Yesterday is today

By Manuel Alberto Ramy

HAVANA – In 1540, Ignatius Loyola (now a saint) founded the Company of Jesus, the religious order of Jesuits.

One of the four vows Jesuits must make is obedience to the Pope and a reluctance to accept positions of hierarchy in the vertical Catholic denomination.

The order’s founder may never have imagined that, more than four centuries later, one of its members would reach the papacy. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 76-year-old Argentine Jesuit, received the ring of the Fisherman – which, in a break with tradition, is not gold but gold-plated silver – as the symbol of the highest authority of the Catholic Church.

He is now Pope Francis, no number.

Before his enthronement, the Argentine pope and the president of his native country, Cristina Fernández, shared a private luncheon, his first with a political personality.

The Pope welcomed her with a kiss to the cheek, nothing more Christian and at the same time exceptional in the world of the Vatican. According to news agencies, Cristina commented that never before had a pope kissed her on the cheek.

If the meal included stew and broiled beef, I don’t know. But mate could not be absent and was a gift to the Pope from the president. Mate is a preferred drink in the southern cone of South America. Its value of the past is very special for Jesuits in that area, because it takes them back to the 17th Century, when, while developing the communities they founded in territories that encompass Argentine, Paraguayan and Brazilian lands, the herb became one of the reasons for the so-called Mate War waged against the Jesuits by the wealthy Portuguese living in Brazil and the Spanish landholders in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

To share a meal with a compatriot with whom he has clashed, who refused to receive him on several occasions, who is the widow of a former president who treated him harshly when Francis was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires; to put a tablecloth and dishes over articles that questioned a certain attitude during the military dictatorship (which have been denied by important personalities in the Latin American left and intra-ecclesial progressiveness, such as Leonardo Boff of Liberation Theology fame and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Catholic militant persecuted by the military dictatorship and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize); to break protocol when, at the end of a Mass, he did as any rural priest might have done, stand at the door to say goodbye to the faithful, or dismiss the limousine and take an ordinary car, or pay for the room that he rented, all those are signs of a change in style.

Will that be all? Maybe yes, maybe no. I don’t know if popes are granted 100 days of grace before critics begin analyzing their behavior.

People close to Pope Francis say that he is very strict on key issues, such as priestly celibacy, gay marriages or the ordination of women to priesthood, although he is more progressive on socioeconomic issues. He has an irrepressible predilection for the poor, which seems to predate a papal document published in the Mexican city of Puebla in the late 1970s.

For this option, he has personal roots: a father who worked in the railroad, a modest home and close contact with his close collaborators and people from the barrios. They didn’t have to go to the archbishop’s palace, just enter his home, which was right next to the palace. There, he liked to prepare his own meals, listen to tangos and maybe remember that young girl who distracted him from his priestly vocation.

It is known that, during the luncheon, Cristina Fernández asked him to mediate in the dispute over the Malvinas [Falkland Islands], occupied by the British in the 19th Century. The papal answer? If there was one, it remained between the two. Worth remembering is the fact that in 2011 Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, declared that “The Malvinas are ours.”

But now he is the Pope, the leader of the faithful who inhabit every corner of the planet and its administrative structure. As chief of state, he is involved in the complex fabric of the Vatican Curia, and he lives in a world where politicians described as Christians and Catholics are acting very differently from Francis of Assisi or the Jesuit Francis Xavier, one of the first followers of Ignatius Loyola, who gave the order an internationalist mission in the late 16th Century.

What prompts me to write this is the thought that during this luncheon meeting between two Argentines, Latin America could have been on the table. Under the president’s black dress was the young rebel of the tough years in Argentina, the years of people murdered and “disappeared,” and children seized and given to non-parents, crimes that were common in much of South America.

Under the Pope’s white robe there is an old history of Jesuits and their settlements and communities, established in a nebulous triangle with hazy borders connecting Paraguay, Argentina and southern Brazil.

That region maintains a history and physical evidence that show that Pope Francis’ order defended the interests of autochthonous cultures, helped the creation of economic relations where small family vegetable gardens provided food for the community. Jesuits respected people’s beliefs, supported the natives, their political, administrative and religious hierarchies all the way to the creation of what some historians call the Guaraní Republic, whose language they learned and preserved even to our days.

That region and all our America, which today seeks new and own economic paths, as well as forms of political relations and control of elected powers that are most appropriate, could find in the controversial Pope Francis a firm supporter of those aspirations, in the face of inevitable confrontation. That’s my wish.

I don’t dare to predict, only to ask that Francis, the Pope, remember the Jesuit founders who died alongside thousands of Indians thanks to the coalition of the four Christian-Catholic kingdoms and empires that decided the massacres of those days. Those days? We’re not witnessing ancient history. Yesterday is today.

Progreso Semanal/ Weekly authorizes the total or partial reproduction of articles by our journalists, so long as source and author are identified.