This article on the recently defunct Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) was published in the journal Crítica Socialista of Brazil (No. 2, March-April 2025) and also in a book edited by our comrade Osvaldo Coggiola (Brazil-Argentina) himself, Il Papa della società dello spettacolo con le scheletti nell’armadio, Massari Editore, forthcoming.
In March 1976, when one of the bloodiest military dictatorships in Latin America was established in Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was not yet 40 years old, but he was already the “Provincial” (head) of the Jesuit Order in the country. No photograph from the following years directly shows any proximity between him and the Military Junta, unlike those that clearly demonstrate the deep ties between the Catholic Church’s upper hierarchy (to which Bergoglio did not yet belong) and the ruling team of professional murderers. Bergoglio, however, was far from opposing the line followed by the Roman Catholic Church (not only in Argentina but across South America, afflicted by brutal counterrevolutionary regimes). The Argentine military “process” justified itself by the need to eliminate “corruption” (Peronist) and “subversion” (armed), i.e., the guerrilla. This last concept was broadened to encompass all socio-political activity: expressing opinions, protesting, writing, speaking, reading, even thinking (sic). Such a notion could not be supported by any “law”: thus, a “national anti-subversive war” was invented. Dictatorship ideologues went as far as claiming that the Third World War (against communism) had already begun in Argentina, taking the form of a “dirty war” (a concept invented by French torturers in the Algerian war). The result of this distortion (there was no civil war in Argentina; the leftist guerrilla was localized and militarily defeated by 1976) was the illegal and horrifying form of repression: the “forced disappearances,” which claimed more than 30,000 victims.
The “disappearances,” part of a total physical extermination plan, targeted guerrillas, politicians, students, writers, union leaders and activists, and even members of the military regime itself, such as its ambassador to Venezuela (UCR politician Hidalgo Solá) and businessmen like Fernando Branca, murdered by his partner, Junta member Emilio Eduardo Massera. The method consumed its own executors, who turned it on each other. Massera ran the Navy’s clandestine detention center in Buenos Aires, located in the ESMA (Naval Mechanics School). More than 5,000 detainees passed through ESMA—disappeared, with fewer than a hundred surviving. Massera was sentenced to life in 1985, later pardoned by Carlos Menem’s government in the 1990s. In a 2011 interview, dictator Jorge Rafael Videla explicitly stated the method and goal of the disappearances. These included: 1. The arrest or kidnapping of thousands of “social leaders” and “subversives,” from lists prepared before the coup in early 1976 with help from businesspeople, aiming unionists, professors, and student leaders; 2. “Interrogations” (a euphemism for unspeakable torture) in secret locations; 3. The execution of detainees deemed “irredeemable,” typically decided in zone-head meetings; 4. Disposing of bodies in the sea, rivers, or buried anonymously, or incinerated.
Videla stated: “Some seven or eight thousand people had to die to win the war against subversion. We couldn’t shoot them. Nor could we bring them to justice,” admitting his role as executioner of a generation of fighters. How could one justify such a role to oneself and the world? That’s where a key ideological component of the dictatorship came in: the supposed “mission from God” they were fulfilling (“God’s Assassins,” as Canadian researcher Patricia Marchak called them), with the approval of their official representative in Argentina: the Catholic Church. Asked why detainees couldn’t be tried, Videla answered: “We couldn’t shoot them [legally]. How could we shoot all these people? The Spanish courts condemned three ETA members to death, which Franco endorsed despite worldwide protest; he only managed to execute the first, even though he was Franco. There was also fear over the global backlash to Pinochet’s repression in Chile” (in 1973). According to Videla, “there was no other solution. We agreed it was the price to pay to win the war and needed it to remain unseen so society wouldn’t notice. That’s why, to avoid protests inside and outside the country, it was decided that these people would disappear; every disappearance can be seen, of course, as the disguise of a death.” Much of Argentina’s militant youth and working class was physically eliminated or driven into permanent exile.
Poet Juan Gelman, father and grandfather of disappeared victims, commented: “That interview where Videla confesses to killing 8,000 reveals a quality I didn’t know he had: modesty. Because, in fact, it was over 30,000. Videla speaks as if he led the coup, but coups always had civil backing. Some political parties incited them, and they were driven by very concrete, important interests. He didn’t mention how many concentration camps existed, what happened in them, or the fate of the disappeared. He didn’t say where the archives are. There are many questions that the families of the disappeared ask, and he didn’t address them.” In 1984, Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) reported 8,961 disappeared during the 1976–1983 dictatorship to President Raúl Alfonsín. Hence Videla’s figure, who justified torture religiously (“God knows what He does, why He does it, and for what purpose. I accept God’s will and believe He never let go of my hand”). Dictators genuinely believed they were fulfilling a divine mission—clearly supported by the Catholic Church. Videla also highlighted the role of “French doctrine in guerrilla warfare” in his regime.
