In 2005, a few days before the conclave that elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as pope, I was having breakfast in my Jesuit community. At the table was a Jesuit who had retired after working in Rome for many years. On that day, The New York Times ran a story that included a list of the papal “electors,” the cardinals who would soon travel to Rome to elect a pope.
After one name were the initials “S.J.,” which meant this cardinal was a Jesuit. But the name was unfamiliar to me. So I said, innocently, “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Argentina?”
My fellow Jesuit’s face darkened and he said, “Oh, he would be terrible!”
He explained that Cardinal Bergoglio had been a Jesuit provincial (that is, regional superior) at a young age and was so divisive that he had virtually split the Argentine Province into two camps: pro-Bergoglio and anti-Bergoglio. “Terrible!” he said again. A few days later, Cardinal Ratzinger was elected and took the name Pope Benedict XVI. I forgot about Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
[Pope Francis, trailblazing Jesuit with a heart for the poor, dies at 88]
Several years later, I was helping a news program during the next conclave, when the white smoke flowed up from the Sistine Chapel. Shortly afterward the camerlengo announced the name of the next pope: Jorge Mario Bergoglio. All I could remember was my friend’s comment: “Terrible!” Some Jesuit friends assumed that the newly elected pope was a disgruntled “former Jesuit” who would be intent on reforming the Society of Jesus. (In terms of church law, when a Jesuit is named bishop he is “released” from his religious vows, but nearly every bishop—or cardinal—in this situation considers himself still to be a Jesuit.)
The man who took the name Francis was probably more aware than anyone of his checkered reputation in the Society of Jesus when he gave his first interview to a group of Jesuit magazines, including America, during the summer after he was elected. Speaking to Antonio Spadaro, S.J., editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, he said about his time as provincial: “I was only 36 years old. That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself.”
His lasting affinity for the Jesuits, however, was telegraphed earlier. A few days after his election, Francis made a special trip to visit the Jesuit superior general, Adolfo Nicolás, S.J., in the Jesuit Curia, or headquarters, in Rome. The photo of the two embracing at the entranceway of the curia was shared among Jesuits around the world. (So was the video of Andrea, the curia’s friendly doorkeeper, who told how flustered he was when the pope rang up.) A few days later the new pope’s papal seal was released with the seal of the Society of Jesus in its center. So it was clear: He’s still a Jesuit.
His Jesuit identity (to use a word usually used for Jesuit ministries) has been evident throughout his papacy. It also meant that many times when he spoke or acted, Jesuits around the world would say, “Ah, yes,” while others might have said, “What does he mean?”
In fact, many of his critics failed to understand just how much of a Jesuit he was, which contributed to their misunderstanding of his words and deeds. Let’s consider three ways he was a Jesuit.
1. Language. Francis often spoke in the language of Jesuit—or, more broadly, Ignatian—spirituality. Now, Jesuits are often (fairly) accused of acting as if St. Ignatius Loyola, our founder, invented things like prayer and discernment, but it’s also fair to say that there are certain practices that Ignatius and the early Jesuits stressed that have become hallmarks of our spirituality.
The first is the way of prayer often called “Ignatian contemplation,” which encourages the person praying to imagine themself in a Gospel scene. Francis used this in homilies over and over.
In his first Easter homily as pope, he used the key word “imagine” to help place the congregation in the scene, or “compose the place,” as St. Ignatius might say. “We can imagine their feelings as they make their way to the tomb,” said Francis of the women on Easter Sunday, “a certain sadness, sorrow that Jesus had left them, he had died, his life had come to an end. Life would now go on as before.” Again, this is not solely a Jesuit practice, but it is a hallmark of our spirituality.
Francis used the same technique in his famous meditation in St. Peter’s Square during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 when he asked us to imagine ourselves in the boat with Jesus, on the Sea of Galilee during the storm. And in his meetings with the poor, Francis would, in a sense, ask us to imagine ourselves as someone else: a migrant, a refugee, a homeless person. His Jesuit imagination was key not only to his preaching but his invitation for Catholics to identify with someone “on the peripheries,” as he liked to say.
2. Poverty. As the first member of a religious order to be elected pope since 1831, Francis was also the first pope since then to have taken a vow of poverty. (Diocesan priests make a promise of obedience to their bishop, and a promise of celibacy and aim to live simply, but do not take a vow of poverty.) Much was made, for example, of his not wearing the traditional papal red shoes, being driven in a small Fiat and not living in the Apostolic Palace but in the relatively simple Casa Santa Marta, a guest house. But his commitment to poverty was more than a commitment to personal poverty. It was also his commitment to those who live in poverty, which he stated shortly after his election: “How I want a church that is poor and for the poor.”
