Creating Francis: the laboratory of Buenos Aires

John L Allen Jr/ Crux• April 24, 2025

When Pope Francis was elected to the Throne of Peter on 13 March 2013, he was largely unknown to the wider world. Even many of his fellow Argentines felt they had only a vague, indistinct impression of a man who, in their experience, had tended to shun the spotlight.

Within days, however, the new pontiff had established a narrative about himself which utterly electrified public opinion, and which would endure to the very end: that of a humble, simple man of the people – “the world’s parish priest” – who spurned luxury and privilege in favour of proximity to the underdogs and the excluded.

This was the pontiff, after all, who took the name “Francis” in homage to Catholicism’s most iconic and beloved saint, the “little poor man” of Assisi; this was the pope who rejected the marble and gold of the Papal Apartments in favour of the Domus Santa Marta, a modest hotel on Vatican grounds; this was the pope who returned to the clerical residence where he’d stayed prior to his election to pack his own bag and to pay his own bill; and this was the pope who, 15 days later, spent his first Holy Thursday not in the ornate setting of St. Peter’s Basilica, but at a youth prison in Rome where he washed the feet of 12 inmates, including two Muslims and two women.

So compelling was the personal story of the new pope that it was easy to ignore the structural and historical forces beneath his maverick style. The most significant transition in Catholicism in the 20th century was a demographic shift from the global north to south in terms of the faith’s centre of gravity, and as history’s first pope from the developing world, Francis put a face and an agenda on that epochal change.

And the roots of that shift, and for the Pope himself, lie in Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina. It was there that the then Fr Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the provincial superior for the Jesuits at the age of 36 in 1973. A year later Argentina’s “Dirty War” broke out. A black legend would take shape in subsequent years accusing Bergoglio of complicity in human rights abuses carried out by the country’s military and security services, including the 1976 arrest and torture of two fellow Jesuits.

In response to those claims, Italian journalist Nello Scavo published a 2013 book titled Bergoglio’s List, styling him as a Argentine Oskar Schindler, documenting roughly a dozen people rescued by Bergoglio during the dictatorship and suggesting that for each person we know about, there were probably 20-30 more.

Bergoglio’s tenure as superior ended in 1979, and by 1980 he was sent into a quasi-exile. Rumours would suggest Bergoglio had been at odds with the liberation theology movement in Latin America, seeding a profile of him as a doctrinal and social conservative that would dissipate only after his election to the papacy.

Though Bergoglio may have been out of the public eye for most of the 1980s, he had become a friend and confidante of Cardinal Antonio Quarracino of Buenos Aires.

In 1992, Bergoglio was named an auxiliary bishop. He became well known in clerical circles for his work ethic and unpretentious style, moving around the city on his own via bus or subway.

While most bishops have a priest secretary to keep their schedule and act as a screener, Bergoglio made his own appointments by carrying around a small black notebook in his shirt pocket, a habit he continued even into the papacy.

While admirers see that independent streak as an expression of personal modesty, others detect something more cunning – a stubborn resistance to being “handled”, plus a preference for inscrutability that might be compromised by dependence on a gatekeeper who knew too much of the boss’s mind.

As Quarracino’s health declined, Bergoglio was named the coadjutor archbishop of Buenos Aires in June 1997, taking over the position eight months later when Quarracino died in February 1998. He would hold the post for the next 15 years, becoming a cardinal in 2001.

In some ways, that long run in Buenos Aires was the laboratory in which Bergoglio developed the theological vision and pastoral style he would later bring to the papacy. Looking back, there were four cornerstones of that approach.

Firstly, closeness and service to the poor, such as the corps of “slum priests” he pioneered who live and minister in Buenos Aires’ notorious villas miserias, or “villas of misery”.

Then, a strong focus on popular faith and devotion, expressed in the great shrines and devotions of Latin American Catholicism.

Thirdly, a missionary vision, getting the Church “out of the sacristy and into the street.”

And finally, rejection of clerical privilege, breaking the Latin American tradition of seeing clergy as part of society’s ruling elite.

Among other hallmarks of the Buenos Aires years, Bergoglio was the lead editor of the 2007 “Aparecida Document” of the Latin American bishops, the core idea of which was a call for a “continental mission”, going out to meet people where they lived.

In other ways, however, it’s impossible to draw a straight line between Bergoglio the cardinal and Francis the Pope.

For instance, Cardinal Bergoglio was notoriously loathe to engage the media, granting only a handful of interviews over his 15-year term, while as Pope it sometimes seemed he had joined the “interview a week” club; he disliked travel, preferring as much as possible to stay home, but as Pope he took to the road with gusto; in Argentina he rarely emoted in public, earning a public reputation as a somewhat grey and stand-offish figure, while he would become the Pope who turned the world on with his smile.

Despite all that, by 2005 Bergoglio was seen by his fellow cardinals as an able leader of one of the world’s largest and most complicated archdioceses, not to mention a figure who seemed equidistant from the liberal and conservative extremes of the Latin American Church. That was enough for some cardinals, opposed to the idea of seeing the doctrinaire Joseph Ratzinger succeed Pope John Paul II, to look to Bergoglio as an alternative.

In the end, 2005 was not Bergoglio’s moment. Eight years later, however, his turn would come, though not in a fashion that virtually anyone might have expected.

Photo: Then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is pictured traveling by subway in Buenos Aires in 2008. (CNS photo/Diego Fernandez Otero, Clarin handout via Reuters/Crux.)

The above extract comes from a longer ‘Crux’ article titled ‘Electrifying, maverick Pope Francis leaves behind ‘roller coaster’ legacy’, the full text of which can be read here.