Torture and death had specific targets: early Amnesty International reports from late 1976 showed that most victims came from the workers' movement, particularly its vanguard sectors (shop stewards, class-struggle activists). That’s how the so-called “factory guerrilla” (militant workers’ movement) was eliminated—denounced shortly before the coup by “democrat” Ricardo Balbín (UCR leader). It was a massive political reaction by Argentina’s bourgeoisie, through the military, against the threat of social revolution. The preceding Peronist anti-communist terrorism (the infamous AAA or Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, personally organized by Perón and his minister López Rega from late 1973) merged with and intensified under military terrorism, forming a continuous regime. The military called their methods a “dirty war,” acknowledging their criminal nature. The term “state terrorism,” adopted later, obscured the essential: a systematically planned massacre carried out by the Armed Forces (as acknowledged by the “Sábato Commission,” created by Alfonsín’s government in 1984).
The Catholic Church was a deadly accomplice. In Argentina, it has always been a bastion of the ruling oligarchy—so much so that Perón was excommunicated in his first government (1946–1955), and tanks in the 1955 coup were painted with crosses and “Christ conquers!” Argentina still recognizes Catholicism as the official religion and pays clergy salaries with public funds. Until recently, the main celebration of national independence was a mass at the cathedral. Entrusted by the military in 1976 with the Ministry of Education (under Ricardo Bruera), the Church ran the worst obscurantist education campaign ever seen in Argentina (e.g., set theory was banned from math classes as “communist”). Monsignor Plaza (archbishop of La Plata) handed out crucifixes in death camps, where detainees endured horrific torture before execution. Monsignor Bonamin (Army chaplain) blessed task forces responsible for abduction, torture, and murder. Some priests, like military chaplain Christian Von Wernich (now convicted), profited by selling false information to desperate families of the disappeared.
Thirty-five years later, Cardinal Primatesta referred to a letter from Emilio Mignone, father of disappeared Mónica Candelaria Mignone and one of Argentina’s highest-ranking lay Catholics. Mignone, former provincial and national education minister and founder of CELS, wrote that the system of abduction, theft, torture, and murder—“made worse by refusing to return bodies to families, cremating them, dumping them into the sea or rivers, or burying them anonymously”—was justified in the name of “saving Christian civilization” and protecting the Catholic Church. He added that despair and hatred were growing in many hearts. Videla told a Spanish journalist: “My relationship with the Catholic Church was excellent, very cordial, sincere, and open,” because “it was prudent, didn’t create problems, and didn’t follow the leftist, Third World trend of other episcopates.” It condemned “some excesses” but “without breaking relations.” With Primatesta, “we even became friends.” The Catholic Church in Argentina, therefore, knew, stayed silent, concealed, and even blessed the genocide.
Of course, there were exceptions within the Church (as in the Armed Forces), but the clerical institution was an active participant in the massacre, as denounced by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and artist León Ferrari. Often, exceptions like Bishop Angelelli of La Rioja or the murdered Palotine priests—killed for protecting the persecuted—became victims themselves, murdered by the same killers blessed by their superiors. Angelelli died in a supposed car accident. Despite glaring evidence of murder, the Church hierarchy accepted the official version and covered it up while supporting Videla and the Junta. The “corruption” of the previous Peronist government was eliminated in “Hegelian” manner—that is, preserved and elevated to new heights. Deals, theft, and resale of the disappeared’s belongings, not to mention the astronomical military budget (almost half of the external debt, which reached $45 billion), all flourished. The capitalist state, under Argentina’s dictatorship, assumed its most extreme, essential form: an armed mafia dedicated to plundering public finances and the population.
As the Military Junta crumbled following Argentina’s defeat in the Falklands War, the Vatican played a key role in avoiding revolutionary crisis (and in ensuring the Anglo-American military coalition’s victory). On June 1, 1982, on the eve of Argentina’s defeat, Pope John Paul II arrived in Buenos Aires to “pray for peace.” He stayed two days, holding extensive meetings with the Junta and President Leopoldo Galtieri, and presided over two masses with cardinals that drew hundreds of thousands—one in Palermo, another in Luján. At these events and others, the Pope spoke in Spanish, urging the nation to pray for peace, even as war continued. Before returning to Rome, the Pope met privately with Galtieri; the conversation was never revealed, but it was decisive in Argentina’s surrender, at a time when the war’s outcome was still uncertain.
