Along the Illia Highway in downtown Buenos Aires, brightly colored shanty homes are stacked haphazardly three and four stories high. The cinderblock structures are crammed together, built upward by residents as more and more people move to the slum. This is Villa 31, one of many villas miserias—literally, “misery villages”—that have filled previously unused spaces, like this one next to a railyard, since the 1930s.
Just blocks from the city’s ritzy Recoleta neighborhood, Villa 31 stands out as a symbol of the city’s—and the country’s—striking wealth disparity. According to 2021 statistics, the bottom 50 percent of Argentina’s population holds less than 6 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the top 10 percent holds 58 percent, and the top 1 percent holds more than 25 percent.
Pope Francis was raised in the city’s middle-class Flores neighborhood from the mid-1930s through the ’50s, a time period that saw Argentina’s wealth gap grow. At the same time, so did the shantytowns, which were then often filled with European immigrant families. (Today, the villasare expanding with immigrants from Paraguay, Bolivia and Venezuela.)
As archbishop of Buenos Aires during Argentina’s recession (1998–2001) and subsequent depression, Jorge Mario Bergoglio worked to increase the church’s presence in the slums, moving priests into the neighborhoods in groups of two or more. Today, as President Javier Milei works to combat sky-high inflation (more than 130 percent in 2023), some of the priests then-Archbishop Bergoglio sent to work in the slums continue to offer support to the communities.
One such priest, Andres Tocalini, S.M., remains in touch with Pope Francis. “To this day, I send him three or four emails a year, and the very next day, I get an answer from him,” he told me when I visited Argentina in April with the Pontifical Mission Societies USA. With a smile, he said the pope must feel obligated to respond quickly because “it’s his fault we’re here.”
My April visit to Buenos Aires and across the northern Argentine desert revealed to me not only Francis’ legacy here, but also the model of ministry that shaped him, which he is now working to bring to the global church—an evangelical mission characterized by closeness to those struggling that is carried out, especially in remote regions, by passionate lay ministers.
The Shantytown Priests
In Bajo Flores, about 15 minutes from where Pope Francis was born, Father Tocalini lives with three lay volunteers at Our Lady of Fatima Shrine, located between several different villas miserias. Like all of the villa parishes we visited, Our Lady of Fatima ministers to a shocking number of people given its relatively small number of volunteers: Its soup kitchen, opened during the Covid-19 pandemic, feeds around 350 families most days and 1,200 families on Sundays (100 families’ meals are provided by the city government; the rest come from donations). Even more impressive is its school, housed on a sprawling campus in the neighborhood’s center. It educates some 3,000 students from early childhood through post-secondary level, training students in nursing, teaching and trades like computer science and electrical engineering.
The school hosts activities from before dawn until late at night in hopes of keeping children off the streets—a generous term for the sidewalk-width dirt paths between buildings in the shantytowns, unnavigable by police or emergency vehicles. It is important to keep young people occupied, one shantytown priest explained, because he has seen children as young as 8 in this neighborhood consuming paco, a cocaine byproduct often called coca paste in English and frequently mixed with glue and fiberglass. It is sold in the same small bags used for candy, and for the same price.
“We try to make sure the kids don’t have time to even consider drug use,” Father Tocalini says, “So when they leave school, they go directly to an extra activity: soccer, volleyball, tennis, orchestra, choir, guitar lessons, school support, etc. A child who, in this neighborhood, has two hours to spare, is a child [who is] prey to drug addiction or becoming a criminal.”
Some students even live on campus full time: Twelve girls and young women who have been abused or are at high risk for abuse live in communal houses where they share chores. It costs the school around $1,000 per year to house each student, a cost the school could not afford if not for donations.
Around 163,000 people lived in Buenos Aires’ shantytowns as of 2020. Their overwhelming material needs are served by a hybrid of charities and government aid. For example, a portion of the meals distributed by the two soup kitchens we visited are underwritten by the government.
Meeting the communities’ pastoral needs, however, has largely fallen on the shoulders of the shantytown priests, a group of Catholic clergy who, rather than driving into the slums to celebrate the sacraments, live there among the people—an exercise in solidarity that has, in the past, proven deadly.
