Pope Francis

From the End of the Earth to Rome

The Staff of the Wall Street Journal

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780062292742
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Political Biographies

On March 13, the cardinals of the Catholic Church, gathered to elect a successor to a living Pope for the first time in 600 years, announced a dramatic shift. By elevating Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina to become Pope Francis the 266th Pontiff, the cardinals were naming the first-ever Pope from the growing New World to take the helm of the church at a crucial moment.

It was a stunning move by a 2, 000-year-old institution that has immense influence—with 1.2 billion adherents worldwide—and huge problems, including a decade-old sex-abuse scandal that has shattered faith in the institution, a shortage of priests and secular trends that have drained the church of members and challenged its relevancy in a changing world.

From the shocking decision by Pope Benedict XVI to retire, to the introduction of Pope Francis, from the back streets of Buenos Aires to the front row at St. Peter's Square, reporters from The Wall Street Journal have chronicled these dramatic weeks in the life of the oldest institution in the world. Now, in a new e-book, Journal reporters will present a detailed, timely and original biography of the new Pope Francis, as well as new insight on the bargaining and drama that surrounded his rise. Pope Francis will present the full, in-depth story of the church's change in direction and the man charged with leading it, and consider how Pope Francis might address the years of scandal and shortcomings while leading Catholics worldwide toward a deeper faith.

1. Pope of the Slums

The Rev. José Maria Di Paola, a young priest with a beard and long hair, fretted as he improvised an altar out of beer boxes and scrap wood. He was preparing a street Mass in a particularly tough corner of one of the city’s most violent slums, Villa 21–24, a sprawling Buenos Aires ghetto where he ran the local parish. But his special guest, Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was late. The young priest grew worried.

The slums of Buenos Aires are known as villas miseria—villages of misery. Most residents are poor working folk. Their neighborhoods produce a shocking tally of murders each year, few of which ever get solved. For a simple measure of the profound social divide that the villas represent in Argentine society, look no further than the typical GPS device on the dashboard of local cars: They are designed to warn drivers, “Attention, you are nearing a dangerous area” if wandering too close to a villa.

There wasn’t much the young priest could do that afternoon in 2000. The archbishop had insisted on coming by bus and walking, alone, to the service.

Finally, Father Di Paola spied a figure stepping matter-of-factly out of one of the ghetto’s tiny brick dwellings. “You made it!” the young priest exclaimed.

The archbishop apologized for his delay. He had actually arrived early, he explained, and had decided to wander the alleys and share tugs of mate, a bitter local tea drunk from a gourd, with slum residents.

Thirteen years later, the priest still marvels at the memory. “The people were blown away,” he recalls. The archbishop “was climbing up and down the alleys, blessing homes—alleys that most people from outside the villa wouldn’t enter because of the danger.”

There are many aspects to the cardinal known around Buenos Aires as simply “Bergoglio” and now known to the world as Pope Francis. There is the career churchman, and the faithful, if careful, doctrinal conservative. There is the man whose career intersected with Argentina’s descent into a bloody “Dirty War,” and the re-establishment of a fragile democracy that nearly collapsed in deadly riots of 2001.

And there is the Jesuit. The intellectually minded order of priests to which Pope Francis belongs was founded a half-millennium ago but has never, until now, produced a pope. The order is defined by a history of exploring the geographical as well as the intellectual boundaries of the world, be it in travels to the courts of imperial China and Japan, during the 16th century, or the no-less-hazardous journey to the shantytowns of Buenos Aires and other Latin American cities in more recent decades.

In fact, the place to begin the journey toward understanding the new pope is the one where he himself focused so much attention as archbishop of this sprawling city of nearly three million: the city’s villas. Upon his elevation to the papacy, the people here quickly dubbed him “El Papa Villero”—The Slum Pope.

Villa 21–24, the city’s largest slum, dates to the 1940s after one of Argentina’s many economic collapses drove rural families to the capital seeking work and food. In the 1970s, a military dictatorship then in charge forcibly removed many families, but the sprawling ghetto blossomed anew as immigrants arrived from Argentina’s even more impoverished neighbor, Paraguay. Today most of the 40,000 or more people living in Villa 21–24 claim Paraguayan roots.