Bergoglio’s low profile during this period deserves elucidation. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the son of Italian immigrants, was born and raised in Buenos Aires’s Flores neighborhood. He earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires. As a teenager, he had a girlfriend, Amalia. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in March 1958 and completed it in Santiago, Chile. He graduated in philosophy in 1960 from the Catholic University of Buenos Aires. Between 1964 and 1966, he taught literature and psychology at Immaculate Conception College in Santa Fé and at Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires (a historically conservative private institution). He earned a theology degree in 1969 and was ordained a priest that December. “1969” is significant—it was the year of the “Cordobazo,” the popular uprisings against General Onganía’s dictatorship. Around this time, Bergoglio was linked to the Iron Guard, a Peronist group opposing the Peronist left (Montoneros, Peronist Youth) and Christian-based leftist movements (like “Christianity and Revolution” or the Movement of Priests for the Third World, whose key figure, Father Mugica, was murdered by the right-wing AAA, funded by Licio Gelli and the P2 Masonic Lodge). These groups reflected Liberation Theology, inspired by guerrilla priest Camilo Torres, which emerged in Peru and grew in Brazil. Bergoglio’s political convictions were shaped in this anti-left, religious-political struggle.
Bergoglio took his vows in the Society of Jesus in 1973, when he was appointed Master of Novices at the Villa Barilari Seminary. In the same year, he was elected provincial superior of the Jesuits. In 1980, after completing his term as provincial, he began teaching at a Jesuit school. From 1980 to 1986, he served as rector of the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology of San Miguel, granting academic honors (honorary doctorates) to members of the highest military ranks of the dictatorship, including the assassin and mafioso Emilio Eduardo Massera. After earning his doctorate in Germany, he served as a confessor and spiritual director in Córdoba. Guardia de Hierro (GH), with which Bergoglio remained connected, maintained good relations with Massera. According to Alejandro Tarruella, “Jorge Bergoglio became connected to GH members through his participation in the University of El Salvador. In 1975, Bergoglio appointed two GH members to the university: Francisco 'Cacho' Piñón and Walter Romero. Piñón was the one who, in 1977, presented the honorary professorship designation to Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera.”
The now-deceased Massera had devised a plan to become Perón's political heir in the post-dictatorship period, even going so far as to publish books falsely signed by himself and a newspaper, for which he used the forced labor of detainee-disappeared persons from the ESMA (Navy Mechanics School), who were later massacred (their corpses also vanished). This plan collapsed along with the military's downfall in 1982–1983. Bergoglio would necessarily have been a political piece in this frustrated move, conceived during the dictatorship's moment of glory — the rule of the "assassins of God."
During the long civilian period of reckoning with military atrocities, Bergoglio, by then a cardinal, was accused in 2005 of connections to the kidnapping of Jesuit priests Orlando Virgilio Yorio and Francisco Jalics, which occurred on May 23, 1976, while they were working under Bergoglio's command, performing tasks among the impoverished communities of Bajo Flores. Bergoglio expelled the two from the Jesuit Order. The accusation against him was based on journalistic articles and the book Church and Dictatorship, written by Emilio Mignone, an undisputed authority on the subject. Another book, The Island of Silence, concerning a property located on an island ceded by the Church to the Armed Forces to serve as an extermination camp, by well-known journalist Horacio Verbitsky, also referred to Bergoglio’s ties to the dictatorship: "(Bergoglio) goes to the Foreign Ministry, requests a procedure in favor of the priest (Jalics), but behind the scenes, says not to grant it because he is a subversive." Francisco Jalics denied the accusations in a statement published on the German Jesuit Order's website: "Missionary Orlando Yorio and I were not denounced by Father Bergoglio," which does not actually contradict what Mignone and Verbitsky claimed.
Sergio Rubin, his authorized biographer, reported that after the disappearance of the two priests (which Rubin shamelessly calls "imprisonment"), Bergoglio worked behind the scenes for their release and personally interceded with dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. It was certainly not just anyone who could "privately and personally intercede" with that psychopath, much less on behalf of disappeared persons. Rubin also stated that Bergoglio sheltered people persecuted by the dictatorship on Church properties, even handing over his own identity documents to a man who resembled him, enabling him to flee Argentina. Well, high-ranking military officials deeply involved in the repression also acted to save some individuals close to them, including relatives.
The 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, also refuted (or rather, tried to refute) the accusations regarding the current Pope Francis. Esquivel claimed that “some bishops were complicit with the regime (some?), but that was not the case with Bergoglio,” a claim he could not possibly know for certain unless Esquivel himself had questionable ties. Estela de la Cuadra, sister of Orlando Yorio and much closer to the events in question, said in an interview that "the Catholic Church chose someone who was complicit with a genocidal regime."
The operation to "clean up" the now humble Francis I is impressive and includes several official figures like Pérez Esquivel. The Christian website "Humanist Institute Unisinos" summarized: "Bergoglio and his Argentine Church did not show prophetic attitudes during the military dictatorship (1976-1983) as happened in other Latin American churches. At that time, Bergoglio was not yet a bishop but the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina (1973-1979). As provincial, he expelled two young Jesuits—Orlando Virgilio Yorio and Francisco Jalics—from the Society of Jesus and hindered their acceptance into the diocese of Morón, headed by the Salesian Miguel Raspanti. Between expulsion and reception procedures, on May 23, 1976, Yorio and Jalics were kidnapped by military forces, tortured, and six months later, expatriated. The synchronization between their expulsion and abduction suggests a certain understanding between ecclesiastical and military authorities. It was not definitively proven" (emphasis added). Certainly, many other things could not be definitively proven during that illegal, secret, and undocumented repression. But evidence exists for those willing to see it.
Five spontaneous testimonies confirmed Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s role in the repression by the military government, including actions against progressive sectors of the Catholic Church that he now leads: a theologian who taught catechism in Morón diocesan schools for decades, the former superior of a priestly fraternity devastated by forced disappearances, a fraternity member who denounced the cases to the Vatican, a priest, and a layperson, all of whom were kidnapped and tortured. Two months after the 1976 military coup, Morón bishop Miguel Raspanti tried to protect Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics but Bergoglio opposed it, according to Marina Rubino, then a theology student at the Colegio Máximo de San Miguel, where Bergoglio lived. She had been a student of Yorio and Jalics and was aware of the danger they faced. As mentioned, they were kidnapped on May 23, 1976, taken to the Navy Mechanics School, and interrogated by an ecclesiastical affairs specialist. During one interrogation, they were asked about seminarians Carlos Antonio Di Pietro and Raúl Eduardo Rodríguez, who were colleagues of Marina Rubino and were abducted ten days later on June 4, 1976, and taken to the same "operational house" as Yorio and Jalics.
Alejandro Dausa, kidnapped on August 3, 1976, in Córdoba when he was a seminarian in the Order of Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette, after six months of torture by the D2 Intelligence Department, managed to flee to the United States. There, he met Father James Weeks, the head of the seminary. In the US, he learned Jalics was staying with a sister in Cleveland. During two spiritual retreats in 1977 in New York and Massachusetts, Dausa and Jalics spoke about their respective kidnappings. Dausa recalled: "Naturally, we discussed the details, background, prior signs, and those involved. In these conversations, he indicated that Bergoglio had denounced them." In the next decade, Dausa worked as a priest in Bolivia and attended annual La Salette retreats in Argentina. At one retreat, Orlando Yorio, then working in Quilmes, also confirmed Bergoglio’s responsibility. Orlando Yorio died in August 2000 in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Roberto Scordato, founder of the lay fraternity "Little Brothers of the Gospel Charles de Foucauld," reported meeting Cardinal Eduardo Pironio, Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Religious, in late 1976 in Rome to inform him that a Jesuit priest from San Miguel was attending torture sessions at Campo de Mayo to "spiritually break" detainees. Scordato asked Pironio to inform Jesuit Superior General Pedro Arrupe. Lorenzo Riquelme, a doctor abducted in a raid in La Manuelita, said a Jesuit priest from San Miguel College, an army chaplain, denounced him. Rice, who was also abducted and tortured, said this could not have happened without the provincial’s approval (i.e., Bergoglio). Therefore, evidence abounds.