Father Carlos Mugica, for example, was killed in 1974 by an anti-communist paramilitary group; he was part of a group called Priests of the Third World that had moved to the slums preaching liberation theology, leading to a strained relationship with the Catholic hierarchy. (The main street through Villa 31 is named for him.) Likewise, in 1976, two Jesuit priests working in the slums were kidnapped and tortured by the country’s military dictatorship. Their superior was Father Bergoglio, and one blamed him for giving information on their whereabouts to the government, leading to their abduction; the other said at the time of Francis’ election that this was not true.
When he became archbishop, after the dictatorship had fallen, Francis saw the need for priests to be living in the slums and increased their numbers from 10 to 20, assigning them to live in pairs or groups for safety and arranging for them to meet regularly as a group for mutual support. He famously visited the slums often himself, a fact many residents have not forgotten. As of 2019, there were around 40 priests living and ministering full-time in the slums.
Across Bajo Flores, in the shadow of the San Lorenzo stadium—famously home to Pope Francis’ favorite soccer team—is Villa 10-14-17, served by the Parish of María, Madre del Pueblo (“Mary, Mother of the People”). In August of this year, its pastor, the Rev. Pedro Cannavó, was named auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires by Francis, who had ordained him 15 years before.
María, Madre del Pueblo runs a much smaller school than Our Lady of Fatima, with around 900 students, but it operates three soup kitchens, two of which specialize in low-sodium food for elderly and diabetic residents. It also hosts a Hogar de Cristo, one of 300 drug rehabilitation centers that operate under this name across the country. The first one was founded in 2008 after Cardinal Bergoglio washed the feet of 12 drug addicts at a Good Friday liturgy in Villa 21-24 in Buenos Aires. At the time, he said the parish where the liturgy was held would be a good place for them to recover, “a Home of Christ [Hogar de Cristo] where everyone is welcomed.”
Due to a delayed flight, I was not able to visit Villa 10-14-17, but Father Cannavó explained to my fellow travelers that there are 135 patients there, with separate facilities for men and one for women and their children.
“In Argentina, the church is an embassy for the poor, for the destitute, for those who hunger, for the mentally ill. No one else would advocate for them here in the slum,” he said.
Father Cannavó hinted to my colleagues that plans were in place for Pope Francis to visit the country, saying, “A visit by Pope Francis would be the best [thing] that could happen to us…. But it all depends on his health. If he does come, it’s here, these neighborhoods, where he will be most comfortable and feel the most welcome.... All of us priests who do this ministry of working and living in the slums would love to host him, but I think we have better chances, because here he could say Mass in the San Lorenzo stadium!”
Nipo Chan, a first-generation Argentine whose parents left Japan before World War II, hosts a salsa music program on the parish’s radio station and remembers when the pope would visit this slum. Asked by my colleagues about a potential homecoming for the pope, his eyes welled with tears: “He came here a lot more often when he was [living in the country].... But I guess we can lend him to the world.”
Lay Missionaries in the Desert
Far outside the Parisian-inspired avenues and shantytown passageways of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis’ vision for the church is alive in a different way: Here, in the remote desert nicknamed “The Impenetrable” that stretches across northern Argentina, lay missionaries inspired and, in some cases, empowered by the pope minister to some of the farthest reaches of Argentine society.
Our group flew from Buenos Aires to the single-gate airport of Santiago del Estero, where out the window we could see rectangles of plowed, dusty land sliced into a forest of thick desert bushes. A few thorny trees poked up through the dirt, as if to remind us how the desert got its name. From there, we drove 4.5 hours along national highways to Monte Quemado, a village of 12,000 whose economy is primarily driven by more than 40 sawmills that produce wood posts for farming and railroad ties.
Noemi Herrera is a parishioner and the finance manager at the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal, Monte Quemado’s first church, founded in 1953. She said that several of the city’s sawmills have closed down recently, as their buyers, mainly from Brazil, were driven away by Argentina’s unfavorable currency exchange rate. Ms. Herrera, who is in her 70s, gave her own sawmill to her children last year.
As we drive through the Canal de Dios neighborhood, the effect of the sawmill closures is apparent. Several plots have concrete and wood piles laid for future houses, but at each the construction has been abandoned. Someone in our car points out that each abandoned home represents a family’s destroyed hopes.