At one end, Villa 21–24 is squeezed around a railroad track so tightly that it seems impossible that a train could slip through without knocking over some hovels. Packs of dogs loiter on streets defined by pools of flinty gray mud. There are many little shrines, called Ermitas, that are testaments to faith and hardship. One near the railroad tracks memorializes a lifeless newborn found abandoned there. It contains votives, virgins and a photograph of the dead infant.

A walk in the villa offers a master class in Latin America’s most glaring social problem: the deep economic divide between rich and poor. Like many of its neighbors, Argentina is home to a vast, poorly educated class of servants and construction workers who are essentially excluded from broader society. The slums they call home exist as a violent, impoverished parallel world with their own codes and rules. Schools, hospitals, police protection, sometimes even water, are hard to come by.

Five decades ago, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, a movement sprang up to bring the gospel to the slums. Curas villeros, or slum priests, began living and working in the city’s most wretched neighborhoods.

As Argentina careened toward a period of political crisis, however, this movement became politicized. The arrival of the curas villeros in the ghettos of Buenos Aires coincided with the deep and bloody ideological split in Latin American politics following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Some activist priests fell under suspicion of working with Marxist guerrillas. Priests were kidnapped, and killed. This was Argentina’s Dirty War era, characterized by state-run death squads and the disappearance of roughly 10,000 people.

Father Bergoglio, who headed the Argentine Jesuits during most of that difficult era, saw the politically charged nature of the activists’ efforts as a danger to the church. So he channeled Jesuits away from social work and into devotional and philosophical pursuits. But by the 1990s, political stability returned. And Father Bergoglio—first as auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires and then starting in 1998 as archbishop—began placing the ghetto work of the curas villeros at the center of the archdiocese he ran.

People who know him say a key factor in his transformation was simply the end of Cold War politics. The Dirty War era came and went, but the ghettos themselves remained. Father Bergoglio’s focus on the slums, and his mentorship of villa priests like Father Di Paola, offer a portrait of his notion of a “poor church in service of the poor” that he would ultimately take to Rome.

“The poor are the treasure of the church, and it’s is necessary to care for them; and if we don’t have this vision, we will make a mediocre, lukewarm and weak church,” he wrote in his 2010 book “On Heaven and Earth.” “I will add something else: This commitment has to be person to person,” he wrote. Describing an “obligation to establish direct contact with the needy, he said, “I find it a terrible experience to go to a prison because what you see there is so harsh. But I go all the same, because God wants me to be personally in contact with the needy, with the poor, with the sick.”

By the time Father Bergoglio became archbishop, he was a trim 62-year-old with a reputation around the archdiocese for upsetting the status quo by refusing to ride in chauffeured cars and declining other perks. He doubled the number of priests assigned to the slums at a time when the supply of priests at his disposal was in decline. He instructed them to get out into the neighborhoods instead of remaining inside their churches. He discouraged them from pursuing appointments in Rome that are sometimes seen as essential in ecclesiastic career-climbing. Where there were no churches, he encouraged priests to conduct masses outside, on the streets, a move that rankled some traditionalists.

These priests set up schools, and homes for the elderly and children whose parents couldn’t care for them. The churches ran a villa version of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts called the Explorers. To deal with the consequences of paco, a cheap and addictive form of cocaine sweeping the slums in recent years, the archdiocese opened rehabilitation centers.

There were successes. On his desk at the archdiocese, Cardinal Bergoglio kept before-and-after photos of a 47-year-old paco addict and resident of Villa 21–24, Juan José, who weaned himself from the drug after going to a church-run rehabilitation center. In the “before” picture, Juan José is a skeletal, bearded drifter holding a tin mug. In the “after” picture, he is clean-shaven, smiling and looking about 30 pounds heavier.

The archbishop obtained the photos because he washed and kissed Juan José’s feet in 2008. In the Catholic Church, priests will wash the feet of 12 parishioners during a special Mass just before Easter, re-enacting Jesus cleansing the feet of the 12 apostles at the Last Supper.

Gestures like these made many villeros feel as one with their archbishop. “He is our pope,” says Sadi Benítez, a woman who arrived in Villa 21–24 from Paraguay in the 1990s and has raised four children there. “He went to Rome with the same mud on his shoes that he got walking around here with us.”

Tears come to her eyes as she describes how the archbishop sat talking to her children at parish events she credits with helping guide them away from drugs and violence. One of her daughters, who is 16, jumps up from a small couch to exclaim: “We cried when they said it was him. We have a pope! A Papa Villero!”