During Argentina’s democratic period, Bergoglio continued his political-religious career largely unbothered by his compromising past, like many others. He distinguished himself as a spokesman for the Argentine Catholic Church's most reactionary campaigns: against divorce laws, against legalized abortion, and as the leading opponent of same-sex marriage. He declared: "If the bill allowing same-sex civil unions and adoption passes, it could seriously harm the family. The Argentine people will face a situation that, if successful, could gravely wound the family. At stake is the identity and survival of the family: father, mother, and children. This is not simply a political fight but a destructive attack against God’s plan" (sic). In May 1992, Pope John Paul II named him auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. His episcopal ordination occurred in June 1992. On June 3, 1997, he was appointed coadjutor archbishop of Buenos Aires and became metropolitan archbishop in February 1998. In November 1998, John Paul II also made him ordinary for Eastern Rite faithful in Argentina.
His meteoric rise was ensured by the favor of Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II), who had silenced progressive theologian Leonardo Boff and his supporters, proclaiming clearly that "the Catholic Church is not a democracy." As is known, John Paul II fought Liberation Theology and other progressive currents within the Church while canonizing the founder of the reactionary Opus Dei and shielding criminal pedophile Marcial Maciel, founder of the ultra-orthodox "Legionaries of Christ." He kept silent as long as possible about Latin American military dictatorships backed by the US and covered up the Vatican Bank scandals involving the Italian Mafia and the CIA, including arms trafficking and funding right-wing guerrillas, as revealed by the Iran-Contra scandal. He protected Archbishop Marcinkus, president of the Vatican Bank, implicated in fraud and financial crimes and suspected in three murders. Meanwhile, the Church condemned contraceptives like the pill and condoms, even amid the HIV epidemic, and actively fought the recognition of homosexual relationships.
By the 2000s, when Bergoglio became head of the Argentine episcopate, Argentina was socially unraveling. Bergoglio supported the political rescue of the State led by the Kirchners. When capitalist Argentina collapsed, he called for a "social dialogue table," with CTA union participation, to support Duhalde’s interim government, preceding Kirchner’s massive social and economic confiscations. Vice-Governor Gabriel Mariotto and Movimiento Evita leader Emilio Pérsico called Bergoglio a "Peronist." By the time Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) was elected pope in April 2005, Bergoglio’s international ascent was strong enough that he came second in the papal conclave voting—likely losing because of growing accusations against him in Argentina. In The Man Who Didn’t Want to Be Pope, German journalist Andreas Englisch said fear of his links to the dictatorship made Bergoglio an insecure choice.
Benedict XVI’s papacy coincided with the global economic crisis. For the Vatican, the crisis was not just about the Church, but capitalism and the institutional system itself. Benedict XVI continued covering up scandals, as the Church drifted like a sinking ship. His legacy to the Church resembled Bush’s legacy to the US: an institution widely seen as corrupt to the core. Benedict named Gotti Tedeschi, linked to Opus Dei and Banco Santander, to head the Vatican Bank, but Tedeschi resigned in 2012 amid scandals. The Vatican Bank was found laundering money, even from the Sicilian Mafia. Benedict also rehabilitated Nazi-sympathetic clergy like Bishop Richard Williamson, denied Holocaust atrocities, and supported ultra-conservative factions like Opus Dei and the Neocatechumenal Way.
In early 2013, amid scandals involving mafia money deposits, prostitution rings, pedophilia, sexual harassment, and corruption, Benedict XVI announced he would resign, citing health reasons. His resignation was the first since Gregory XII in 1415. The 2013 papal conclave thus took place amid deep crisis. SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) sought to exclude a dozen Mexican cardinals implicated in child abuse coverups—but they voted anyway. In the US alone, the Church paid over $1 billion between 2007–2009 in settlements to victims. The Church's homophobia, misogyny, and repeated cases of pedophilia stem from its repression and compulsive celibacy.
The speed with which Jorge Bergoglio was consecrated by a conclave resembling an omertà sought to remove Benedict’s succession from the deadlock caused by the collapse of the Vatican leadership. Before the conclave, all analysts wrote that he had no chances because of his at least complicit record during the Argentine genocide. It seems that under new conditions (the global crisis and the crisis within the Church), it was precisely that record that gave him the credentials for victory. “The central issue is governability,” said John Allen, biographer of Joseph Ratzinger, explaining the cardinals' urgency “after eight years of non-governance” (sic), alluding, without naming it, to the unprecedented mass of offenses, crimes, and frauds of all kinds that led to the German pope’s resignation. The "secret reports" that prompted Ratzinger’s departure were not even revealed to the 114 cardinals who had to elect his successor. The refusal of the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Tarcisio Bertone, to hand over the secret reports convinced the cardinals they were at the end of the line. The continuation of the "Roman party" (a quarter of the College of Bishops) threatened an explosion of the Vatican brothel, where — according to these reports — a "gay lobby," among others, operated. The Brazilian candidate, Odilio Scherer, was eliminated from the race when he attempted a defense of the IOR (Institute for Religious Works), whose operations and accounts had been questioned by the European commission dedicated to rescuing the banking system. The IOR is bankrupt, drained by mafia operations, money laundering, and shady dealings of the Roman leadership.