During our first night in Monte Quemado, we attend a Saturday evening Mass at the Our Lady of Carballo Shrine, where young adults lead the music and readings, sitting in a pack in the front pews. Their joy and energy are palpable, and after the Mass, a long line forms to revere the statue of Our Lady of Carballo in the church’s sanctuary. The young adult group takes us to a garage next to the rectory for dinner and folklórico dancing. The six people I am sitting with—five young women and a young man, all of them 20 years old—are all catechists or in training to be one.
One of them, Juliana Curtoni, who is 20 and known as Juli, has moved here from Rosario, a much larger city 600 miles south of Monte Quemado. She and another lay minister, Sabrina, who is in her 30s and is from Buenos Aires, have been sent by their dioceses to minister full-time here.
Following the Synod on the Amazon in 2019, Pope Francis made two significant changes that would affect the global church but would have particular significance in places like South America, which contains vast swaths of rural areas like the ones I visited in Argentina. First, he opened the lay ministries of lector and acolyte to women for the first time in January 2021; four months later, he also created the new lay ministry of catechist, a role that is primarily held by women. While women had held these roles previously, they were not officially commissioned to them through a rite of the church. Some Catholics wondered whether the most significant effect of these changes might be the creation of an official commissioning rite in the liturgy, but one Argentine catechist explained to me that the change on the ground had been much more significant, allowing catechists to be better organized and to collaborate.
The next morning, Ms. Curtoni joins our group to travel to Los Tigres, a small village outside Monte Quemado, for a faith-sharing group meeting. On the way, we stop in Canal de Dios at the home of Berta Cortez, who, with her adult sons, is making a big pot of locro, a traditional Argentine stew, in their yard. It smells amazing—corn, beans, three types of meat, potatoes, sweet potatoes and pumpkin, all boiled together for six hours. The family’s primary income comes from selling 100 servings of the stew each Sunday for the equivalent of about $1.50 each.
When we arrive, Ms. Cortez gives a warm hug to Ms. Curtoni. Ms. Cortez explains to our group that she was raised in an orphanage that had been founded by Jorge Gottau, the first bishop of the Diocese of Añatuya, which includes Monte Quemado. She explains that Bishop Gottau is the reason this neighborhood has running water: He negotiated on behalf of the people with the country’s military dictatorship government in the late 1970s and early ’80s to divert water from the Salado del Norte river into what is now known as the Canal de Dios, the muddy stream just steps from Ms. Cortez’s home. The water is useful, but it is not clean. Still, she remains grateful that the church stepped up at a time when the people felt powerless.
“We owe a lot to the church. Me personally, yes, but also as a community,” Ms. Cortez says, adding that while she does not endorse the atrocities the dictatorship committed in larger cities, she feels it was “the last government to ever pay attention to the fact that we are here. That we are people. That we are Argentines.”
The Rev. Juan Lanzotti, known as Juani, the diocesan director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Añatuya, explained later that the federal government has almost no presence here, and that the governor of Santiago del Estero is corrupt. An investigation by I.B.I. Consultants, an intelligence contractor for several U.S. government departments, found that Governor Gerardo Zamora and his wife, Claudia Ledesma Abdala, who have alternately (and questionably) managed to be elected to the province’s top position since 2005, profit from protecting the illegal drug trade in the region, especially of cocaine, while the region’s population overwhelmingly lives in poverty. The church does what it can to help, but the priests are spread too thinly even to provide sacraments weekly or monthly to some far-flung communities, much less to negotiate with a corrupt government to obtain material aid.
Leaving Monte Quemado, we drive several miles further into the desert, past dome-shaped brick ovens that residents of our next stop, the remote village of Los Tigres (population 161 as of 2010) use to manufacture charcoal from wood.
Hilda Catan, a woman with nine children and 17 grandchildren, two of whom she is raising herself, welcomes us to her home. Her household is one of the best-off in the village; although the cinderblock structure has no doors, windows or running water, its location on a main road affords it a power connection. When we arrive, around 20 people are gathered in the dirt yard between the house, the outhouse, and the pig and chicken pen; this group meets each Tuesday for faith sharing, and once a month a priest comes to offer Mass for the group. (There are no opportunities for Sunday Mass in Los Tigres.)
Ms. Catan has been awake since 4 a.m. making empanadas santiagueñas for all of us. The group has moved its meeting to Sunday and its members have pooled their food together to serve a large lunch. First, though, is faith sharing, led by Juli, the lay missionary working in Monte Quemado. We hear the Gospel of the day, which is about the Good Shepherd, and Juli reminds the group that while each person is called to be a “shepherd” by evangelizing, we are also the sheep, at times staying with the flock and “other times we are the lost sheep…. And this is OK; we need to remember that God does not leave us just because we might fall or sin. He chooses to be by our side, and if he gave his life because he loved us, how could he not forgive our sins?”
Roxana Gerez stands, teary-eyed, and says that she sees the Good Shepherd in Juli, whom she credits with bringing her back to the church. Behind her, a woman who has been breastfeeding her baby supplements his feed from a bottle filled with orange soda because there is no clean water to drink.
A woman named Rosa, who is there with her daughter, adds that “shepherding begins in the home, talking about Jesus to our children and with our spouse, and then going to our neighbors, and talking to them about Jesus, so that they know Jesus loves them too.”
At her comment about spouses, I noticed that almost the entire group was women. Here, as in many places in the church, the Catholic faith is passed on by mothers like Rosa and grandmothers like Hilda; and, as in many places in South America, they are taught and ministered to primarily by lay women catechists like Juli.
Missionary Families
Our journey through the desert continues with a drive three hours southeast to Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, the second-largest city in Chaco Province. We had intended to visit another small village even deeper in the desert, reachable only by dirt roads, but it has been struck from our agenda because rain is expected, and we cannot risk being stuck when the roads become muddy and unpassable. Instead, a priest ministering in the village comes to us in the city to share details about his ministry to the Wichí people, an Indigenous community scattered across this part of the country. On the way back, the rain comes, and he is stuck in the city for two days, staying with other priests.
From there, it is another two hours southeast to Resistencia, the largest city in Chaco. There we meet the Greatti family, a “missionary family” with three children that takes annual mission trips into the province’s desert for 10 to 15 days at a time to reignite the faith of communities that are too remote to receive regular visits from priests.
Viviana Greatti, the family’s matriarch, is a catechist, as is her husband, Mario, who got her involved in mission work. Because of the high risk of disease, especially the mosquito-borne dengue fever, the family primarily goes to places with electricity and drinkable water—towns where many citizens are baptized but, as Mario puts it, “only pray the Our Father once a year.” There, Mario explains, most people view baptism as culturally important but do not, for example, seek Catholic marriages. In his mission work, Mario hopes he and Viviana are able to model the beauty of a sacramental marriage for people who might not have considered one.
Still, Ms. Greatti says, her family’s choice to be missionaries has attracted criticism at times. She explains how other women in her parish, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, have asked her why she would take her kids out to the missions. “It’s basically the kids dragging us,” she tells them.
Pilar, 14, says that her classmates, too, ask her why she goes to the missions during summer break, when the heat of the desert is so extreme. However, because of their school commitments it is the only time the children are able to go. “I love it so much that I forget I am melting in the heat,” she says.
All three of the Greatti children, now teenagers and a tween, grew up as part of the Missionary Childhood Association, through which they played with children who came from the outer peripheries of the diocese to their parish to play together, learning church songs and doing crafts inspired by the Sunday readings.
Meetings and catechesis classes like the ones her children attended have benefited the most from Pope Francis’ official institution of the ministry of catechist, Ms. Greatti says. Whereas catechists like her had previously been given a book to teach from and had been solely responsible for coming up with activities and teaching strategies for their classes, once the catechists were officially recognized as ministers, their work became more structured and collaborative. Now her parish—which includes some 50 catechists spread across seven chapels, mostly women plus a handful of their husbands—hosts regular training workshops for the catechists during which they share activities, curricula and ideas for how to teach certain Gospels.
Mr. Greatti points out that Pope Francis has often spoken about catechesis as a “laboratory” and has encouraged creativity, which he sees his parish and diocese putting into practice by reaching out to other catechist groups online to exchange ideas. For Ms. Greatti’s part, she has tried to introduce some of her own missionary flavor into her catechesis classes. This spring, for example, she took her students out into the neighborhoods near their chapel and had them knock on doors to invite people to Holy Week services. The result was the most crowded Triduum celebrations the parish had ever seen.