All modern popes have emphasized the church’s closeness to the poor and its advocacy for them, based on the Gospel and on the traditions of Catholic social teaching. So Francis was building on the legacy of his predecessors. But Francis made this a hallmark of his ministry from the very beginning. His first trip out of Rome was to the island of Lampedusa, where he celebrated a Mass on a fishing boat that served as a vessel for migrants and had been made into an altar. Solidarity with the poor was a consistent theme of his papacy.
But there was another emphasis on the poor, perhaps subtler, that went largely unnoticed
In the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which formed Francis as they have formed countless Jesuits, there is a strange prayer: the retreatant is asked to pray for the desire to follow “Christ poor.” This is not simply an invitation to live simply, or poorly; it is also a desire to place oneself with Christ who suffers insults, out of a desire to be close to him. So an outgrowth of this emphasis on Jesuit poverty is the willingness to suffer insults, which we saw frequently, as Francis was insulted as almost no modern pope has been—including by cardinals, archbishops and bishops, even former close associates. He rarely responded. Throughout his papacy, Francis embraced this more mysterious and less understood form of “poverty” as well.
3. Discernment. At the heart of many differences between Pope Francis and his critics was not only a misunderstanding of discernment but an underappreciation of the action of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. Perhaps the biggest pushback to his papacy from within the church occurred in this arena. The Synod on Synodality (in addition to other synods, like the Synod on the Family) was fiercely criticized because this exercise in “discernment” (a favorite Jesuit word that connotes a particular style of prayerful decision-making) was seen as throwing open the door to “anything goes.” In effect, the argument went, why do we need discernment when we have all the rules we need? Why discuss controversial topics when church teaching is clear? Besides, isn’t discernment just an excuse to talk forever?
As a Jesuit, Francis knew otherwise. Discernment, as described in the Spiritual Exercises, trusts not only that the Holy Spirit wants us to make good decisions, but that the Spirit will help us make good decisions. The Synod, in effect, was a living out of that conviction: that the Holy Spirit will guide us.
Discernment also trusts that the Holy Spirit is at work in the individual and can work through anyone. And it is here, when you dig down, past the political, social, ecclesiological, theological and even spiritual differences, where his detractors did not understand Francis. As a former novice director, spiritual director and provincial superior, Francis had a great reverence for the work of the Holy Spirit in the individual and in the individual conscience, because he had seen it. It is impossible to accompany people as a spiritual director and not come away with a reverence for the mysterious, strange and even challenging activity of the Holy Spirit in every person. So why would one not want to listen to the voice of the Spirit among the people of God? So what seemed to detractors as “anything goes” was in reality reverence for the Spirit.
This also touches upon issues of conscience. Two areas in which Francis experienced severe pushback were both related to conscience matters. The first was his insistence in “Amoris Laetitia” (in a footnote) that divorced and remarried Catholics could consult their pastors and then their consciences about receiving Communion. This caused a great uproar and in some places outrage. Respect for conscience is a constitutive part of Catholic teaching, as is reverencing the Spirit there. “Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths,” wrote the bishops of the Second Vatican Council in “Gaudium et Spes.”
But if you listened to Francis’ critics, you would have thought he had made a bargain with the devil.
Likewise for his five most famous words, “Who am I to judge?” This was initially a question referring to the experience of gay priests, which he subsequently expanded to all gay people. Again, it was trusting a person’s conscience. And again, it infuriated some people.
An important part of discernment of course is listening. How could you possibly discern where the Holy Spirit is at work if you don’t listen? And so Francis over the course of his papacy listened to groups that sometimes felt that they had no voice in the church. Perhaps most surprisingly, as Outreach reported, he met regularly with transgender Catholics from around the world. Listening means listening especially to those people whose voices are not often heard.
On a personal note, during the times that I met with Francis one-on-one (in addition to a translator or two) it was easy to speak to him in the “language” of a Jesuit. I knew that I could talk freely not only about broad topics like the Spiritual Exercises, discernment and Ignatian contemplation, but also knew that if I mentioned my annual eight-day retreat, my provincial or my tertianship he knew exactly what I meant. He once asked me how my latest retreat had gone and when I was recounting it to him, I felt that I was speaking more to a Jesuit spiritual director than to a pope.
Overall, Francis entered the papacy as a Jesuit, governed as one and died as one. To understand him was to remember that he was a Jesuit. And to misunderstand him was to forget he was one.