The decomposition of the Church’s "Roman party" sank another papabile, the bishop of Milan, Angelo Scola, who was supported by American and German bishops. Bergoglio seems to have benefited from the fury and resentment the cardinals felt toward the rivalries and internal struggles of the Curia, which weakened the traditionally powerful Italian bloc — almost a quarter of the cardinals — and reduced the chances of Milan’s archbishop, Angelo Scola, one of the two favorites along with Odilio Scherer. It was, therefore, a crisis choice. There was a clear awareness that they were operating at the edge of an abyss: one theologian stated that, facing the crisis of the Vatican Curia, "the monumental religious temples of the continent could turn into museums." Bergoglio’s “populism,” put into practice from the first moments of his papacy, anticipated one of the variants that could fill Europe’s “power vacuum”: bonapartism, which in Europe has always been the pedestal that precedes fascism. After failing with a German representative aligned with the Bundesbank’s policies, the cardinals sought the new Pope from the finisterrae, a metaphor for the bankruptcy of the EU — the Europe of capital. Hans Küng, the intellectual leader of Catholic progressivism, after saying he did not expect a Gorbachev at the Vatican, immediately lit a candle for Bergoglio. He wasn’t the only one. Cristina Kirchner forgot her recent disputes with the enemy of abortion, divorcees, and gay rights, rushing to greet the man of Argentine reaction on Peter’s throne. The “theologians of liberation,” for their part, didn’t even wait for Francis’ visit to Brazil. The Argentine oligarchic newspaper La Nación, on the other end of the political spectrum, made it clear that, regarding the matter of "pedophilia," Francis “never spoke out.”
Thus, Cardinal Bergoglio was elected on March 13, 2013, on the second day of the conclave, choosing the name Francis. His selection appears to have resulted from an agreement among the men of the Curia — specifically the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano (who did not participate in the conclave), Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re and Tarcisio Bertone, and the American cardinals. He was the first Jesuit elected Pope, the first Pope from the American continent, the Southern Hemisphere, and the first non-European to be invested as Bishop of Rome in more than 1,200 years, since Gregory III, who was born in Syria and led the Catholic Church from 731 to 741. The Jesuit order had waited nearly five centuries: it was recognized by the Vatican in 1540, during the height of the Protestant and Calvinist splits (Ignatius of Loyola, its founder, even overlapped at the University of Paris with Jean Calvin himself). It had been established shortly before as a “warrior order” in service of the Pope and the expansion of faith in Christ: the Societas Jesu, or “Order of Jesus” (as its founder called it), was organized like an army, commanded by a lifelong general to whom absolute obedience was due — a worldwide-reaching army defending the Roman Church during the Counter-Reformation period.
The order was founded in 1534 by Ignatius of Loyola, a noble-born soldier, during a time of deep crisis in the Catholic Church, when the Church’s leadership was, as it is now, mired in allegations of corruption, such as the rampant sale of indulgences (the denunciation of which by Martin Luther sparked what is now known as Protestantism). In this context of crisis, the Society of Jesus and its members fully aligned themselves with the Catholic Church's high hierarchy in combating the Protestants. In addition to the common vows of any religious (obedience, poverty, and chastity), Jesuits took a fourth vow: total obedience to the Pope. Ignatius of Loyola wrote the Jesuit Constitutions in 1554, creating a strictly disciplined, selfless organization willing to make any sacrifice to defend the Pope and the Church as an institution. In the crisis of the European feudal order — of which the Christian Church was the concentrated expression — the Counter-Reformation preserved the Church from complete ruin by transforming, delimiting, and ossifying its doctrine, morals, rites, and organization. The Catholic Church split from its medieval social base, rising above and opposing it: the Church became a State.
While entrenching itself in Western Europe, the Catholic Church simultaneously became the spearhead of Iberian colonization of the East and, above all, of the Americas, laying the foundation for its claim to be the sole, universal religion. In this process, the Jesuit Order expanded and grew with increasingly important missions. Thus, they reached the Kingdom of Congo (1547), Ceylon and Morocco (1548), China (1552), Ethiopia (1555), and Japan (1580). In the Americas, conquest, extermination, and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples to forced labor (in the form of slavery or otherwise) were carried out in the name of the Christian cross. The Catholic Church (and later, Protestant churches in North America) thus assumed direct responsibility for Indigenous subjugation.
The Society of Jesus became the principal political force in colonial American society in the 16th and 17th centuries, given the still-disorganized colonial administration and the settlers, divided and conflicted in their immediate interests. The Jesuit missions in Paraguay undoubtedly helped spare much of the local Indigenous population — the Guarani — from the colonizers’ exploitative fury. The clash between the religious and European settlers was inevitable. The Jesuits played a decisive role in the physical annihilation of the Revolution of the Comuneros, which arose in Paraguay between 1721–1725 and 1730–1735. This revolution proclaimed the sovereignty of the people over the monarch and opposed the Jesuit missions, which strangled the development of a local commercial sector. When confrontation broke out, the Jesuits, at the Spanish monarchy’s request, organized and led a powerful army of eight thousand Indigenous people and defeated the revolutionaries in March 1735. Thus, the Society of Jesus took part in the European colonization and plunder of the Americas. However, the Jesuits were eventually expelled from Paraguay in the 18th century after the Guaraní War (1753–1756). In the Iberian metropolises, the Jesuits were also expelled due to conflicts with the "enlightened despotism" of Pombal (Portugal) and the Bourbons (Spain). The influence of Jansenist and Anglican ideas was growing in the Iberian Peninsula, carried by the influence of French absolutism and anti-Roman tendencies within sectors of the clergy. The Society of Jesus, during its enforced retreat, clung to its role as savior of the Catholic State.
On July 21, 1773, with the brief Dominus ac Redemptor, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus, which at that time had about 23,000 members across 42 provinces (more than today). Yet the Revolution brought it back to life, in its specific counterrevolutionary role. In 1789, the French Revolution erupted, temporarily bringing victory to republicans in Rome and resulting in the deportation of Clement XIV’s successors: Pius VI and Pius VII. Resistance to the Revolution was led by a secret association, the "Christian Friendship," founded in Turin by the Swiss ex-Jesuit Nikolaus Albert von Diessbach. After 40 years, with Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum in August 1814, Pius VII revoked the 1773 brief and reestablished the Society of Jesus worldwide:
"We would consider ourselves gravely guilty before God if, faced with the countless present agitations that besiege public affairs, we neglected to reinstate this sure source of salvation (the Society of Jesus) that God, by a singular providence, has placed in our hands. Thus, while Saint Peter’s ship is incessantly tossed by the waves, we cannot reject these strong and experienced rowers who offer themselves to help us withstand the force of the stormy sea that at every moment threatens to engulf us in an inevitable shipwreck."
This time, it must be worse, since they entrusted the papacy itself to a member of the Society.
Amid the Church’s growing retreat, papal infallibility was declared dogma in 1871 by Pope Pius IX, who had been defeated by the Italian unification war. The result was a State (the Vatican) whose citizenship is exclusively male, devoid of any form of democracy, representing a global religion and officially recognized in what remained of a once-vast papal territory expropriated by Italy’s independence movement, leaving the Pope confined to the Vatican until the "Concordat."
In the 20th century, the Jesuits continued as the papacy’s armed vanguard in the struggles that determined Catholicism's fate. During the Spanish Revolution (1931–1939), the Jesuit Order held one-third of Spain’s national wealth and was a major political supporter of the monarchy. Due to its counterrevolutionary activities, the Second Spanish Republic dissolved the Society of Jesus in 1932, confiscating its assets for obeying a foreign power (the Pope) and conspiring with monarchist sectors. In the final stages of the Spanish Civil War, many Jesuit priests took up arms within Francisco Franco Bahamonde's counterrevolutionary ranks. In May 1938, Franco repealed the Republican decree and restored their properties.
The Church’s millennial material power — which once owned most of Europe’s lands and imposed its rule through inquisitorial terror — has a dual nature: material and symbolic. Its strength lies not only in the Vatican State, in the financial assets of the IOR (estimated at at least eight billion dollars), the more than 400,000 priests and 700,000 nuns worldwide, and its political influence with governments, but also in its priceless symbolic capital: the role of Christ’s substitute on Earth. This "symbolic capital" rests on very real, material wealth: historically, the Catholic Church has been the largest holder of gold bullion, controlling about 60,350 tons of gold — twice the official gold reserves of the entire world — representing about 30.2% of all gold ever mined, with an estimated value of $1.245 trillion. The Church’s golden peak occurred between the 14th and 17th centuries, when it controlled 60% of all historically extracted gold.