Father Bergoglio’s protégé, Father Di Paola, ran the small Virgin of Caacupé Church at the entrance to the troubled Villa 21–24. Father Bergoglio’s decision to send him there in 1997 exemplifies the future pope’s approach to evangelizing the slums and cultivating his priests.

The two met in the mid-1990s, when Father Bergoglio was an auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires. At that time Father Di Paola was a conflicted young priest, torn between his religious vocation and a desire to have a family. He took a sabbatical to work at a shoe factory. Privately, he thought he would not be returning to the priesthood. But Father Bergoglio urged his pupil to stay in touch.

And Father Di Paola did so. He was living as a layman, and had a girlfriend, but all the same he felt called to do a priest’s work. Even at the shoe factory, he said, he often acted more like a priest than a worker.

Once a month Father Di Paola would take the bus over to the archdiocese after his shoe-factory shift and meet with Father Bergoglio, who lived in a small room in the archdiocese and was pretty much the only person left in the building at night.

They would talk late in the evening. “Bergoglio wasn’t preaching a particular message,” he recalls. “I was in a crisis. And the most important thing was that he was helping me without asking anything in exchange, and giving me the space to make my own decisions.”

Through those conversations, Father Di Paola concluded that he was, in fact, meant to be a priest. “People ask me, ‘Why do I value Bergoglio so much?’ Because I came to know him not through organizing a Mass or something, but in a very important moment in my life. He simply listened to me,” he says. “He helped me reflect on the issues I was bringing up with him.”

“When I decided to come back, I told Bergoglio: Don’t treat me with pity,” Father Di Paola says. “Send me to the worst places.”

Father Bergoglio did just that. He assigned Father Di Paola first to Buenos Aires’s dank, overcrowded Devoto Prison. And when another priest assigned to the church in Villa 21–24 resigned, the archbishop gave his protégé the difficult job of running the small parish there.

At the time, it was too dangerous to walk from one block to another. Gangs would stab or shoot intruders who crossed their turf. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in 1997, the year Father Di Paola arrived, there were five homicides in Villa 21–24. None of them made the news. “I looked around and thought, we have to do something,” he says. “We can’t let it go on like this.”

Father Di Paola hatched a plan to rejuvenate Villa 21–24. It was a textbook version of Father Bergoglio’s technique of using gestures to help spur broader changes. The young priest decided to bring a new image of his little church’s namesake—Paraguay’s national Virgin, Our Lady of Caacupé—to the barrio. From Mexico to Brazil, each Latin American country has a national Virgin that is venerated almost as much as Jesus. Paraguay’s Our Lady of Caacupé is credited with saving a 16th-century believer from a flood. Father Di Paola figured that because so many in Villa 21–24 shared Paraguayan descent, perhaps a new statue of the Virgin of Caacupé would bring them together and defuse some of the gang violence.

With funding from the archdiocese, he dispatched a group from the villa on a pilgrimage to Paraguay to retrieve a new icon of the Virgin of Caacupé to replace his church’s locally made replica. The icon depicts a mixed-race Mary, with dark skin and the long dark hair of the native people of South America. She wears a luxurious blue tunic adorned with tropical flowers, and stands atop a globe balanced on a quarter-moon. With the new Virgin, Father Di Paola planned to rebaptize the villa church.

While the group was in Paraguay fetching the Virgin, the priest started walking the streets of the villa—something only a priest could do safely—telling people that the Virgin was coming from Paraguay to the neighborhood. In the process, he built a network of contacts. He also built excitement around an event that had some meaning for everyone.

A dramatic welcoming ceremony for the newly arrived Virgin was staged. She floated into the villa on a bamboo raft on a stream that flows through the slum. A cheering crowd gathered. And Father Bergoglio held a Mass for the icon—not in the slum but at the grand cathedral in the center of Buenos Aires. Slum children climbed onto high-backed, centuries-old wooden chairs normally filled by Argentina’s elite. The future pope joked about the scene: “Look how far the children...

Table of contents

• Contents
• From the Editor
• Prologue: The Journey
• 1. Pope of the Slums
• 2. A Church in Turmoil
• 3. A Boy, a Grandmother and a Calling
• 4. The Jesuit and the Generals
• 5. Opening the Church Doors
• 6. The Cardinal and the Kirchners
• 7. Two Boys Named Gabriel
• 8. The Path to Power
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher