Interview with José Quarracino about Bergoglio

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These are excerpts from an interview with José Arturo Quarracino, a teacher and freelance translator and nephew of Cardinal Quarracino, Archbishop of Buenos Aires before Bergoglio, first published on January 7, 2022 by gloria.tv here.

What is your relationship with Cardinal Antonio Quarracino of Buenos Aires, the prelate who appointed Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio as auxiliary bishop?

I am the oldest of 5 nephews. My father was the younger brother of the Cardinal, 5 years younger. In addition to me being one of his nephews, he was my godfather at my baptism in 1953.

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What kind of archbishop was he?

Personally, he was kind-hearted, always attentive to the needs of others, because he felt the pain or the needs of others as his own. He was also very jovial, cheerful and affectionate. In 1962 he was elected bishop of 9 de Julio, a city in the interior of the province of Buenos Aires, at the age of 39. At that time he was the youngest bishop in Argentina. Later he was bishop of Avellaneda, archbishop of La Plata (capital of the Province of Buenos Aires) and finally archbishop and cardinal of the City of Buenos Aires. In all these assignments he was always pastor of the flock and father and counselor to the priests for whom he was responsible. He treated all people as equals, never flaunted his office and titles, he knew how to be plain, simple and affable with the faithful, not only with the priests. But when he had to exercise authority he knew how to do it, with firmness and mercy.

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Bergoglio was far from Buenos Aires when Quarracino appointed him auxiliary bishop…

That is correct. In that year you mention, 1992, Bergoglio was “exiled” by the Society of Jesus in the province of Córdoba, assigned there to keep him away from Buenos Aires, where he had served as Provincial of the Society for several years, with an end in that position and a posteriori punctuated by a great internal division between pro- and anti-Bergoglio people.

Why did your uncle choose Bergoglio?

My uncle had met him in 1973 or 1974 when he was Provincial, but the one who spoke to him to “rescue him from his exile” was one of his teachers in the Society, Father Ismael Quiles SJ, a saintly priest, because Bergoglio was having a very bad time, both inwardly and psychologically. That is why my uncle asked the Holy See for him as auxiliary bishop – although he already had others. In Austen Ivereigh’s book, The Great Reformer, there is a detailed account of what my uncle had to fight to get the Holy See to make Bergoglio a bishop.

So, you say that Bergoglio was made bishop “out of compassion”?

On the one hand, my uncle knew Father Ismael Quiles who asked him for Bergoglio and he appreciated him very much, because – as I told you before – he was an excellent priest and an exemplary Jesuit. And beyond the internal conflict with the Society of Jesus, Bergoglio presented an image of a pious man, very Ignatian, of a very austere life, developing a lot of sympathy with those who, as we say in Spanish, “thought he was likeable”. With this appointment, Bergoglio also solved the great problem of the tremendous internal conflict he was experiencing with a large part of the Jesuits who had been his friends and with whom he had distanced himself enormously.

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Do you know why Bergoglio produced such a division as provincial of the Jesuits?

I don’t know the details, but seen from a distance I think it was his psychological personality that brought him into conflict with his brothers, because he always had a tendency to have power, and the way he found to carry out that desire was to lean heavily on the younger priests and novices, and not so much with the adult and older priests. What became known was that when he ceased to be Provincial, for statutory reasons, he in fact remained active as if he were still Provincial, weakening the authority of the new authorities, both in the leadership of the Society and in the Faculty of Theology where the Jesuits were being formed, in the city of San Miguel, the historical seat of the Society of Jesus.

What kind of impression did Bergoglio make as auxiliary bishop?

As auxiliary bishop, Bergoglio knew how to win the affection and appreciation of a great part of the young clergy of the archdiocese, with his simplicity, his piety, his accompaniment and his psychological management, which he exercised like few others, many times for the better, and in some cases for the worse. With those who fell into disgrace with him he used to be very hard, even cruel. And he was subtly setting the adult clergy aside, to promote his friends and young protégés.

As auxiliary bishop, was Bergoglio different from Bergoglio as provincial?

In general, he did not keep such a high profile and did not have as many executive responsibilities as when he was Provincial, but sometimes he had attitudes that attracted a lot of attention, such as cutting all ties with someone forever, and many times the disgraced person did not know what he had done wrong.

Did Cardinal Quarracino get along well with his auxiliary bishop?

I would say excellently well. My uncle was very fond of him, and in his position Bergoglio was a great help to him, especially in his pastoral work, when he began to suffer from illnesses that limited his mobility (for two years he could not walk and lived in a wheelchair, and one day – miraculously – he regained mobility in his legs).

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How did you perceive Bergoglio as auxiliary bishop?