Popular Piety
As we enter Formosa Province, on the border with Paraguay, the roads are increasingly lined with billboards and signs featuring a bald man taking credit for the construction of schools, housing and other social improvements. This person, I learn, is the legendarily corrupt Formosa governor, Gildo Insfrán, who changed the provincial constitution to allow himself to be re-elected indefinitely.
We stop at several parishes in Formosa where we hear from parishioners about both their struggles under the corrupt government and, at the same time, their deeply held and widely practiced popular piety. At Cura Brochero Parish, we sit under a large metal roof without walls that someone has donated and that the men of the parish have constructed. As the rain patters on the roof and the ground around us grows muddy, we sit in folding chairs in a circle and drink maté.
The parish priest, Mario Giménez, O.C.R., explains that the church had quickly outgrown its old building, which was around 200 square feet, because the Insfrán government had demolished houses near a parish across town, citing safety concerns, and had begun moving residents into the sprawling complexes of unpainted, cinderblock duplexes with blue roofs that now stretch for half a mile in each direction. Already the congregation is too large to fit under the roof, though, the pastor explains, the population growth has stalled temporarily because Mr. Insfrán has announced he would let the rest of the displaced people move in only after he had again been re-elected.
Across town, at the Santuario Divino Niño Jesús, a welcoming committee of five women in matching T-shirts take us around the back of the church building to see what remains of the houses that the government had suddenly torn down. The grass is full of dust and broken cinderblocks and glass, with some household items buried in the rubble. The people who had lived here, they tell us, are staying with friends and family, waiting for the new housing development to open after the election.
The dome of the enormous church towers just feet away from the destruction. Inside, it is painted with angels, the faces of which were based on the children of the parish, whom some of the women can still name, 12 years after they were painted. The parish, which began in a straw-roofed lean-to with one wall—not unlike a larger, metal version at Cura Bracero—is devoted to both the Divino Niño (Holy Child) and María Auxiliadora (Mary, Help of Christians). On the 25th of every month, to commemorate Christmas, the parish hosts massive spiritual revivals where Mass, reconciliation and baptisms are celebrated that regularly draw around 3,000 people from across the region.
A gathering of that size would be unheard of for most U.S. churches, even on Christmas and Easter, yet the Sanctuary draws such crowds every month. Pope Francis has drawn attention throughout his pontificate to examples of popular piety like these gatherings, in which local cultural expressions of faith are celebrated in lively and emotional gatherings. While some dismiss these practices as folksy or even superstitious, the pope believes they are a key component of evangelization. In Francis’ first document, “The Joy of the Gospel” (“Evangelii Gaudium”), which laid out the vision for his papacy, he called popular piety “a spirituality incarnated in the culture of the lowly,” saying that practices like traveling to shrines, taking one’s children or friends, “is in itself an evangelizing gesture. Let us not stifle or presume to control this missionary power!” (No. 124).
This deeply held, popular faith was perhaps the greatest insight Argentina offered us into the papacy of the first Latin American pope. It explained his emphasis on inculturation and embrace of local cultures, especially Amazonian Indigenous cultures, that other prelates shy away from. His emphasis on closeness to the people is born from an experience in Buenos Aires where, in the absence of government help, the church became responsible for the poor, and he learned quickly that ministering in the slums meant that priests would have to deal with the messiness of life outside the rectory, moving agilely from sacraments to drug rehabs and schools and back many times over the course of a day.
It is this experience that leads Francis to say, at the head of a church that has long proposed a moral ideal to its adherents, that “reality is greater than ideas” and that the church must accompany people in their real lives, no matter how messy. It is the Argentine reality, underscored by the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, that has shown him the evangelizing power of laypeople, prompting him to encourage popular piety and empower lay ministers in a new way.
“It’s his fault we’re here,” Father Tocalini told me on the streets of Villa Calacita in Bajo Flores. That is true. But it is equally the slum priests and the Catholics of Argentina who are at “fault” for forming Jorge Bergoglio into a pope who says “Hagan lío”—“Make a mess!”
Inés San Martín, vice president of marketing and communications at The Pontifical Mission Societies U.S.A., assisted in the reporting of this article.