However, not even all the gold in the world guarantees immunity from crisis in capitalist society: the IOR has recorded losses for the past five years, even after reforms and the removal of Marcinkus and Co. (read: accomplices). The same crisis provokes conflict between the Church’s material power and nation-states. Twenty-six countries have representatives at the Vatican, while the Vatican maintains direct representation in 37 states. In Italy, particularly Rome, the headquarters of 215 religious orders — 89 male and 126 female — are located, many with millennia-long histories and properties worldwide.
In Italy, the Church is a true "parallel power." In 2012, the Monti government attempted to tax Church properties (estimated to make up between 33% and 50% of Italy’s real estate holdings, a closely guarded secret), specifically those openly used for commercial purposes (luxury hotels, resorts, etc.). Monti’s project failed in the Italian Constitutional Court — in a secular State whose justices still require the Pope’s blessing. The entire Italian political spectrum, including the supposed "left" (the PD party), remained silent.
The latent crisis between the Italian State and the Vatican — supposedly resolved by the 1929 Lateran Treaty between the papacy and the Fascist regime — remained suspended and could resurface with the galloping crisis of Italy’s public finances (140% of GDP debt) that Monti's timid reforms sought to address. This crisis collides with another: the Church’s financial crisis. In 2012, the Vatican recorded its largest fiscal deficit in many years, around $19 million. Financial costs related to clerical sex abuse lawsuits have also weighed heavily: in the United States alone, $3 billion in damages were paid across more than 3,000 cases involving 3,700 accused clergy, with 525 convicted and imprisoned.
The crisis that restored the Jesuits to prominence in the 19th century was part of the birth pangs of European capitalism; today’s crisis, which a Jesuit imported "from the end of the world" (Bergoglio) seeks to face, belongs to the historical senility of capital. It is not the crisis of Europe's capitalist birth, but of global capitalism’s agony.
The Society of Jesus is not the solution; it is part of the Catholic Church’s global crisis. Though it still administers numerous colleges and universities in many countries (around 200 universities and 180 schools in Brazil alone), its ranks are clearly shrinking. When Bergoglio became Provincial of Argentina in 1973, there were 30,000 Jesuits worldwide (the Order peaked at 36,000 members in 1965). Forty years later, there are fewer than 18,000, with an average age of 57 years. This decline has forced the unification of provinces and the closure of several missions. Nonetheless, it remains the Catholic Church’s largest religious order, present in 127 countries and counting six cardinals among its members.
In the global campaign to revive the Church’s image through the new Pope, the most reactionary clergy members and former Liberation Theology proponents (such as Brazilians Leonardo Boff and Frei Betto) converged, praising Bergoglio’s Jesuit background and ties to "progressive" movements. Boff celebrated Bergoglio’s election, noting that "a Jesuit has a well-trained mind" to "renew" the Church leadership.
So far, however, no real reforms or renewal have occurred — only symbolic gestures magnified by the media. A journalist from the conservative Corriere della Sera, specializing in religious matters, has already published a book announcing the "aborted revolution of Pope Francis," blaming insurmountable pressure from powerful conservative groups (Legionaries of Christ, Focolari, Opus Dei, Community of Sant'Egidio, Neocatechumenal Way, Communion and Liberation, etc.) entrenched within the Italian State’s heart.
What has been seen, rather, is the Pope’s role as a firefighter. Francis I went to Brazil — the "world’s largest Catholic country," where Catholic adherence dropped from 92% in 1970 to 65% in 2010 — partly to contain the youth movement that took over Brazil’s streets in June 2013, calling on the PT government to "listen to the voice of the streets" — creating more space for the Catholic Church and less for evangelical sects. Liberation theologians eagerly supported this political-religious operation. The Vatican did not work for free: the huge papal expenses in Brazil were billed to the State, despite evangelical efforts to reduce them.
All of Bergoglio’s "openness to progressives" has amounted to little more than a symbolic meeting in Rome with Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez in September 2013, with no public disclosure of what was discussed.
The unusual features of Bergoglio’s pontificate are not a solution, but a symptom of a profound Church crisis — the deepest in centuries — showing, despite declarations in favor of the poor and against the rich’s greed, that this ancient institution has irrevocably tied its fate to that of capital, and will share its destiny. A destiny being determined today not within the ships of ecclesiastical temples, but in the factories, offices, schools, and streets of the entire world, Catholic or not.