PopeWatch: Peronism and the Pope

Sandro Magister writes about our Peronist Pope:

“I don’t like giving interviews, I do it a bit grudgingly,” Jorge Mario Bergoglio said to his journalist friend Elisabetta Piqué of the Argentine newspaper “La Nación,” even as she was interviewing him on the occasion of his ten years as pope.

Long live sincerity. From 2013 to today, the interviews given by Pope Francis are now verging on two hundred, with a crescendo as the tenth anniversary approaches and with a peak of seven interviews in four days, between last March 10 and 13.

Interviews that can run on for miles, like the one with Jorge Fontevecchia (in the photo), founder of the Argentine publishing group “Perfil,” in which Pope Francis lingers insistently on a question that for some time has been particularly close to his heart.

It is the question of his youthful proximity to Peronism, if not to Juan Domingo Perón.

In the first years of his pontificate, this proximity of his was common doctrine in his biographies, even in those he authorized and controlled. Today, however, he never passes up a chance to deny it.

In the interview with “Perfil,” he recounted that his maternal grandfather was cut from a completely different cloth, a “radical of ’90,” a political movement that established itself in Argentina with an armed revolt in 1890, which later became a party by the name of Radical Civic Union. His grandfather was a carpenter, and Bergoglio recalls that when he was a child “a man with a white beard” named Elpidio often came to sell him varnish and chatted with him about politics. “And do you know who Don Elpidio is?” his grandmother said to him one day. “He was vice president of the republic.” Just so, between 1922 and 1928. “My grandfather’s friendship with the radicals was due to Elpidio González, and our family has always inherited that radical identity. When the Peronist movement began, they were fearsome anti-Peronists.”

But also a bit socialist. He recalls that “Dad bought ‘La Vanguardia’,” which was their newspaper, sold door to door. And he went with the whole family to Plaza Francia for their rallies. “It was like going on a pilgrimage to Luján, going there was sacred.”

In short, “my family was decidedly anti-Peronist,” Francis insists today. “Of course, as bishop I had to make myself available to one of Evita Perón’s sisters, the last to die, who came to confess to me, a fine woman.” And in this sense “I was able to dialogue with fine Peronist people, sound people, just as there were sound radicals.” But as for the accusation of having been a Peronist, no, today the pope does not accept it, and even less the accusation of “having been part of the Guardia de Hierro” on account of having given some of their members control of the Universidad del Salvador, when instead “I had no idea” they were any such thing.

Of course, even in the interview with “Perfil” Francis attributes great merits to Peronism, in particular that of having adopted the “social doctrine of the Church” and of having been “a popular movement that brought many people together with social justice projects.” But he is keen to reiterate that he never took part in it. And moreover, that he had not even been one of its “sympathizers,” as he told his authorized biographers Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti in their latest book on him, “El Pastor,” released in Argentina in early March.

But is it really so? If one peruses the names of the philosophers, theologians, militants with whom Bergoglio has had the closest ties, from Lucio Gera to Alberto Methol Ferré, from Carlos Mugica to Jorge Vernazza, Peronism is what they all have in common.

As for the Peronists of the Guardia de Hierro, whom he now says he didn’t even know as such, it is enough to re-read what he himself, as pope, reported to the journalists Javier Cámara and Sebastián Pfaffen in the 2014 book “Aquel Francisco”: “I met Alejandro Álvarez [one of the founders of the Guardia – ed] when I was provincial of the Society of Jesus, because there were meetings of intellectuals at the Universidad del Salvador, and I attended these meetings because I was about to cut the university loose and hand it over to lay people. Álvarez attended one of these meetings. I saw him another time at a conference with Alberto Methol Ferré. Then I met various people of the Guardia de Hierro, just as I met people of other branches of Peronism, at these meetings held at the Universidad del Salvador.” And it was precisely to them that Bergoglio handed over the university.

Not to mention what can be read in perhaps the most documented and authoritative biography of Bergoglio among those published so far, written by the Englishman Austen Ivereigh, one of the pope’s own beloved authors:

“Not only was Bergoglio close to the Guardia, but in February and March 1974 – via a friend, Colonel Vicente Damasco, who was a close collaborator of Perón’s – he was one of a dozen experts invited to contribute his thoughts to a draft of the Modelo nacional, a political testament that Perón conceived as a means of uniting Argentines after his death.”

Bergoglio never became a party activist, Ivereigh writes, but he did have “respect for and identification with Peronism as the vehicle for the popular values of the pueblo fiel.”

Go here to read the rest.  One trait the Pope shares with many Peronists is a “flexible” attitude towards truth.