From 1995 to 2002 I was close to Bergoglio’s work, as auxiliary bishop and as chancellor of the Universidad del Salvador, where I worked. In those times he cultivated a very Jesuit profile, very pious, very pastoral. But he maintained a very strong confrontation with the Society of Jesus, to the point that when he became bishop the Order had to appoint as Provincial a Colombian priest, Father Alvaro Restrepo, because none of the Argentine Jesuits got along well with Bergoglio. It was a confrontation “to the death”, as we are accustomed to say in Argentina.

Was he a “conservative”?

Doctrinally, Bergoglio cultivated an orthodox profile, with many Jesuit touches. Pastorally, he tended to emphasize attention to social problems and the care of children and families. And service to the poor as a priority, with much permissiveness and laxity in liturgical and sacramental matters.

When Bergoglio replaced your uncle as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, did you perceive a change? What do you remember from your time in Buenos Aires?

There was a total change in his way of proceeding. Initially he took care of getting rid of those who had been excellent collaborators of my uncle, such as Monsignor José Erro, rector of the Cathedral of Buenos Aires and a saintly priest, whom he asked on the phone to resign from his post and retire. Without any kind of thought or thanks. I interpret that he did it that way, to let the clergy of Buenos Aires know that the leadership of the archbishopric was going to change radically, sweeping away everything that meant continuity with the previous stage, although taking care to maintain something of the posthumous figure of my uncle.

So the kind auxiliary bishop suddenly became an unpleasant archbishop? What did people say about this?

What most shocked and upset many was that in almost all his experience as full archbishop he almost always presented a grim, bitter, sad face, a “vinegar face” as he sometimes said to some nuns and “traditionalist” or “orthodox” Christians. It was very shocking to see that face so “distant” from others in liturgical or sacramental celebrations, totally devoid of joy when he celebrated the Eucharist, as it happened in his celebrations as Pope. No one could explain the reason for this way of acting and presenting himself, which was very hurtful to some.
On the contrary, it was very striking that after being elected Pope, he began to show a cheerful and jovial face that he almost never had in Buenos Aires. […]

How did the “new” Bergoglio present himself?

He began to have a very distant relationship in general with all those he did not know and who were not part of his circle of friends. Until he became pope, comments from the faithful of the archdiocese about the angry face he always showed in every public activity were common. A priest he trusted, a parish priest, asked him – jokingly but also seriously – not to make any more pastoral visits if he was going to show what Bergoglio himself called “vinegar face”.

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Was there, at that time, any evidence that the orthodox Bergoglio had become heterodox?

Not in the early years, but as time went by he began to show signs of a certain “relaxation”, not so much in what he said but in what he did, as if they were slips or flashy attitudes.
But when he really began to show his heterodox behavior was a year and a half after he took over as full archbishop, after the death of my uncle (February 28, 1998). It was a week before the official inauguration of the Jubilee Year 2000, Christmas 1999. On that day, December 18 of that year, Bergoglio summoned the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires to sinuously celebrate the “Mass of the Millennium” (not of the Jubilee), which of course had nothing to do with the celebration of the universal Church, anticipating the papal initiative.

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What was Bergoglio’s strategy as archbishop?

During his tenure in Buenos Aires he became famous because nobody knew what he really thought, since he always said to every interlocutor who visited him what he wanted to hear. And he was also known because he began to put in the background or directly to ignore the older or adult priests, in order to promote young priests who had a great devotion to him. And very strikingly, he imposed the law for the seminarians of the archdiocese that forbade them to wear cassocks, both within the house of studies and in their external pastoral work.

On the social level?

On the social level, he gave more and more importance to the work of assistance in precarious urban settlements, as what he later called “Church going out”, but with the recommendation – or requirement – not to insist on formation and sacramental preaching.

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How did he handle finances?

On the subject of finances I have almost nothing to say, because I did not have access to information of that kind. I can tell you that he began to encircle and corner the more orthodox orders and congregations, on the one hand because of their doctrinal firmness (which for him was “hardness”), and on the other hand because many times these orders possessed a great patrimony.

How did the Seminary of Buenos Aires develop under Bergoglio’s mandate?

From what I know, thanks to the testimony of some seminarians who were forced to go to another diocese, is that the seminary – at the time one of the most important in the country, in terms of its academic formation – began to lower the level of demand in doctrinal and theological formation, to accentuate formation in pastoral action, whatever that means, with the result that the new priests were increasingly characterized as agents of social aid, with the odd exception, but with little or no doctrinal, theological and intellectual formation.
In this sense, one of the initiatives taken by Bergoglio as full archbishop was, as I mentioned before, to prohibit the seminarians of the archdiocese from wearing the cassock, inside and outside the seminary. Something he also did in Rome, as bishop of Rome.

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This article is published as “fair use”.