wrote to the president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Georg Bätzin, that the country already had an evangelical Protestant church and did not need another. The paradox is that the papal popularity among agnostics and atheists is directly proportional to the animosity he provokes among his detractors. In The CruxJohn Allen points out that Francis is an obvious case of the “Gorbachev syndrome”: very popular outside – the Vatican, the Soviet Union – but the object of sharp criticism within the enemies of innovations and those dissatisfied with the slowness and timidity of the reforms.